Boys Will Be Boys: Re-Inhabiting the Homosocial Sphere of Take That
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[PMH 7.2 (2012) 121-126] Popular Music History (print) ISSN 1740-7133 doi:10.1558/pomh.v7i2.121 Popular Music History (online) ISSN 1743-1646 David Sanjek1 Boys will be boys: re-inhabiting the homosocial sphere of Take That Abstract With the expectations of Take That’s fans in mind, as well as those of the band itself, this essay explores the idea of reunion in terms of repetition, change, and evolution. Focusing on tem- porality and temperament, it explores the role our attachments to culture play in our efforts to make sense of our experiences. The paper examines these issues with reference to three poten- tially illuminating investigations: first, the consideration of the depiction of homosocial commu- nities in literature pursued by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick; second, the distinctions made by Bruce Kawin regarding productive and counterproductive uses of time; and third, Frank Kermode’s examination of end-determined fictions and their influence upon how we construct narratives of human behaviour. Keywords: homoromance paradigm; homosocial unit; narrative; repetition; reunion Let me begin by stating that I come to you today neither to defend nor defame Take That. In fact, I entered this dialogue as a complete neophyte, intrigued by the concept of repetition embedded in the phenomenon of the reunion and the inter- personal dynamics inherent in the confederation of the boy band rather than as someone previously acquainted with or disposed to offer a ready opinion about Take That. If we have learned anything about musical history, it is that only a sap ignores what the little girls understand. And said sap only adds to his ineptitude if he fails to consider what transpires when those little girls grow up and experience an inevitable evolution of their infatuations over time. It is, in part, that evolution of infatuation that is to be examined in the study of the Take That reunion, and the ensuing connections between temporality and temperament. Say what you will, the constitution of our affections rarely remains any more stable than the composition of the record charts. Each routinely experi- ences unexpected and unprecedented alterations. Well-worn clichés such as how 1. Editor’s note: David Sanjek, Professor of Popular Music at the University of Salford, died suddenly on 29 November 2011. He had given the opening address at the conference from which the papers constituting this issue were given. After his death only an unfinished version of his talk was found among his papers. However, because of the circumstances, we have decided to include this version here, lightly edited. © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013, Unit S3, Kelham House, 3 Lancaster Street, Sheffield, S3 8AF. 122 Popular Music History popular music in particular provides the soundtrack of our lives attempt to make sense of how even the most mundane of our experiences routinely acquires a form of accompaniment, sometimes without our understanding, or even wishing to understand, how and or why those alliances get established in the first place. One of the determining factors of age seems to be the retrospective desire to comprehend what jump-started those feverish bursts of concentrated plea- sure; what deflates them all of a sudden; and what can, with equal lack of prec- edent, reanimate them with all their initial devastation, and more. In the midst of these acts of contemplation, sometimes we find ourselves chagrined and, pos- sibly, ashamed, to think that we could have ever fallen for something so simple- minded. Other times, we feel altogether invigorated when we re-inhabit those past moments in our lives and mourn whatever transitions now deny them their former privileged place of residence in our consciousness. In effect, each time we replay the culture we associate with our past, we initiate our own reunion not only with that material but also with a portion of ourselves that time certainly has tampered with, perhaps irreparably. Those flashbacks can fly in the face of what we believe to be the current foundations of our personalities, or remind us of just what ingredients went into constructing those foundations many years before. Whatever form of culture triggers this process for us, from the most sophis- ticated material to the most sophomoric, does not matter. What does matter is the role it plays in the effort to achieve some consonance rather than dissonance in the understanding of our experience. The late literary critic Frank Kermode reminds us of how commanding this achievement can be. He writes in The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, ‘in ‘making sense’ of the world we still feel a need, harder than ever to satisfy because of our accumulated scepticism, to experience that concordance of beginning, middle, and end which is the essence of our explanatory fictions’ (Kermode 2000: 35–36). We aim, he believes, for some form of ‘temporal integration’; in effect, ‘a need in a moment of existence to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end’ (46, 4). In order to achieve this goal, we construct what he calls ‘concord-fictions’, a form of narrative organiza- tion that answers to his injunction, ‘For to make sense of our lives from where we are, as it were, stranded in the middle, we need fictions of beginnings and fictions of ends, fictions which unite beginning and end and endow the interval between them with meaning’ (190). I submit to you that there are a significant number of individuals temporarily in Salford at this conference, weaving with all the diligence and urgency of Hom- er’s Penelope these plotlines for themselves as they experience in the form of Take That one of the principal characters in the construction of the story of their lives. And it does not take a great deal of effort to imagine that, in the course of this tour, © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013. Boys will be boys 123 the five men in the group themselves are constructing plotlines relevant to their individual sets of experience. As Jason Orange said in a 2008 interview, ‘Being a good pop band is not just about good pop songs. It’s about a good story… Our story is pretty good’ (Vernon 2008: 42). That narrative now continues. Another set of chapters in being created each night on another stage before another set of mutually engaged narrators. In the remainder of my comments, I want briefly to address two things: first, how Take That enact, in part, a plotline that others have inhabited: the homoso- cial unit of performers, whose lineage I want to trace back to the start of the last century. Second, how the occasion of their reunion can, or cannot, act for its audi- ence as a simple ratification of their past or a reanimation and readjustment of its meaning. To begin, Take That assumes a place in a long line of performance ensem- bles, and more specifically of ensembles composed of young men or individu- als who, regardless of their chronological age, enact the role of young men. The prior examples I want to highlight are from the American tradition, but I’m sure I could come up with others in other cultures, those themselves influenced by the American individuals. Youth itself has persisted as a marketable commercial package, and some of show business’s most celebrated icons began their careers before they concluded, if they in fact possess a diploma, their schooling. One of the best-known and long-lasting of those congregations was started by the cele- brated Tin Pan Alley songwriter Gus Edwards (1879–1945). Following the writing of his classic song ‘School Days’ (1907), he assembled the Kid Kabaret, a congre- gation of some forty boys and girls that held the vaudeville stage for the next two decades. Eddie Cantor, George Jessel and journalist Walter Winchell got their start with Edwards. The film producer Hal Roach piggy-backed on this template with the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, virtually all-male Our Gang, who appeared in short features released from 1922 to 1944. A number of other companies followed in kind with similar groups affiliated with the characters Buster Brown and Mickey McGuire in addition to the collective, the Kiddie Troupers. Such male-dominated or male-exclusive ensembles carried over into feature films, most notably the group of young New Yorkers who performed in Stanley Kingsley’s 1936 hit stage drama Dead End, among them Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall and Billy Halop. They appeared subsequently in the 1937 Sam Goldwyn film adaptation, only to be collectively designated the Dead End Kids and hired by Warner Brothers. Members of the troupe continued in the types of roles established in these vehicles, albeit increas- ingly in a deliberately comedic vein, in a sequence of B-features under the names the East Side Kids, Boys Next Door and, eventually, the Bowery Boys. This last mon- iker attached itself to a sequence of forty-eight features released between 1946 © Equinox Publishing Ltd 2013. 124 Popular Music History and 1958, at which point, it goes without saying, the performers were anything but boys and their salaries and profit percentages had effectively priced them out of any residential affiliation with the Bowery. Roach’s releases on more than one occasion drew attention to their male dominance by the incorporation of a comedic narrative trope, the All Men Woman-Haters Club. This was not so much an illustration of pre-pubescent misogyny as an illustration of what sociologist Jeffery P. Dennis has called the ’homoromance’ paradigm, which he differentiates from an ‘ordinary same-sex friendship, even of the “best friend” variety, in their intensity, intimacy, and exclusivity’ (2007: ix).