Tween Pop
Children's Music and Public Culture
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Duke University Press
Published:3rd Apr '20
Should be back in stock very soon
This paperback is available in another edition too:
- Hardback£85.00(9781478006855)
In the early years of the twenty-first century, the US music industry created a new market for tweens, selling music that was cooler than Barney, but that still felt safe for children. In Tween Pop Tyler Bickford traces the dramatic rise of the “tween” music industry, showing how it marshaled childishness as a key element in legitimizing children's participation in public culture. The industry played on long-standing gendered and racialized constructions of childhood as feminine and white—both central markers of innocence and childishness. In addition to Kidz Bop, High School Musical, and the Disney Channel's music programs, Bickford examines Taylor Swift in relation to girlhood and whiteness, Justin Bieber's childish immaturity, and Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana and postfeminist discourses of work-life balance. In outlining how tween pop imagined and positioned childhood as both intimate and public as well as a cultural identity to be marketed to, Bickford demonstrates the importance of children's music to core questions of identity politics, consumer culture, and the public sphere.
“A pathbreaking contribution that will reach and be relevant to a wide audience, Tween Pop is the first book to treat the tween pop explosion of the 2000s as a cohesive phenomenon. I have no doubt that it will reach a wide audience while repositioning music as central to childhood studies and demanding for children's music a central place in the study of popular music as a whole.” -- Diane Pecknold, author of * The Selling Sound: The Rise of the Country Music Industry *
“Tyler Bickford masterfully describes a ‘tween moment’ in American public culture, examining those young music consumers who teeter between childhood and adolescence, and the attention of the popular music industry in reconceptualizing music for them in this critical growth stage. This highly original and ambitious book is a substantial contribution to ethnomusicology, sociology, media studies, education, and child studies, and convincingly clarifies the struggle of the culture industries to convert childhood into a cultural identity all its own.” -- Patricia Shehan Campbell, University of Washington
“Tween Pop offers valuable new directions in many areas across multiple disciplines. The scholarship here should remain beneficial for quite some time. . . . I urge readers to pick up this book now and make the most of it.” -- Christopher A. Medjesky * Journal of Popular Culture *
“Tween Pop is well-researched, expertly written, and thorough, and it includes supporting images. It is an essential text for those wanting to understand the important tween audience and its continuing impact on popular music.” -- Kathy Merlock Jackson * Journal of American Culture *
"Tween Pop is a joy to read. Not only is Bickford an engaging writer, but the examples in the book are accessible while also deeply excavated for an analysis that goes well beyond simple representation to consider how cultural industries reimagine and position cultural identities."
-- Natalie Coulter * Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth *ISBN: 9781478008194
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 340g
240 pages