Selective Tradition Across Boy Bands (by Jen)

Have you thought about how ever since The Beatles there have been hundreds of boy bands throughout the world? With the surge of The Beatles in the late fifties, the term “boy band” was coined and little did the world know that it would ripple a wave of many more boy bands to come. According to the Oxford learners dictionary, a boy band is “a group of attractive young men who sing pop music and dance, and who are especially popular [amongst] young people”. This definition can apply to all boy bands through out history from mid twentieth century up until today. Nonetheless, the idea of the term has slightly been reinterpreted and reproduced differently in accordance with the social atmosphere and other cultural aspects. 

Why can we understand and fully experience the phenomenon of boy bands up to this day? Williams makes it very clear: through selective tradition “certain things are [picked] for value and emphasis” (1961, p. 38). What has happened ever since The Beatles - the first coined boy band - many other bands of boys have formed and with very specific boy band qualities. There are normally four to eight boys, I would like to say, they tend to be somewhat attractive to the majority of the people who know them and they will typically appeal to a younger audience. Nevertheless, what makes BTS different from The Beatles and different from The Backstreet Boys and from Jackson 5, and so forth...? 

What has changed has not been the boy bands, but the periods of time in which the boy bands were formed and how these time periods have constructed our structure of feeling. When we experience this structure of feeling, we are reframing our ideas and new reinterpretations based on the “particular living result of all the elements in [a] general organization”, and this is then the culture of a period (Williams, 1961, p. 37). In simple literature, depending on the culture of the time, different aspects of a boy band - the same ones as in The Beatles or as in 5 Seconds of Summer - will be recreated so to satisfy the collective public living the selective tradition of the ‘boy band’. 

Williams emphasises the importance and inevitability of how selective tradition “should follow the growth of society” (1961, p. 39). However, he points out, trying to reproduce rather than newly interpreting and creating a ‘selective’ boy band - as it is that we are speaking of this phenomenon - is an unattainable goal since we cannot foresee how culture nor the time period of which we will live in, will affect the manifestation of a tradition from the past (Williams, 1961). In our case, we speak of boy bands and how they have picked and chosen these already existing lines from their ancestors, but always in fulfillment with “the sign of times” which shapes these selective traditions (Styles et al., 2017). 

References:

Boy band. (n.d.). Retrieved February 23, 2021, from https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/boy-band

Styles, H., Bhasker, S., Rowland, M., Nasci, R., Salibian, A. & Johnson, T. (2017). Sign of the Times. [Recorded by Gee Jam]

Williams, R. (1961). The Long Revolution. The Analysis of Culture, 32-40. doi:10.7312/will93760