jane dark's sugarhigh!

virgins, pop stars, and the three songs rule

We have yet to hear a good song from Hannah Montana, but won't be surprised when we do. It's like getting a good Christmas present from your uncle who works in Silicon Valley: he's clueless, but he's got pockets full of money and friends full of advice, and sooner or later he's gonna nail it. Ditto young Hannah, who should probably stop taking advice from her daddy, who hasn't caught a good song since 1992.

But finally it's of little matter. The Lizzie McGuire-ing of country music is a fait accompli, and we don't even mean the fact that American Idol's majority of successes are country acts, which would only be surprising to those folks with geographical and/or snobby milieu-formed blinders obscuring their grasp of what American music actually consists. We mean, in short, Taylor Swift. Taylor Swift is a gawky high-school student with a thin voice, a billion-dollar hairdo, a pointedly incompetent sultriness, and television looks. In interviews, she likes to talk about how she wrote certain songs while sitting in class, and so on. At any given moment, it's not clear what she's good at, except for embodying the ambiguous ego ideal of a good chunk of the population, which is not a bad start if you want to be a pop star.

But if you don't look "in any given moment" but over the last year's span, you'll discover that she now has three songs that have not only been radio hits but are quite good indeed: "Tim McGraw" (see discussion below the fold here), "Teardrops on my Guitar," and now "Our Song." And as we know, three songs is the rule: just as when a young, impoverished Jane Dark made the fast rule never to buy an lp without foreknowledge that it had at least three good songs on it (a lesson learned after getting burned by that Grand Funk Railroad disc with their cover of "The Locomotion").

That the first two singles were ballads is passingly curious, especially given the thinness of Swift's voice; that the new single' vocal attack is almost certainly indicative of Nashpop's slow and plausibly deniable rapprochement with hip-hop (given it a listen or two, you hear what we mean) is itself a bit odd. But what is finally explicable, or at least describable, is the cultural sequence to which Taylor Swift is a kind of closure. The routing of pop stardom through television is scarcely a new fact (Ricky Nelson, etc etc) but has certainly taken on a new force since the new Mouseketeers fueled the old teenpop. However, it was the bifurcated reality of Duff/McGuire that really set the new tween machine in cultural relief: awkward high-schooler on TV, and (shortly thereafter) charmed pop princess on stage and chart. The two paths intersected in the Lizzie McGuire movie, in which Lizzie herself, rather than the actress who played her, became a pop star. Now Hannah Montana, the television character, tours as Hannah Montana, the pop star, but releases songs as Miley Cyrus, the person. But as we suggested, that sequence has now returned to its zero point. It should be the case that, now that we have Taylor Swift, we no longer need any Hannah Montanas.

Once upon a time the unresolvable ambiguity of female adolescence, of that transition from one mode to another (a shift, one can't help but note, in mode of [re-]production; truly the site of the great mysteries), took the rigid cultural form of the virgin/whore bifurcation. While this punishing cookie-cutter is epochs old, the contemporary pop-cultural formulation is perhaps best summarized in the '84 movie Angel: "High School Honor Student by Day. Hollywood Hooker by Night." This, you'll note, is a particular formula, for a particular place and time: the generality of "virgin" has been replaced by the specifics of "high school student," while the generality of "whore" has been actualized in a specific place, and a particularly loaded one: Hollywood.

From Hollywood, the next leap isn't far — but it is striking. For it now appears that the "whore" portion of the ambiguity can be replaced happily by "pop star." The structure of this current apparition — high school student by day, international pop star by night — has its own story to tell. It's evident that the structural role that "pop star" plays here is deeply connected to "whore"; it remains otherwise inscrutable, despite the reasons weakly offered, why Hannah Montana must conceal her night-time career from her classmates. The activity of selling yourself on the open market — or really, of entering into the machinery of selling yourself — finds its happy ideal in the image of the teen pop star, and yet somehow remains a dirty secret. It's as if, even with the issue of illicit sexuality neutralized by the shift in job description, the issue of the first commoditizing of bodies cannot be made unproblematic.

Of course, just because this narrative shift makes visible some fact about social labor, that doesn't mean it can wish away the cultural anxiety over female and child sexuality. Indeed, the very implausibility of this particular "wishing-away" testifies to the insolubility of the fear. "Culture" — the ascent of Taylor Swift and Hannah Montana equally — is always busy wishing away even as it's busy making visible. It stands in the same relation to "economics" as "pop star" does to "hooker"; if there is any distance between culture and economics at this late date, one might find its measure there.

Posted by jane at December 2, 2007 09:08 AM | TrackBack