Naming something helps to bring it into being, so all the Fifties songs about teens and teenagers reinforced the nexus between youth, music and money. Hence the emergence after 1945 of songs about what it is to be a teenager, with all that adolescent angst and potential purchasing power. If there are any Charlestons about acne or swing tunes about school, I haven't found them.Īs teenage marketing was more seriously pursued during the Second World War, it became to some degree self-conscious.
In the 1920s and the 1930s, before the terms 'teenage' and 'youth culture' were coined, the sheer energy and - to adults - atonal noise of hot jazz was enough to demarcate the generation line. So, if you're going to sell music to teenagers, it seems fairly obvious that that music should contain qualities that will appeal to adolescents. Since its full inception at the end of the Second World War, the teenage market has relied on music as one of its biggest hooks: indeed the very existence of the teenage market was predicated, to some degree, on the manic crowd scenes that greeted appearances by the Benny Goodman Orchestra and Frank Sinatra. 'You are the bosses of the business.' The editors of Seventeen had done their research: estimating that there was a youth market out there worth $75 million, they produced the first modern era magazine that helped to usher in the era of the teenager.
Y ou dictate to everyone in music,' Seventeen magazine told its young female readers in September 1944.
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