It’s been a minute since ‘Tiger Beat’ was the topic of discussion, four years since Jaida Aneese came through to talk about her Teeny Bopper Crush on none other than a Gen Z favorite, Justin Bieber. Of course, I’ve likely mentioned the publication here and there before and after that, but this week it’s all about the actual magazine.
Well, all of those magazines. The foundation of this podcast could be traced back to the pandemic, boredom, and a need to create – but I also think that long before terms like “social distancing” and “COVID-19” were part of our everyday vernacular, Crushgasm was brewing in the back of my mind as I sat in my bedroom pouring over the glossy layouts via teen magazines. So with that in mind, I set out to talk to someone who worked at one of them, and low and behold – Anne Raso. We’ll talk more about it to her when her episode drops. Until then, let’s get into why ‘Tiger Beat’ and all those other teen magazines were crucial to not only Crushgasm but the tween experience as a whole.
If you clicked any of the links above, you already went to the previous piece I wrote about this very subject. The reason why I love teen magazines, and how the pictures within them helped me transform my room and make me feel comfortable at times when perhaps that wasn’t the case. Not to get too sappy, but I do get a little emotional thinking back to how simple life was when all was just about a $3.99 magazine, the TGIF lineup, and perhaps a pizza from Little Caesars. It was during those simpler times that my mind started to go from a kid into something to a preteen on the verge of something new; extreme fandom.
Before the teen magazines were a must for me, I was a casual reader of them. JTT and Devon Sawa were cute enough to make me pick up a copy here and there, but, again, by 5th grade I was in love with Nick Carter from Backstreet Boys and to not have every magazine he was in, it literally felt like I’d die if I didn’t have them all. They were my Pokemon and I had to catch them all – and I often did. Well, as much as $20 could get me on a biweekly basis. In the ‘90s, you could stretch a $20 way further than you can now. I can’t imagine being a fangirl in today’s world.
Which, let’s switch to the present really quickly because when I first wrote about this, those types of magazines were still trying. BTS urged fans towards printed materials, but like all boy bands – they came and went from the spotlight, and that was really the last time I saw magazines like that; the multi-pictured covers with vibrant colors and lame, but effective captions that would make 12-year-old’s head turn. Perhaps one or two are still around, but ‘Tiger Beat?’ They closed their doors in 2019, and it was a sad day for all the teeny boppers who once spent whatever they had on it.
Being a fan today means following your favs online via social media, which has its benefits and drawbacks. Fanatics have always had an unusual way of creating a parasocial relationship with their favorites. I’m sure even Mozart and those other composers had their fair share of fans who thought they were besties when in reality they knew nothing about them. Teen magazines made fans believe they could connect with Justin Timberlake or Jordan Knight because of the little blurbs they read here and there back in the day. Today? Fans haven’t changed much. They’re still believing these things, it’s just they’ve – to me – dived even further off the deep end of delusion because social media tricks the mind into believing everything posted is 1. Personal and 2. Specifically for them.
Yes, some artists are very open with their fanbase, but others like Taylor Swift and Beyonce have some of the most particularly curated content that some of their fans have high-jumped off the aforementioned deep end. I can’t judge though because fandoms be like that. It’s just gotten out of hand with social media.
A major drawback though, to me, when it comes to little to no teen magazines like ‘Tiger Beat’ is the loss of room decor. There’s something beautiful to me about walking into someone’s space and knowing their personality in an instant. I’m not talking about a trendy thing seen on TikTok, I’m talking about actual interests. I want to see art on the wall, be it a framed piece or a picture torn from a magazine and tacked to the wall haphazardly. They say you shouldn’t judge people by this and that, but I immediately get a sense of who someone is by their space. So I’m stuck wondering how kids these days express themselves in the real world to their peers, or are they so focused on their phone and what’s happening online, that they don’t even understand what it means to express oneself in their rooms? Are their rooms just the four walls that have outlets to charge their beloved phones?
This subject obviously sends me spiraling, so I’ll leave it at that so I don’t continue down this path and get into why the internet has all but deleted the idea of childhood and certain experiences that normalize being young in this world. It’s sad, really. For now, I will leave you with this, teen magazines were once viewed as valuable currency in the fandom realms, but have since become ancient relics for older Gen Z and all that came before them to look back on as a crucial piece to their obsessed fan ways. I wish they still existed but hey, I could say the same about mall hangs, lengthy phone calls, and computer rooms.
Crushgasm 