Teenpop and its discontents

It's a long one, but this thread has some fine compressed insights (especially by Tim Finney and Jess) on the teenpop phenomenon. Frankly, I don't have a dog in this hunt. There's a reason why I freeze when non-rockcrits ask me what "kind" of music I listen to: I'm expected to list genres (inevitably, the person asking will say, "I listen to anything BUT country"). I don't know any serious consumer of music who says, "I'm a reggae fan" but there are plenty of people who love Bob Marley, Black Uhuru, etc. We listen to artists, not genres.

My feelings for "teenpop" as a subgenre and signifier of various kinds of youth, rebellion, angst, and ecstasy run counter to a lot of what's expressed in that ILM thread. It does, however, return us to the central question: HOW do we listen to what we listen to? Frank Kogan and Chuck Eddy have posited their own answers, not all of which I necessarily agree with, but you can't accuse them of promoting one genre and its characteristics; if anything, Kogan and Eddy (in particular) have tried to expand a listener's notion of what, say, heavy metal can encompass as well as the ways in which our understanding of heavy metal changes as our tastes bump against other records (and other people).

How do I respond to teenpop? As I mentioned in my own post, I got to thinking of Maura Johnston's freestyle panel at EMP. Matos asked me how South Floridians regarded freestyle as a genre. I said something, "It was OUR MUSIC," which, admittedly, was rather lame, but it summarized how thirteen-year-old horny boys and girls felt. We were responding to Company B, "Diamond Girl," "Jealous Fellows," and Noel's "Silent Morning," not to "the music played on Power 96 and Y-100 and listened to by guys in rat tails and girls in Capezios, Taxi pants, and hoop earrings." The hysterical nature of adolescent experiences dovetailed with the scenarios drawn in their songs:

As I age and life gets duller, the memorable experiences are actually MORE melodramatic in context, so "Girlfriend," "Wake Up," and "Since U Been Gone" really do become the soundtrack to my life. Call it hyperrealism. Jody Rosen was right when he posited in his Slate essay last week that the "defining feature of post-Lavigne teenpop is its adult pretensions," but I'd also remark that "the defining feature of adulthood is pretension." Thirtysomethings are pretty smug, generally, and so are the artists we tend to admire; thus, there's something to be said about teens striving for adulthood using the language and manners of eighteen-year-olds.