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Notes -
Elvis's rabid teenage fans grew up to be his rabid thirty-plus female fans (and his remaining rabid 80+ female fans who sustain SirusXM's Elvis channel). Same goes for Swift; she's not a teenybopper anymore; she was famously born in 1989 making her 35 years old.
Possibly this was less obvious in the days of “live fast, die young”.
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But that's actually my question - in the 1970s, were there actually any unmarried childless women in their thirties showing up to Elvis gigs and literally fainting with excitement?
Sorry, when referring to Taylor Swift as a teenybopper I meant that her music's primary target demographic is and always has been teenage girls, not that she herself is a teenager.
In a word, yes.
I mean, do you have any evidence to support this claim?
Do you have any reason to doubt? I couldn't, without significant effort, produce specific evidence of this. And my experience with "citation needed" is no citation will be accepted anyway. But here's something in the ballpark.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Elvis/comments/xhef68/on_december_31st_1975_elvis_performed_the_largest/
That was needlessly rude. "There's no point providing evidence for my factual claims, because even if I do you people won't believe me anyway" seems profoundly out of keeping with the ethos of this space.
Maybe, but that doesn't make it false.
My claim was that celebrity mania in adults was nothing new. You responded with the very specific and hard to verify claim that no over-30, unmarried, childless women were fainting at Elvis Presley concerts in the 1970s. Having been around in the 1970s, I'm fairly certain that's not true; I know for certain that many of Presley's earlier, older, fans were still going to those concerts, but I can't verify that they included unmarried childless women nor that any of the latter fainted. Probably a search of newspapers at the time would either verify this or fail to do so, but that would be considerable work. But if I found such a report, I feel the chances are good the goalposts would move again.
What are you basing this accusation on?
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This is obviously false, though. Her primary target demographic, throughout her career, has been, “people of roughly the same age as Taylor Swift.” As she has aged, her fanbase has aged along with her, and her lyrical subject matter has evolved concurrently. Yes, many girls who are currently teenage are into Taylor Swift, but she doesn’t have the cachet among that demographic that she did 10 years ago, and the majority of people at her shows are millennials, none of whom are currently teenaged.
That's fair. I guess from a compositional standpoint, what little of her music I'm familiar with screams "pop for teenaged girls" for me, even the more recent stuff, even if the lyrical content is more mature than one would expect of pop for teenaged girls.
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I think there is something different in a lot of these areas in that the fans of (insert Taylor Swift, LEGO, Star Wars, Marvel, Funko Pops, Video Games etc) would probably still have been fans in the past, at least to some extent, but due to trends around marriage and having kids, instead of listening to a radio station or going to a movie or whatever they have high levels of disposable income and time to spend on their hobbies that would otherwise be spent on children.
I personally see this as net negative for society, others might see it as net positive, but I think it is hard to argue it is not happening.
It's not that it's not happening. It's that it's not new. Video games are kind of the exception, but the idea that they were ever just for children never really solidified; the Boomers (except the youngest) pretty much played them ONLY as adults if they played them, and every generation since never stopped playing.
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