Dorkfest: Idina meets Spice Girls meets Academia

[steelcity_dagny]

My skeptical reaction to
veronicamae's post on a messageboard regarding Idina, at age 25, being a fan of the Spice Girls led me down a rabbit hole of academic journal articles that are too hilarious not to post.

So, my initial reaction was to argue that our musical tastes are most formed when we are around 15, not in our 20s. Plus Spice Girls fans skewed young. I think their major fanbase was between the ages 7-17 in 1996, and now aged 17-27. However, I did some research, and apparently popular music preferences peak at age 23.5.

See this article for details (accessed via JSTOR):
Some Exploratory Findings on the Development of Musical Tastes
Morris B. Holbrook; Robert M. Schindler
The Journal of Consumer Research > Vol. 16, No. 1 (Jun., 1989), pp. 119-124

Who knew? Also, I kind of love that article for referencing the film "The Big Chill" as the impetus for the research. Fun! Then I searched "Spice Girls" on JSTOR and found the following gem of an article:
Vicars of 'Wannabe': Authenticity and the Spice Girls
Elizabeth Eva Leach
Popular Music, Vol. 20, No. 2. (May, 2001), pp. 143-167.

--which includes quotables such as:

•  "To some degree their 'polysemous femininity' is part of an adherence to convention - a complicity with a public for whom such feminism has become, post-Madonna, standard."
  
• "The Spice Girls' contribution to fin-de-sicle pop music is to upset the clarity of authenticity markers by presenting a polysemy which allows different collectives to construct the kind of authenticity that they require, based on the assumptions that they bring to their listening and thus to find their own meanings in the group."
• "Although some fans no doubt eagerly participate in their own deception, many probably knowingly appreciate the play, and willingly subscribe to a pre-romantic aesthetic of safe fantasy and terpsichorean enjoyment."

Indeed, if there's one thing Idina is doing, it is subscribing to a pre-romantic aesthetic of safe fantasy and terpsichorean enjoyment. (Actually the article is pretty interesting, because it manages to describe, in academic language, the celebration of artificiality in manufactured pop music.)