Culture Blues

The Rant: Teen Choice Awards

Newsflash:  teenagers are stupid.

On Monday, I managed to catch portions of this year’s Teen Choice Awards, the slutty older sister to Nickelodeon’s Kids Choice Awards (in this metaphor, MTV’s VMAs would be the formerly popular cousin now driving his IROC to community college). Some random observations I jotted down during the show:

• I don’t know who any of these people are, but I assume they’re all on Gossip Girl
• Hugh Jackman sweats a lot
• Post-show orgy?
• Miley Cyrus thanking her father Jesus Christ, and the camera cutting to Billy Ray

Of course, the god-fearing gap-toothed heroine of the tween movement deserves more than just a bullet point. The controversy is a cyclical one – the sexualizing of our teenage pop idols (girls only, NAMBLA has the green-light to molest the Sprouse twins on sight). Cyrus performed one of her dopey songs in an outfit that the kids might call scandalous. We could see parts of her training bra. She appeared to pole-dance on top of an ice cream cart. She gyrated – dare I say it? – suggestively.

And yet, the pervert community responded with a collective yawn.

Try as she might (what’s more salacious than an Annie Liebowitz shoot?), Cyrus just can’t tap the creepy dad demographic, unless you count those prudes at the Culture & Media Institute, whose site I refuse to link to. Lets face it - Cyrus is no Natalie Portman (thank Luc Besson for that weirdness) and she is definitely not an Olsen twin, whose skeletal grins inspired websites counting down to their 18^th birthday when they could finally be legally devirginized, even though growing up in a corporate super-structure had certainly fucked them long ago.

Don’t believe for a second that Hannah Montana’s middling attempts to titillate are merely the teenager acting out. This is marketing. The Disney Channel gig can’t last forever. We are about two years away from the press release that introduces Cyrus’ new “mature” sound. That mature sound will sound a lot like her current sound, actually, but there will be a lot more grinding and vague sexual innuendo. There will probably be a song about eating candy. The outfits will continue to shrink. It will happen. It is, in fact, already happening. Miley’s handlers are trying to inject some sex appeal, some auto-tune, some club beats. After all, the act can’t be dumb wigs and ditzy pratfalls forever. We’ve got units to move.

We need to create us a Britney.

Ironically, it was Spears receiving the Teen Choice’s equivalent of a Lifetime Achievement Award on Monday night. I suppose that she fits that award perfectly, since she’s perpetually stuck in the role of rebellious, irresponsible teenager. Congratulations on your Best Arrested Development Award. And while some might say that Spears (and therefore pop-tart-in-training Cyrus) owes much of her persona/career/marketing plan to Madonna, I would argue that the biggest factor in this twisted stew of pop-evolution is the tasty broth we call Internet.

The current generation of insufferable retards can thank my wonderful generation – the so-called e-generation – for our hefty contribution to the Britney Spears model. We were the first generation to settle the internet, and Spears was the first celebrity fully-consumable via dial-up connection.

We copied and pasted her, but we can’t undo her.

Spears began as just an underage harlot flouncing about in a school girl’s outfit, with a few innocuous (and thus, vastly successful) pop hits to her credit. She got overwhelmingly popular. Hers was the cleavage that launched a thousand Geosites. We could follow Spears’ every move on the net, scrutinize them in real time and living color, an ability that has only grown as Spears has descended from pop stardom to cultural infamy.

Oh, to lament the fate of the rich and mindless.

Maybe you’ve heard, but this internet thing has only grown since we e-kids broke it in. We live in an age where access to information is instantaneous, comprehensive, and terrifying. The celebrity detritus that clutters every corner of the internet, including this one, is America’s only self-sustaining resource. And while my generation dipped their toes into over-accessibility, the teens screaming their braces off on Monday’s award show have grown up immersed in it.

Spears, along with her mid-aughties contemporaries (see: Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, etc) have taken the axiom of ‘there’s no such thing as bad publicity’ to frightening heights. Their careers are forgettable and their talents arguable, but their marketing is pervasive. Capitalizing on our ingrained love of watching rich, pretty people implode, the marketing geniuses behind these over-saturated bimbos have amassed ample profits by turning private lives into public billboards. Celebdaq stocks rise with every pixilated vagina blown up in the gossip glossies. You can now have a lucrative career simply by being seen. Believe in yourself!

Celebrity culture is dumb and the people who like it are yucky! Old news, sure. But what has this done to our teenagers? Those lovable morons that we need to fight our wars, cure our plagues, and carry on our legacy. Won’t someone think about the children!

First, it’s dumbed them down, perhaps beyond the point where they can be saved by a liberal arts education and dabbling in drugs and sexual experimentation. They are too attuned to the ad-machine and the machine is perfectly geared to them. The internet, nay the world-at-large, has been reshaped too much to fit their stunted braincases.

Second, our teens have become a bunch of needy pussies. They’re the worst afflicted of the social networking disease that has turned us all into whiney open books. We shout our feelings from the virtual rooftops and hope that someone will take note of how interesting we are. Self-diagnosed pathos and bad poetry are on the rise, stride for stride with the ballooning weight of the American teen. Cheap shot? Maybe. But it needs to be said that climbing someone’s Facebook wall does not constitute exercise.

The Teen Choicers gave away a “Best Tweeter” award this year. That’s where we’re at. Combined with the wasteland that is reality television, getting famous has never seemed so easy. Just expose your shallow soul on the internet, get out there as much as possible, and eventually someone will pluck you out of obscurity.

You deserve to be famous. You’re as interesting as anyone else, right?

Not that this problem is localized with the youth. But they’re the most susceptible. They control that holy grail of advertising demographics – the 15-22s, the ones who will buy things, forever, if we can just get our claws in now. And hell, with them shitting out so much of themselves all over the internet, it’s never been easier to tap that demographic.

That’s what Cyrus was doing dancing on that pole that other night. She was making the demographic transition from the tweens (who still rely on their boring-ass parents to buy them the new hotness) to the teens (who are dumb and have a lot of disposable income). The wheels of industry were in motions, my friends.

I’m not suggesting you stop buying things and unplug your computer. Frankly, I know you don’t have the stones for that. But, while the internet has corrupted our youth, it has also delivered unprecedented power onto the previously useless late-twenties demographic (AKA, the post-Real World relevancy age group). Bloggers, aged and experienced and clever, are becoming tastemakers. Our leaders are Harry Knowles and Obama-Girl. You remember Snakes on a Plane and Howard Dean, right? We did that! That was just a taste!

Yes we can, guys. We can deconstruct the marketing machine that tells us young and pretty and stupid is the best way to go through life. We can derail the next Transformers: Rise of the Fallen with some well-placed snark on the tracks. We can—

Oh shit, Perez Hilton just posted some new cock drawings! Gotta run – see y’all on Facebook!

TTYL

Tagged as: britney spears, facebook, miley cyrus, systematic dumbening