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Tween Pop: Children's Music and Popular Culture by Tyler Bickford (review)

2024; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 17; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/hcy.2024.a916845

1941-3599

Media Studies and Communication

Reviewed by: Tween Pop: Children's Music and Popular Culture by Tyler Bickford Natalie Coulter Tween Pop: Children's Music and Popular Culture. By Tyler Bickford. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. x + 229 pp. Cloth $102.95, paper $26.95. We are all familiar with the poppy tunes of the early 2000s, when tween stars like Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber topped the charts, High School Musical dominated the box office, and Hannah Montana was on repeat on the Disney Channel. Tweens-focused media seemed to be on every media platform. According to Tyler Bickford's new book, Tween Pop, this was not an arbitrary coincidence but a coordinated attempt to expand tween culture into children's mediated spaces. In the book, Bickford charts the commercial and cultural project of tween pop during what he calls the "tween moment," the decade between 2001 and 2011. The "moment" begins with the first Kidz Bop CD produced by record label Razor & Tie in 2001 and ends with Justin Bieber's 2011 concert film Never Say Never, which signaled that both Bieber and the music industry had moved on from tween consumer publics. Bickford defines the tween moment as a decade when commercial and media industries, led by the music industry, centered tween stars as a means of legitimating children's participation in public culture. The centering of tweens started with the resegmentation of child audiences by age through removing tweens "from the broader categories of teen/youth and rehousing them in spaces marked as childish" (21). Then, once tweens were housed in the child [End Page 157] space, the industries begin to expand the category outward to a broader public. Ultimately this legitimized children's participation in public culture. This reframing of the child audience, Bickford argues, allowed the child to be a cultural and public identity similar to other identities such as gender and race, as opposed to being a private identity relegated to the confines of patriarchal domesticity. Bickford traces this process across multiple examples that are at the center of each chapter. The early chapters focus on corporate actors—from the production of Kidz Bop, which redrew the boundaries between children's bedroom culture and public performance, to Disney's investment in pop music and the High School Musical franchise—as a way to position children as influential, independent participants in mainstream culture. The later chapters highlight a tween musician each—Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, and Justin Bieber—as way to explore how childhood is positioned as a cultural identity to be marketed to. The focus of the work is not on the tween audience themselves, which Bickford has examined in other publications, but on how tween pop articulated a notion of a child audience that calls children into the public sphere. Throughout it all, Bickford reminds us that tween media are still heavily invested in whiteness and femininity as articulations of childhood innocence. Drawing heavily from Lauren Berlant's The Female Complaint (2008), Bickford suggests that the tween moment allowed for the formation of childhood identity as an intimate public with legitimacy in the public sphere. Prior to the tween moment of the 2000s, led by Nickelodeon, the tween public was more of a counterpublic, oppositional and politicized as anti-adult, as noted by Sarah Banet-Weiser in Kids Rule! Nickelodeon and Consumer Citizenship (2007). But in the 2000s the tween was recentered in a child public that was not in opposition to an adult culture but part of a shared affective intimacy that nonetheless maintained a separation from adult publics. In tracking this historical trajectory, Tween Pop continues the story of children's media citizenship from where Banet-Wieser's work on Nickelodeon left off. 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. This book would work well in an undergraduate course to push students into looking at popular culture examples more critically. But it will also be of keen interest to children's studies scholars interested...