Tween Pop

In the early years of the twenty-first century the US music industry created a new market for tweens selling music that was cooler than Barney but that still felt safe for children. In <i>Tween Pop</i> Tyler Bickford traces the dramatic rise of the tween music industry showing how it marshaled childishness as a key element in legitimizing children's participation in public culture. The industry played on long-standing gendered and racialized constructions of childhood as feminine and white-both central markers of innocence and childishness. In addition to Kidz Bop <i>High School Musical</i> and the Disney Channel's music programs Bickford examines Taylor Swift in relation to girlhood and whiteness Justin Bieber's childish immaturity and Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana and postfeminist discourses of work-life balance. In outlining how tween pop imagined and positioned childhood as both intimate and public as well as a cultural identity to be marketed to Bickford demonstrates the importance of children's music to core questions of identity politics consumer culture and the public sphere.