Justin Bieber gets the prodigy treatment in a profile from Entertainment Weekly this week (sadly not online yet). I'm not yet convinced that the 15-year-old crooner, who was the object of a bidding war between Usher and Justin Timberlake's competing labels, quite the deserves the label yet, unlike Taylor Swift. But for a whole variety of reasons, including the fact that there's someone very important to me who is about to be a teenager, I've been thinking a bit about the kind of pop music available to young teens and made by their (relative) peers.
When I was 12 and 13 and 14, I spent a fair amount of time taping songs off of radio Top 40 countdown (We didn't steal music from the internet in those days, children). Among the songs that made a big impression, enough for me to sit by my mini-stereo, fingers primed to hit and the "play" and "record" buttons down together at the first sign of their opening chords, were Toni Braxton's "Unbreak My Heart," lots and lots of tracks off of No Doubt's Tragic Kingdom, the Backstreet Boys "I Want It That Way," (Which in my defense, the pool where I worked blasted EVERY time in came on the radio that summer. We all made the swim classes we were teaching stop whatever they were doing and dance to it. In retrospect I'm surprised we weren't sued for traumatizing children, though we definitely got a lot of noise complaints from the police.), and tracks off Savage Garden's self-titled debut album (Shut up in advance. These are my soft spots I'm showing y'all.)
In retrospect, it was pretty grown-up stuff. All these "I want you" and "you are my fire" sentiments, all deep, genuine adult grief over love gone wrong were things I was quite a bit away from understanding. I really can't think of any genuinely age-appropriate (and by that I mean it really hit at my emotions where they were, not about where I was curious for them to be going) music that hooked me in at that age. And so while I don't really think "One Less Lonely Girl" is immortal or anything, I'm glad the pre-teen in my life has it to listen to. I'm okay with it if kids that age can rap Jay-Z's verse on "Umbrella," (I'm waiting until this one is a little bit more grown until I really get the one in my life into the good stuff, hip-hop wise, so we can have a real conversation about the problematic stuff) but I sort of wish I'd had something like this to define my slow-dance aspirations, too.