Have
you ever felt embarrassed by things that you used to like?
Like most pre-adolescent girls I also went through a boy band phase. Being the 12 year old hipster that I was, I didn't like the big bands like One Direction. I was obsessed with the smaller Big Time Rush. One Direction was and still is (kind of) the large multi-million modern British pop invasion. They had their faces in every magazine, life-size cardboard cut-outs, and world tours. Even grown women were fawning over them. By the time they were twenty they had released four #1 albums. Big Time Rush was like the more tamed and less successful second cousin. Big Time Rush (or BTR as the people who talked about them all the time on the internet and deemed it a waste of time to spell out the whole name called it) was formed by Nickelodeon for their new TV show, also called Big Time Rush. The show told the story of four friends from Minnesota who move to Hollywood to become a singing group.
I first stumbled across them while on vacation. My grandparents, while lovely people, are old. Old people take a lot of naps. Stuck inside the house on a 114 degree day in an unfamiliar city, I resigned myself to watching television. After SpongeBob rerun where he joins a jellyfish colony, there appeared on the screen the faces of four teenage boys with floppy hair and incredibly intriguing eyes. I was convinced they were calling to me.
They were living the dream. They were living my dream. Their life seemed so glamorous with all the interviews and the fame. I didn’t just want to be their fan, I wanted to be their friend. And so I attempted to connect myself with them in every way that I could. I never missed an episode, followed them on every social media, and listened to their album on repeat on my pink iPod shuffle. I begged my parents to buy me tickets to their concert in Chicago. They didn’t believe my love was real. And like all phases, the effect wore off over time. I slowly integrated different kinds of music into my playlist and un-liked them on Facebook.
I’m not just embarrassed because the music was bad or the lyrics were cliché or my brother made fun of me and now I realize he was right and I was wrong or because I spent my whole allowance on their merchandise or I believed the staged TV show was their real life. I’m embarrassed because this is the first time everyone told me not to do something and I did it anyway. Here is where I first started to become an individual and I wasted what should have been a grand and climatic moment that I would be proud of the rest of my life on four boys in their twenties who were being paid to look pretty and extract money from other pre-teen girls just like me. In trying to be different I became exactly like other people. That’s embarrassing.
