The best thing ever

How Children's Popular Culture Matters

Bibliographic Data

ID3977326
AuthorsJohn Horton (0000-0002-2956-2264, Centre for Children and Youth, The University of Northampton, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume11
Issue4
Pages377-398
Publication date2010-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial & Cultural Geography (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-9365 • E-ISSN: 1470-1197
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/14649361003774563
OpenAlexW2027458401
LanguageEN
Citations received29
References cited47

This paper reflects upon a popular cultural event which was, briefly, for a particular grouping of children in the UK, 'the best thing ever': namely the release of the CD-single Reach, by the British pop group S Club 7. I suggest that this event was illustrative of manifold cultural forms and practices which—being ostensibly banal, fun, faddish, lowbrow and 'childish'—continue to go largely unheralded by many social/cultural geographers. Against this grain, this paper presents three apprehensions of S Club 7's significance. First, I restate a particular case made via Anglo-American cultural studies that 'children's popular culture', ought to be taken more seriously in contexts salient to social/cultural geographers. Second, I detail how the S Club 7 phenomenon existed, practically and materially, and mattered, in some children's everyday lives. Third, refracting cultural geographers' recent apprehensions of affective, evental aspects of cultural practices, I suggest that the pop cultural phenomenon described herein mattered (to those children, there and then) in ways which elude and exceed canonical scholarly habits of writing/knowing popular cultural phenomena

Aesthetics · Art · Club · Cultural geography · Cultural phenomenon · Cultural practice · Epistemology · Media studies · Phenomenon · Popular culture · Salient · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Children's Rights and Participation · Cultural Studies · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Rural development and sustainability

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