Younger fans and all that

["Christine" <boristhespider@home4017.freeserve.co.uk>]

Popping out of lurk to add my two pence worth on te N'Sync/Britney thing.
When I was about 13 (I'm very nearly 20 now), I was a little teenybopper,
like most of my friends.  I can only speak for myself, but I've tried to
figure out why I liked the bands I liked then (Take That and Ant & Dec being
my favourites, how pathetic is that??  Actually, I bet those two names mean
nothing at all to American listers), and I think hormones played a big part
in it.  When I think back, I realised I hardly ever listened to their music,
it was more of a case of fancying the lads in the bands, sticking posters of
them on my walls and getting all giddy at the sight of them.
And then there's the fact that they're always featured on TV and in
magazines, and also when you're a younger teenager, I think you're more
influenced by what your peers are doing, and what seems to be considered
'cool' or the 'in thing' or whatever.
I found it's when you get to about 14/15 or so, you just grow out of it, and
form your own tastes.  Well, some do anyway.  I think it's to do with
fitting in, fear of being alienated, and I think teenagers get affected by
this a lot.  I don't know how much adults get affected by that, I'm only
heading out of my teens now.  I don't know if any of this makes any sense,
but that's my opinion.

Jeff:-
> Seriously, how did you fine young folk get your first dose(s) of The Who?

I think I was about 12 or 13 when I was first exposed to the Who, when there
were some Ready Steady Go's shown again on TV over here in Britain, and I
watched them with my parents, and of course, the Who were featured, and I
remember thinking that My Generation was a great song, the Who were very
loud and their drummer was a madman who wore nice target t-shirts.
At the end of 1995, when I was 14, the Beatles Anthology was on TV, and I
ended up listening to only the Beatles for about 18 months.  Then in the
summer of 1997, I started to realise there were other great bands in the
60s, and when I was at the cinema one day My Generation was playing on an
advert before the film and it reminded me what a great song it was and so I
went out and got a Who greatest hits CD, and the rest is history, or
something like that.

Brian:-
> So are there lots of cliques? One group likes Britney and The Backstreet
> Boys while another group hates them and won't listen to anything but Korn
> and Limp Bizkit while another only listens to Radiohead.

I remember when I was at school, you'd have your 'Take That' fans, and your
'Nirvana' fans on the other side.  Even though I was a big Take That fan, I
did straddle into the Nirvana camp now and again.  These days I notice here
there's the S Club 7/HearSay/Steps/Britney fans, and then there's the little
nu-metal fans, a similar sort of thing to when I was 13, it seems to be
mainly among the younger teens to me.  I don't really know what people more
my age are into, my musical tastes are a bit stuck in the 60s.

Sorry to ramble about nothing much.

from Christine