Familiar riffing about Ashlee, Lindsay, and Taylor
Alfred Soto claimed over on a Justin Bieber review thread on the Jukebox that "In our many, many teen-pop discussions we rarely discuss the interaction of sexuality and the singers' self-representations" (he also claimed that gay male critics preferred male singers, which certainly didn't accord with my experience, or that of anyone else who
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Yes, makes sense ("indivisible" not meaning "identical"). Actually, Timberlake's looks helped me root for him too, for reasons not so distant from yours, and I'm not gay. And the Jonas Brothers, too, who look like nice guys - and actually copied the guitar intro to "Anarchy In The U.K."* on their very first single, "Mandy," and took the song somewhere cuddly, which was a move I liked - but ultimately they don't have the music to back it up.
When I was 15 and 16 my wall was covered with pictures of the stars of music, and among the scores of pictures, there was exactly one female: Grace Slick. While now, if my wall were covered with singers I listen to, it would be overwhelmingly female. But there's a connection, lots of the '00s nice girls being angst girls too, struggling with the same experiences as the nihilist angst boy heroes of my youth but trying to do it without the nihilism.
(I'm sure what I wrote is unclear. My Decade's End piece tries to get at the same thing a little more extensively, though maybe no more comprehensibly, in the part - if you scroll down - where I say "alienation was more an opportunity than a catastrophe" and then talk about how Joni and Stevie moved the romantic alienated hero into mainstream femininity. I think the sonic presentation more than the visual presentation moves my sociosexualemotional viscera towards the '00s girls, the sense of romantic hero(ine) Dylan/Miss Lonely as sweet regular Ashlee and Kelly and Taylor, "nice" girls with their deep bodily moods just trying to get through the day.)
*UPDATE: Don't know why I kept saying "Anarchy In The U.K."; it's much closer to "Holidays In The Sun" (for about ten seconds, and minus the marching feet).
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