Buzznet is to Soap Opera as...

I've been chatting with my friend Shana this morn, and it brought up a point that I wanted to share quite some time ago.

Part of my overarching plan for this blog was to talk about these issues in my head in the light of previous media scholarship. There's a great handful of articles on soap opera fandoms in England and Australia (I'll look up the citations when I get home) that set out a couple of ways that soap operas attract fans and build them into a community. These things are often what female fans told me attracted them to fandom at large.

1. Soaps provide a break from the daily chores, a set time for pleasure. Bands do the same thing, where you substitute "job" for chores. I spend my lunch hour discussing band news and gossip, and it's a welcome hour.

2. Soaps provide a place where the talk of women is valued. Both in the text, because most soaps are driven by plots and talking, instead of action or comedy, and outside of the text, where women have a reason to gather and talk to each other, to use that opening to discuss their lives or their viewpoints with each other.

3. Soaps provide parasocial interaction; viewers form an attachment to the fictional characters within. Not to say that the boys in bands are fictional, but strangers are developing attachments to them. Watching girls fight with words over who gets to pick Brendon Urie as their favorite band boy is just like watching my female relatives debate who was the best of Erica Kane's husbands. (Answer, clearly, Dimitri.)

The Emo Sommelier, on Panic vs. MCR

My friend Nicole pointed me at a really interesting post at Idolator about why The Black Parade is turning up on year end best-ofs and A Fever You Can't Sweat Out isn't. The Emo Sommelier says:

The more interviews I read, the more I realize they must be a pain in the ass to hang out with. Artistry aside, this makes them less likable. If you remember high school, you'll recall that you always resented the kids that took themselves too seriously, regularly pontificating (a word they would use) about their art, their passion, their drive and their music video with the Lucent Dossier Vaudeville Cirque. It's like, dudes, chill out. You're eighteen. Go illustrate a comic book or something.

(In case you're wondering, yes, that last sentence does include a link to info on Gerard Way's forthcoming comic The Umbrella Academy.) His main point is that there is an emo generation gap, that the trailblazers of emo, pushing 30, have very little in common with the 16-year-olds just now discovering it.

The wide divide between Panic! supporters and My Chem enthusiasts indicates that emo bands now come in two varieties: Bands that make us want to feel like we're eighteen again, and bands that remind us that being eighteen actually sucked really hard.

Then we chatted about the piece:
Nicole: But it's true, there is a gap, and that's probably a good indicator of why the nudge-wink schtick doesn't work on older folks. We already know that being eighteen and knowing everything there is to know is a falsehood and impossibility, and a new crop of kids can't convince us otherwise. It makes me wonder what these bands will think of their early work down the road.

Sarah: I think they'll still quite like it. The winking is new. The winking is from a culture completely different than the one that existed when Static Prevails and even Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge came out. This is a world now where emo is the thing. The most popular girl at school listens to emo. Hell, The OC embraced emo. Lindsay effing Lohan is going to Panic shows. It's a completely different world for them. Their music isn't like that because they're young, it's because this is how they grew up. Does that make sense? They're never going to turn out an album like Bleed American or The Devil and God. They'll probably churn out a copy The Black Parade, but it will be about the perils of fame or something.

Nicole: Hmmm. I wonder if the winking is new in general or new in emo, specifically. Well, it definitely is the latter. The guys crying their eyes out about last goodbyes and kisses in The Juliana Theory weren't smirking about it after the recording stopped, that's for sure. I guess in the "reality" age, everything is sort of tongue-in-cheek because it has to be; you have to recognize and push your own irony in order for said irony to be appreciated. And then everyone wants to be in on it. Even the cheerleaders!

hi, how are you

I suppose that it would make sense, at the outset, to explain why I'm here and what I'm doing.

Hmm. This sounds boring.

My name is Sarah Walker. I live in New York City and all higher education left me with is a master's degree and a taste for sociology, more specifically, the sociology of fans.

I've been watching the emo/scene movement for a little while now, and I hit upon the brilliant(ly stupid) idea of writing an academic paper on themes of sexuality in the culture surrounding Panic! at the Disco. My friends, who are very smart, looked at me like I was crazy. Like they don't sometimes want to write academic papers for fun.

Instead, I started this. I plan on posting every so often, tying old research and new experiences to the emo landslide that's got the young people all excited. And I'd love to hear your thoughts too. Don't be shy!