On Twilight Moms (See also: BTS Moms)
In 2008 Caitlin Flanagan wrote an insightful essay on the Twilight books titled “What Girls Want”. The entire essay is worth a read but what I want to highlight is how Flanagan absolutely nails the nostalgic appeal in Stephenie Meyer’s novels, writing, “Twilight is a 498-page novel about teenagers in which a cell phone appears only toward the very end, and as a minor plot contrivance.” Despite being set in the present, the novels are steeped in the middle aged author’s own adolescence. And it’s this powerful echoing nostalgia of a girlhood long past that hooked middle aged female fans.
Flanagan’s comments on the stirring of girlish passions in her middle aged heart have been on my mind recently as I’ve watched the giddy excitement of American BTS fans as BTS were awarded their very first number one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart with “Dynamite”. Much like the Twilight novels, the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart is set in the present but it’s relevance is tied to a nostalgia for an earlier era--an era when many of BTS’s middle aged fans would have been teenagers, an era when being number one on the chart meant something tangible.
It’s different today. Media is different today. Culture is different today. The Billboard Hot 100 has tried to keep up by adding in things like YouTube streams and counting “album equivalent units” rather than album sales but the truth is that the chart is essentially useless as a tool to measure broad popularity, if such a thing as “broad popularity” even exists any more. When the audience share of the worst rated episode of an old sitcom like Friends is unobtainable by anything less than like the Super Bowl on American television today, can we meaningfully compare the impact of a number one song of yesteryear to the impact of a number one song today?
The week of September 22, 1990, about 30 years ago, the number one song on the Billboard Hot 100 was a minor Wilson Phillips hit called “Release Me”. It went gold with 500k copies sold but I couldn’t even hum the melody if you asked me. I have no memory of this song although surely it must have been on the radio and this was exactly the era when I would record songs off of Top 40 pop radio and create my own homemade mixtapes. Janet Jackson’s “Escapade”, Sinead O’Connor’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”, Madonna’s “Vogue”... these were all Hot 100 chart topping 1990 radio staples that I have vivid memories of, along with another timeless song that did not get a number one on the Billboard Hot 100 but unlike Hot 100 hit “Release Me”, it remains so firmly rooted in my brain that I could probably sing all the lyrics for you right now: “The Humpty Dance”.
As an experiment, when “Dynamite” was released I began listening to my local Top 40 station again. In the years since I last tuned in regularly, I Heart Radio nee Clear Channel has taken it over and centralized playlisting in some boardroom in some city I don’t know. Over the past month I have heard Harry Styles’s summery “Watermelon Sugar” approximately one billion times along with a handful of other heavily rotated songs I couldn’t tell you the names of. Some were catchy--Dua Lipa’s slinky disco track was one I genuinely enjoyed--and others went in one ear and out the other without making much of an impression. But I can tell you a song that I didn’t hear even once: BTS’s “Dynamite.”
But the reality of what people are actually listening to right now (“WAP”) doesn’t matter in the world of BTS fans because it’s not about the present, it’s about the nostalgia for a girlhood long passed.
In this context, the infamously ugly Paper Magazine cover featuring BTS adorned with Lisa Frank™ skateboarding unicorns and ballerina angel kitty cats makes perfect sense. Lisa Frank is now a nostalgia brand aimed at women looking to recapture a bit of their youth and BTS is targeted at the exact same market. The symbols they hold up as signs of BTS’s cultural dominance are the dying legacy media properties that haven’t been relevant in years and that nobody under the age of 40 cares about:
* Time Magazine cover story
* Showcase performance on The Tonight Show
* Appearance on Dick Clark’s Rockin’ New Years Eve
* Number one on the Billboard Hot 100
* Speech at the United Nations
Who reads Time Magazine in 2020? Who watches broadcast television in America these days? Who respects the UN after Bosnia and Haiti (and etc.)?
And, of course, the grand prize for these BTS fans is the Grammy™, the most out-of-touch award of all the awards whose winners almost never line up with a) what’s actually broadly popular among regular listeners and b) what’s forward thinking and will have an impact on future musicians.
It’s in this context too that BTS’s “Dynamite” is best understood. The theme (allegedly) is disco but it’s not a look back to the disco of the 1970s or even to the modern disco revival of acts like Daft Punk. The disco of “Dynamite” is the disco nostalgia boom of the late 1990s in America. It’s not Nile Rodgers touch that makes a song like Avicii’s “Lay Me Down” sparkle, it’s the heavily sanitized imagery of That 70s Show slapped on top of a serviceable, contemporary bubblegum song.
Because that’s the other part of the Flanagan piece that rings true. The fantasy that these BTS fans have is not just the nostalgia for the cultural symbols of their youth (to include the 70s nostalgia boom) but it’s also the heady intoxication of power. Except in this case, it’s not the sexual allure that Bella holds over Edward and Jacob but tangible power over the outside world. These BTS fans use their Kpop idols the way 4Chan trolls used Pepe, to humble, to anger, to get a reaction. A vote for a politician feels fruitless but buy 1000 copies of an mp3 and see the result on the Billboard chart. It’s understandable that so many fans want to make it mean more than it does in these uncertain times.
But what does it all mean at the end of the day? Who benefits when the burst of endorphins from purchasing another 100 mp3s wears off? Where is the money going? What message is really being spread? Is 30 years a long enough time that we can all admit that Lisa Frank’s skateboarding unicorns are, in fact, hideous? And that a number one song doesn’t mean it’s a good song, or even a remembered song?