The Boys (and Girls) Are Back in Town

Nine-year-old Phylicia Dryer wants to be a pop star. Growing up in a music industry that has no qualms about the ethics of exploiting the very young, Phylicia's dreams of becoming the next Britney Spears may only be a hop, skip and breast implant away. As the youngest member of BreZe, a pre-teen pop-music foursome dubbed the Spice Babies (their combined age is 41), Phylicia already has Bill Kimber (who discovered Eurythmics) as her manager, as well as a share of a $1.5 million contract with Warner Brothers. She's tipped to be the biggest thing in pre-teen pop since Aaron Carter, little brother of the Backstreet Boy Nick Carter.

Together, youngsters like Dryer and Carter represent the growing movement of tweenie pop music that has begun to creep up through the ranks of singles charts across the world. Comfortably situated in the competitive world of late-'90s pop music, pre-teen pop seeks to satisfy the multitudes of braces wearing, Pokmon card-hoarding kiddies for whom the Backstreet Boys and Britney are just not enough.

As miniatures of their love ballad singing adult counterparts, pre-teen acts such as BreZe and Aaron Carter offer its listeners cheese-fried pop music that is thoroughly ridden with the fingerprints of a teen marketing-machine. Highly fabricated and mechanically produced with a pervasive blend of Backstreet Bop and Color Me Badd hip-hop doo-wop, pre-teen pop follows closely the recipes for commercialized music and suceeds marvelously at achieving lyrical triviality.

Aaron and BreZe, however, are only the headliners of pre-teen pop; a great many other agent-dependent, pre-pubescent boys and girls are being recruited and transformed into pop stars by record companies around the world. In Bangkok, 12-year-old half-Scottish, half-Indonesian Anan Anwar is shooting to the top of the charts with hits "Go To School" and "Simon Says." Triple Shake and Best Frenz are two more pop creations whose members are too young to see PG-13 movies but old enough to suggestively sway their underdeveloped hips.

Although most record companies who have mustered their forces behind pre-teen acts hope that kids will want to buy records from pop stars no older themselves, some in the industry argue that nine- and ten-year-old kids are too young to be involved in the entertainment business. Even those with a rudimentary sense of pop music history could probably come up with a litany of names of child stars who went on to lead shattered lives. Take the calamitous life of Michael Jackson for example. When the Jackson Five first began touring in 1962, Jackie was 11, Tito was nine, Jermaine was eight, Marlon was five and Michael was only four. Although Michael Jackson reached unparalleled solo superstardom after his Jackson Five days, his early inception into the world of celebrity cost him more than his personal life; it cost him his childhood. Jackson has said, "I'd see children playing in the park and I'd cry because I had to go to work."

Citing the tragedies that have befallen children of pop in the past critics of teeny weenie bopper music complain that the music industry forces young kids to play roles for which they are not ready. Such critics argue that no child is capable of managing the stresses and strains of the notoriously fickle industry, and that to encourage young boys and girls to pursue pop-stardom on the road borders on child abuse. The early death of Patrick Waite from '80s pre-teen group Musical Youth (of "Pass the Dutchie" fame) is a prime example.

Or consider Frankie Lymon, a major child star in the 1950s with such hits as "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" His numerous failed marriages and drug habit (a habit which ultimately led to his early death at the age of 25) were tragic enough to be the subject of a movie (1998's mawkish Why Do Fools Fall in Love?).

No matter the ethics involved in pre-teen pop, children around the world still stand in front of their mirrors with pretend-microphones in their hands and dreams of stardom on their minds. Little Aaron Carter is ready to become as big as his brother Nick, and with his adult teeth finally growing in and his sprite blond hair newly cut, he is ready to be more than just "the little prince of pop." But whether his early fame will be an asset or a liability remains to be seen.