Familiar riffing about Ashlee, Lindsay, and Taylor

[koganbot]

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

Comments

[thinwhiteduke74]

Thanks for the response. I have to think about a few of your remarks. Speaking for myself, though, Justin Timberlake's looks - the way he presented himself in those N'Sync songs and on Justified as a slightly dorky guy just becoming comfortable with his cuteness - went a long way towards making me root for him. Same with the Jonas Bros. It was true to a lesser extent with the Backstreet Boys. So maybe I wasn't clear: I meant that my warm response to the music recorded by these guys was indivisible from my attraction to them. Does this make sense?

[koganbot]

Alfred! Thanks for posting! Keep coming back.

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