Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

2ge+her - click here for the entire movie on youtube

(I hope this makes sense…)

So, throughout class I was thinking a lot about how the boy band craze affected my life… and while I completely perpetuated the false, constructed rivalry by being a strict BSB fan only; I think one of the most intriguing, hilarious and complex phenomena to come out of this period has to be – 2ge+her.

In short, 2ge+her is a completely fictional boy band created to capitalize on and simultaneously mock the boy band hysteria of the moment. The band was first revealed in a mocumentary about the formation and rise of a new boy band to rival the dominant group – Whoa!. This mocumentary was the first feature-length film produced specifically to air on MTV and I distinctly remember the hype and my excitement building up to the commercial-free broadcast in 2000. The band went on tour one summer as the opener for Britney Spears. And the group was given a sort of reality TV show extension from the movie that was short lived due to the sudden death of the youngest member, Michael Cuccione.

(My personal attachment: I saw them at the Granite Run Mall after school one afternoon. It was kind of a major deal for me… at the time. And I bought one of their albums. My love for BSB was much greater than my appreciation of 2ge+her but I think it’s fair to consider my youthful self a fan.)

I think 2ge+her is relevant to our discussion in class for two main reasons: 1) the construction of the musician-fan identities and relationships; and 2) the consumption of the performer’s multiple identities.

This “Boy Band Training” clip from the movie highlights the commodification of the boys in order to provide individual personas for the fans to identify with. It acknowledges the need to present constructed identities that will be judged not only by the media but more importantly by the fans. Also, prior to this scene, as the boys are individually found and brought together to form the group, each one is chosen due to the necessity to fill/cast a distinct character type. They end up with a well-rounded group:

Jerry O’Keefe (Evan Farmer) – “the heart-throb”

Mickey Parke (Alex Solowitz) – “the rebel”

Chad Linus (Noah Bastian) – “the shy one”

Doug Linus (Kevin Farley) – “the older brother”

Jason “QT” McKnight (Michael Cuccione) – “the cutie”

But 2ge+her not only highlights the absurdity and falseness in constructing commodified identities to cater to the audience-consumers, it also complicates the multiple identities that we discussed in class. So for “the heart-throb,” there is Jerry O’Keefe who has an entire history and personality that the fans are privy to through the tv show and movie, and then there is Evan Farmer, the actor, whose identity is completely obscured by the constructed O’Keefe. It isn’t until a few years later with the TLC reality show “While You Were Out” where Evan Farmer, as the host of the show, becomes the commodity consumed. But this publicly televised version of Farmer still is not the private Farmer who audiences may feel connected to… and really- it probably doesn’t matter at all which identities fans identify with but as Brandon pointed ount in class- how these identities affect the fans…

Overall, I thought that it was another interesting example of the degrees of distance between a fan and the fan object. I also think that 2ge+her is a specific case, and I can’t imagine there are still fans of 2ge+her who struggle with defining themselves in relation to this group; but the 2ge+her project provides an extreme model of fan interactions and the construction of commodified identities.

A few parting questions/thoughts:

- What do you think the intent of creating 2ge+her was? Was it simply to capitalize on a fan? What is the underlining commentary on the band boy craze?

- How does 2ge+her compare to “real” boy bands? How does 2ge+her vary from any other transmedia franchise?

Opening disclaimer: I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with the post–mostly I was hoping to put something out there and hope that other people can figure out what to say about it.

So, one of things that didn’t come up today, but that occured to me during our discussion, is how incredibly raced the music industry and music fandom is. Boy bands and girl bands and their followings seem to especially embody this theme. Off the top of my head, I can’t name one multi-racial boy band. New Kids on the Block: all white. Boyz II Men: all black. New Edition: all black. Menudo: All latino.  *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, LFO, O-town: all white.  Furthermore, when rivalries are constructed, the racial frontiers are maintained. Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera (and to a lesser extent Jessica Simpson and Mandy Moore) were all constructed as rivals to each other, but Brandy and Maya weren’t considered in the bracket, even though they were young, hot women producing PG to PG-13 boy-centric pop music for a similar demographic. The only counterexample that I can think of right now is that the Spice Girls had one black member. And I think it’s pretty telling that she was “Scary Spice.”

I just had a few observations based on these samples. The first is the obvious statement that the music industry reproduces and perpetuates social cleavages. Especially since all of the above music is targeted at pre-teens and teens, it’s somewhat sinister that the expectation/stereotype that people of different races won’t have similar tastes is being reinforced in the next generation. The other, slightly less boring, but related observation I had was that I think a lot of this is bound up in the sexual and homosexual subtext of pop icons. Girls aren’t only supposed to find a member of *NSYNC to identify with (“The Sensitive One”; “The Young, Hip One”; “The Wacky One”), they’re supposed to want them sexually. And it’s still seen as threatening for the stereotypical boy-band consumer–a 13-year-old white girl–to sexually want a black man. And it is especially threatening if she discovers her sexuality through wanting a black man, entirely possible given the middle-school target age of a boy-band consumer. The homosocial dynamic of boy bands also seems to be similarly raced/racist.

I guess a way to end this post would be ask: how does this relate to what Brandon was saying in class about what people stand to gain or lose through particular music fandom identifications? And is this mostly constructed in the fandom (i.e., a black person who likes Jessica Simpson won’t get respect from black peers), constructed in the industry (the industry tells black people to like Beyonce and white people to like Christina Aguilera), or both? Hopefully someone else can say something coherent, because I’m just not entirely sure where I’m going.