Obsession With teeth
Written by Zofia Rose
Image courtesy of Bloom Print Club
Walking to a magazine stand, sitting through hours of MTV, hand-coded fan sites, bootlegging songs and passing them to your friends, long lines outside record stores, calling a phone line for concert tickets: obsession was a pilgrimage.
“Walking to a magazine stand, sitting through hours of MTV, hand-coded fan sites, bootlegging songs and passing them to your friends, long lines outside record stores, calling a phone line for concert tickets: obsession was a pilgrimage.”
Obsessions with a pop star, a movie franchise, a hot rising actor were fascinations, something out of reach, barely there, shiny and sexy. You had to work hard to be part of a club, a fandom. These clubs were exclusive, and if you wanted to be admitted you had to get crafty. You couldn’t repost your favourite artists’ new album cover, gone in 24 hours, it had to be sellotaped to your closet door, a pin badge on your backpack.
Adoring something had texture. It smelled like fresh magazine ink, and the new cheap body spray sponsored by a pop band. There was no compensation for watching MTV, your finger hovering over the record button, but it was worth it the next day. Collages climbed the walls. Sticker covered diaries filled with ticket stubs and written over in gel pen, stored under beds. Bedrooms weren’t just decorated, they were manifestos, and they had to be noticed.
Back then, girlhood existed in its rawest form: loud, emotional, pure devotion. Girls up and down the street were practically cult leaders. Entire belief systems consisted of who your favourite Spice Girl was. It wasn’t just the glamorous, Hollywood, hard-to-reach things we became obsessed with. There was also an obsession with privacy, and crushes, friendships and breakups. These things were stockpiled in carefully crafted boxes and pages in a diary entry about hating your mother next to a cut out of heartthrob Di Caprio in another movie.
Britney girls & Destiny's Child disciples: Butterfly clips and frosted lip gloss. Bedazzled belts and hoop earrings. Dance routines performed with Olympic-level seriousness. Punk girls donning their fishnets, carrying torn copies of Kerrang, indie girls with home cut bangs and thrifted docs, scene girls that were never seen without jet black locks or lyrics in their MSN messenger username.
It’s widely thought, mainly by adults or men, that these things are contrived, or shallow. But complexity ran through each choice made. There was chaos, there was chase! Everything came with a choice, and once you made it, it was hard to change your mind after the effortful hours proving yourself to fellow fan girls in your school or around the world. Convenience was not a hot commodity because subcultures were ecosystems built from scratch, and every girl found her corner and decorated it with fierce loyalty. With your walls, with your pencil case, with your band tees and with your hair cut.
Nostalgia porn is becoming a frequently used term. The constant yearning, the frequent looking back, does not reflect a lack of imagination in young artists, it is simply the build up to a new obsession. Girls have always been experts at turning interests into joy and identity. We still bond over hyperfixations, we still make playlists, and fall in love with aesthetics. That feeling hasn’t disappeared, it just looks different now. It’s louder, it's faster, it’s widely connected. There are discord servers to engage with fans from all over the world, get inspiration from Apple Music playlists and Pinterest boards. The saved folder is a cultural archive, shopping is a mood board. Instead of collages on walls, we have edits. Girls aren’t just watching things, they’re remixing it, creating their own unique masterpiece.
“The constant yearning, the frequent looking back, does not reflect a lack of imagination in young artists, it is simply the build up to a new obsession. Girls have always been experts at turning interests into joy and identity. We still bond over hyperfixations, we still make playlists, and fall in love with aesthetics. That feeling hasn’t disappeared, it just looks different now.”
Obsession has survived every update. Girls transform and transcend‘ trends.’ Girls own them.
The one thing we all crave is obsession with teeth.
