Research Catalog

Title

Tween pop : children's music and public culture / Tyler Bickford.

Author

Bickford, Tyler

Publication

• Durham : Duke University Press, 2020.
• ©2020

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

x, 229 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Subject

• Preteens
• Music and teenagers
• Music and children
• Popular music > Social aspects
• Identity (Philosophical concept)

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-220) and index.

Contents

Introduction: The tween moment -- Singing along -- Music television -- "Having it all" -- The whiteness of tween innocence -- The tween prodigy at home and online -- Conclusion: After the tween moment.

Call Number

JNE 21-38

ISBN

• 9781478006855
• 1478006854
• 9781478008194
• 1478008199
• 9781478009177 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2019043399

OCLC

1121603112

Author

Bickford, Tyler, author.

Title

Tween pop : children's music and public culture / Tyler Bickford.

Publisher

Durham : Duke University Press, 2020.

Copyright Date

©2020

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-220) and index.

Summary

"TWEEN POP examines the creation of the "tween" in the early 2000s as a gendered and raced consumer audience. The tween, aged nine to twelve, and usually thought of as a white girl, occupies a temporality between childhood and adolescence: she has aged out of children's products but is too young to fully engage in marketing directed at teenagers. But, as Tyler Bickford argues, this seemingly narrow market grew to broadly include four to fifteen year olds, with producers and marketers pulling upwards and downwards by creating material that would attract younger viewers and teenagers, thereby creating a demographic that expanded, rather than limited, the traditional reach of child and teenage markets. According to Bickford, the key to this expansion was pop music, as it provided an intensity of experience that mirrored childhood in its investments in emotional authenticity, cultural value, and relational intimacies. In other words, pop music needed to be both intimate and public--a tension that Bickford argues defined the tween's positionality as well--and tween pop did so by pairing the mainstream pop of adulthood with images and lyrics suitable for younger audiences. Throughout the book, Bickford reveals how childhood's status as a private domestic position outside of politics was not a hindrance to the cultivation of children as a mass audience but rather was the very foundation of that project. By creating an intimate public of tween pop, the tween music industry was able to position tweens as still within the private domestic sphere of family life, but connected in a broader public of other tween-pop-listening tweens. Chapter 1 looks at Kidz Bop music videos to argue that the tween music industry framed childhood domesticity as complementary to participation in a public culture. Chapter 2 focuses on Disney Channel's popular music programs' efforts to engage older children, particularly older girls, in their marketing tactics. Chapter 3 analyzes the Disney Channel show Hannah Montana and its foregrounding of tensions between girlhood, public culture, and family. Chapter 4 attends to how whiteness served as central to the tween construction of innocence and childhood. Bickford concludes the book by periodizing the tween moment as the decade from 2001 to 2011, and then outlines the developments in popular culture for children since that time. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of ethnomusicology, feminism and gender studies, and cultural studies"-- Provided by publisher.

Other Form:

Online version: Bickford, Tyler, 1981- Tween pop Durham : Duke University Press, 2020. 9781478009177 (DLC) 2019043400

Research Call Number

JNE 21-38