Letters to the Editor
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but the audience is much younger
My daughter is in kindergarten. She has been invited to a "High School Musical" themed birthday (where they watched the movie in a movie theatre) for a girl turning 6, and a "Hannah Montana" themed party (where a teenager came and sang "The Hokey Pokey" and other songs, dressed in a blonde wig, belly shirt, low-cut skin-tight jeans, and platform boots) for a girl turning 5. When I asked the moms what the birthday girls wanted, they replied "Anything HSM or HM related" (a soundtrack cd, or a Barbie-type doll, or character dress-up outfits). (Another little girl was having a "Bratz" themed party, which we declined to attend. Ugh!)
From what I have seen, Hannah Montana and the High School Musical crew are squeaky-clean compared to, say, the Britney Spears of a decade ago. But, still. If the kindergartners and early school-aged girls are "into" this stuff now, they will be "over it" by the time they are tweens, and into something more sophisticated and darker.
For now, my daughter would rather go bowling than watch a bunch of teenagers sing their hearts out, or be a knight in armor than a teeny bopper in a belly shirt. It's one of the many things I love about her. But I am concerned that she and her peers will "grow up" to fast: what will they do when they are 12? Botox parties?
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Juliebird
As a father of a 6.5 yr old girl, I 100% agree with what you wrote. A lot of parents (and maybe Mary Elizabeth Williams) seem to think HSM is just fine because it's not Brittany or something. But my objection is that there's no reason for 6 yr olds to be watching junk about high school kids. The marketing is not confined to tweens - a kindergartner is a child, not a tween! The marketing is an all consuming tidal wave and I do worry about what comes next. Heaven knows what my daughter will demand at 10 when she actually is a tween.
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Its about marketing to boomers.
What today's market understands is that today's boomer parents cater to their children in a way that previous generations would never have thought of doing. There is even a name for it: the non-wage earning consumer. And it's worth many billions a year.
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The hollow children
Corporations frame people as consumers. They are not interested in your children, entertainment, nice moral outcomes, or education. They simply want your money and will have you serve your children up to get it. Period. Nothing nice about it. It is very hard to clap and sing along to that cold hard reality.
A revolution is going on. The first shots were fired on Madison Avenue a half a century ago, and it ends with your capitulation. "This is how the world ends... not with a bang, but a..."
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@ The Voice of Reason
"This is how the world ends... not with a bang, but a..." ka-ching!
Yup.
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Wake me when she's twenty-one.
I expected the Marxist posters on Salon to find another way to slam the bourgeoisie and the "vampire elite" oppressors of the proletariat. It's not that they're wrong; there's some truth in what they say, but they want to dress their kids in rags and send them out with Kalishnikov rifles to kill Bill Gates. They won't get the chance. Windows users will get to him first.
In truth, this kind of exploitation of young performers pre-dated The Beatles. It was around in the 1950's with people like Frankie Avalon and a mob of motley one-hit wonders, pretenders to rock 'n' roll who were modeled as teenage Frank Sinatras. It doesn't matter that the agents who promoted those performers, and then dumped them in an alley when their careers failed, were streetcorner sleazeballs instead of megacorporations. Manipulation is manipulation.
The real question is, does Miley Cyrus have the ability to survive manipulative teen stardom and graduate to something better? It's possible. Sonny and Cher, after their brief season in the sun, gritted their teeth and learned how to do comedy and how to sing better ballads in countless county fair performances. And Tina Turner completely remade herself, after she stopped rollin' on the river and got rid of Ike.
A friend of mine, much more into teen culture than I am despite being in her forties, thinks Cyrus has a good head on her shoulders and good advice from her dad. I think it depends on how much she frees herself from Disney influence, and avoids being overexposed and over-milked by The Mouse. If I were offering her advice, it'd be to become the second lead in a sitcom with a solid comic actor or comedian - Roseanne, Margaret Cho, even Ellen DeGeneris comes to mind. She needs to learn different performing chops than she'll get with two shows a night and no days off on extended road trips.
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Part of marketing, is making a satifying product.
When we finally expanded viewing prilages beyond PBS, the Disney Channel was one of their first additional choices. In terms of appropriate programming it seems like a logical next step. What I hadn't counted upon was the drastic change from near non-marketing (PBS does plug their other programmng)to being subject to one of the most sophisticated and relentless marketing machines on the planet.
To watch any Disney sitcom is to be simply amazed at how well they know their audience. The acting, even given that most of it is from kids, is worse then anything you'll experience outside a grade school auditorium. The writing is bad enough to have made you switch sides during the strike. Still, the belly laughs from my daughter and son can be heard around the block.
The machine managed to snag our money for HSM and Cheetah Girls DVDs as holiday gifts but not much else. The kids don't ask for much, bless'em.
So my daughter just had her 8th birthday party. It didn't have any kind of theme, but you would have thought differently during the present opening. She went from just being a viewer to now owning an HM poster, T-shirt, microphone, make up, doll, cards, and a few things I can't remember. And she loves them all, just as her friends knew she would, which in turn made the shopping trip that much eaiser for the parents. And I guess therein lies the beauty of the whole affair. In this day of 110+ cable channels, 1000+ video game selection, and who can count how many kid's series books, these girls still get to have a surprisingly big peice of common ground.
I know parents who refuse to let their kids watch this stuff. And while I can sympathise, I'm not sure their kids are really better off or happier.