Lavinia Greenlaw Writes: The Importance of Music to Girls is not your typical coming-of-age story. Rather than chart her early childhood and teenage years through run-of-the-mill family drama and teenage angst, author Lavinia Greenlaw spins her story through the emotional landscape of her musical awakening.
The story begins, however, typically enough. The reader is introduced to a young Greenlaw embarking on her musical journey with a yearning to experience genuine emotion and secure her place in the world.Greenlaw begins her self-directed musical education gradually, with the childhood soundtrack of her own piano lessons and her mother's voice humming classic folk songs.
In music, Greenlaw finds revelation and refuge, while revealing a poetic prowess in her keen and succinct observations: "This is what music could do: change the shape of the world and my shape within it, how I saw, what I liked, and what I wanted to look like Does it depend upon whom you come across or is there something building up inside you, as I believe there was in me -- a half-formed vision needing an external phenomenon, such as music, in order to complete itself?"
The Importance of Music to Girls is poetic, clever, surprising, and incredibly endearing. Readers will root for Greenlaw's teenage self, recalling their own missteps with fashion, friends, love, and of course, music.
Pop-sensation life spans have been shrinking since the dawn of pop sensations, but the power of the boy band has proved enduring.
Although the manufactured boy band has become the music-industry juggernaut of the late 1990s and beyond, achieving success and sales numbers usually reserved for more genuine musical talent, it's by no means a new phenomenon.
Today's crop of boy bands has earrings, tattoos, and intricately sculpted facial hair. The boys shimmy and shake in time with each other like male Rockettes or Solid Gold Dancers. They are the most assiduously marketed--and the most blatantly prefabricated--of all the boy bands who came before.
Making the Band, the ABC show that gave us O-Town, was renewed for a second season; it also inspired a female counterpart, the WB's Pop stars.) Some boy bands of the past replaced members one by one as they grew out of their teens; now, entire bands are the new models--introduced yearly by impresarios like Lou Pearlman, puppet master of the Backstreet Boys, 'N Sync, and O-Town--and have far more lenient age restrictions.
Feminists with an eye on pop culture have traditionally looked toward arguably positive female role models like Buffy or Madonna as the key to creating a strong self-image in young girls--perhaps overlooking the importance of teen idols and prototypical sex symbols. After all, the conflict between who you want to be and whom you want to please is a universal and classic one for women, and our socialization to be pleasing is powerful.
In contrast to their hot-panted female counterparts Britney and Christina, the sexuality these boys are selling is adolescent, not adult.
Performing "Walk This Way," the admittedly past-his-peak Tyler humped the microphone, wagged his tongue, and looked like he wanted to have sex with all the girls in the audience and never call them again; the 'N Sync--ers, with their sidelong sheepish grins, were more like, "Gosh, honey, can you believe I'm doing this?" Their sweet, soft image doesn't impose anything other than the purest visions of good-boyfriendhood on their teen audience--a tactic that's historically been the m.o.
And it's this sexuality that keeps the boy bands in business. As American pop culture embraces and attacks the desires of girls (often simultaneously), one constant is that it's men who decide what a girl wants.
The Everly Brothers release "Bye Bye Love," the first of many hit songs about teen love, lost love, unrequited love, and eternal love that will prove to be lyrical templates for many boy bands to come. The Osmonds, five singing brothers from Utah, begin performing barbershop-style melodies at Disneyland.
The Beatles appear for the first time on American tv, on The Ed Sullivan Show, followed soon after by the movie A Hard Day's Night.
The Monkees, a television show about a wacky young rock 'n' roll band patterned after A Hard Day's Night, premieres complete with a cute one, a serious one, and not one but two goofy ones. Teenage British-Australian brothers the Bee Gees hit number one in the U.K.
Bubblegum--the effervescent genre of pop epitomized by the Archies ("Sugar Sugar"), the Ohio Express ("Yummy Yummy Yummy"), and Tommy James and the Shondells ("I Think We're Alone Now")--enjoys a brief period in the spotlight.
Family singing group the Jackson 5 is signed to Motown Records.
Kiss forms in Queens, New York.
A symbolic monkey wrench is thrown into the clean-cut works of the boy band when British clothing-boutique owner Malcolm McLaren constructs the Sex Pistols--supposedly in order to expose the empty commercialism that had consumed the purity of rock 'n' roll.
Menudo forms in Puerto Rico and goes on to become the first Latin band to achieve global success.
Teenage fivesome New Edition releases the high-pitched "Candy Girl." Assembled by producer/songwriter Maurice Starr as a new-style Jackson 5, the group quickly chafes under his creative control and fires him. New Kids on the Block, a quintet of blue-collar Bostonians, release a self-titled debut album under the tutelage of former New Edition producer Starr.
Nelson, twin sons of onetime teen idol Ricky Nelson, hit big with their debut album After the Rain.
British teen soon-to-be-sensation Take That release a debut single, "Do What U Like," on their own label. After hitting it big in Europe three years earlier, the Backstreet Boys' U.S. debut is the third-biggest seller of the year.
Always quick to exploit a trend, MTV teams up with ABC to produce the reality series Making the Band.
The Beatles are named "#1 Boy Band" in the April issue of Tiger Beat, largely on the strength of 1, a compilation of the Fab Four's 27 number-one hits that, aptly enough, spent eight weeks at number one in the U.S. and hit number one in another 33 countries.
The boy band explodes, and the girls love it, in fact it is well known that the girls aren`t invited back stage just say high to the members, but because they are sexually enthralled with the band and will have bragging rights for being sexually involved with the members and of course dreams of love for years to come.
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