Michaela has been a fan of reality TV shows focused on female entertainers for a while now. I think it started with "Dance Moms: A New Era." Then there was the documentary series about the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Each time we caught her watching these shows we would make a halfhearted attempt to ban them and then were just, like, fuck it. I can't justify this; it's just lazy parenting. Also, she is like a sea turtle: no matter which direction we turn her toward, and we do try to find decent alternatives, she always returns to these shows. They are her ocean.
Then a week or so ago Michaela asked me to watch a new(ish) show with her, Pop Star Academy: Katseye. If this is your first time hearing about Katseye, then you probably aren't in regular contact with a tween. Katseye is a girl band formed via an open call and auditions in the grand tradition of producer-generated girl bands, such as En Vogue or the Spice Girls.
The difference between Katseye and those other bands is that now the stardom pipeline is documented every humiliating step of the way. So in addition to Katseye the band and their music there is also the Netflix show Pop Star Academy, which, based on my admittedly limited viewing, documents an "academy" where extremely talented and very young women—I don't think any of them are legal adults—go through a rigorous training process involving multiple rounds of elimination before the final composition of the group is determined.
Pop Star Academy encapsulates everything I hate and fear: entertainment at its most shallow and exploitative. The girls in Dance Moms, even when they're lashing out at one another, at least have some fight and personality. The girls in the Pop Star Academy are all weirdly alike. They come from different countries and ethnic backgrounds (the concept, I believe, was to create a global group in the model of a K-pop group), but that's the extent of their difference: on screen, at least, their speech and gestures and appearance are eerily similar. I just watched the Wannabe video by the Spice Girls and immediately noted that A) they are clearly adults and B) they have very different body types and none of them are generically pretty.
But the formula still works. The music, the tongue-in-cheek videos: it's all infectiously fun. I suspect that the producers behind Katseye know exactly what they are doing, designing a girl band to appeal to both ten-year-old girls and their geriatric millennial/Gen X moms.*
Maybe there are lessons to be learned from the Pop Star Academy after all.
Once again I must close out before leaving you with some recommendations of things I enjoyed. I have work jobs to attend to! Which is a good thing, we like the work jobs here at Mushroom Head HQ.
Here are few more (hastily scanned and edited) pages from my comic diary:
Til next week, my dears!
Claire
*While researching this I learned that the cartoon girl band HUNTR/X topped the Billboard 100 this year with their hit song Golden, the first girl band to do so since Destiny's Child topped the charts in 2001. I also learned that the cartoon girl band I grew up with, Jem and the Holograms, just released a 40th anniversary album. Fortieth. Anniversary. Album. Now if that's not truly outrageous...
