Beatlemaniacs, Beliebers, Directioners —
why do they scream?
By Chris Richards
in the Washington Post
When One Direction
and 5 Seconds of Summer perform at Nationals Park next
month, you’ll have to squint your ears to hear the boy bands’ hits amid a more
ancient and fascinating sound: the emptying of adolescent lungs.
Obviously, there
will be screaming — high-decibel, high-pitch swells that push hard on the
eardrums and then harder, toward the surreal. It’s an abstract sound that JC
Chasez has had years to ponder as a member of the multi-platinum juggernaut ’N Sync.
But putting the power of that communal wail into words still isn’t easy.
“Sound is energy,”
Chasez says. “And the entire room is producing sound, not just the people
onstage, so when the entire room is resonating with every human being
producing, it’s a very exciting feeling.”
Surely. But what’s
behind that feeling? Why do young women assembled at pop concerts express their
collective ecstasy with the most alarming sound available to their bodies? Why
do they scream?
In some ways,
today’s young fans are simply imitating the ritualized shrieks of the
generations that preceded them, from the Beatlemaniacs to the Beliebers. And
while today’s tween screams aren’t reserved exclusively for young male
heartthrobs, concerts by Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift don’t seem to
generate quite the same sonic fervor as a performance from One Direction or Ed Sheeran.
Since the
splashdown of Elvis Presley in 1956, the American media has often characterized
the din of young female fans gathered in the presence of a pop idol as
“hysteria” — “a description that denigrates their musical engagement,”
according to a 2003 article written by Australian researcher
Sarah Baker.
“Not only do these
screaming, crushing bodies animate these [performance] spaces,” Baker writes,
“but they also make the pop experience feel intensely real for both the girls
involved and the wider public.”
So when the lights
go down at a 21st century boy band revue, we aren’t hearing a helpless,
hysteric howl.
We’re hearing a
complex expression of individualism and collectivity — perhaps with a dash of
Darwin thrown in.
The loud crowd
Sociologists have
different names for different types of crowds. The noisy throngs at a pop
concert qualify as an “expressive crowd” — a gathering in which the
participants are given implicit permission to abandon decorum and freak out.
“When men cry at a
sports event, it’s very similar” to the screaming that takes place at a One
Direction concert, says author Rachel Simmons. “It wouldn’t be okay for men to
do that anywhere else. But the sporting event sanctions that behavior.”
Simmons is the
author of “The Curse of the
Good Girl,” a book in which she argues that young women are unfairly
asked to squeeze into an impossible mold of politeness and modesty. Simmons
says a concert is a unique event that gives girls the rare opportunity to break
out of those roles.
“In their day-to-day,
non-concert-going lives, girls don’t have a lot of permission to scream,” she
says. “A concert offers an oasis from the daily rules about being good girls.
Screaming is about letting go and leaving the confines of being the
self-conscious pleaser.”
That’s one way to
explain why so many concerts are filled with screaming girls instead of
screaming boys.
“Screaming is a way
to control a situation,” says Michelle
Janning, a professor of sociology at Whitman College
in Walla Walla, Wash. “When you’re a kid, and a girl, you don’t have
control. Young people don’t have a loud voice in society, so screaming in this
kind of space is a way to have a voice. Literally.”
Janning also
believes that girls have felt an expectation to scream ever since Beatlemania
spread across the land in 1964. “We’re constantly being socialized to see
crowds of girls screaming at rock stars,” Janning says. “So we’re following the
crowd, doing what we’ve seen other people do. But we also want to stand out as
individuals.”
Both Janning and
Simmons agree that concert screaming ultimately provides girls a chance to
express their individuality while reinforcing their place in the larger group.
And it can also be a place for competition.
“Adolescent girls
are really invested in the acceptance of their peers,” Simmons says. “But
there’s a competitive element to fandom and fan-girling — and screaming is an
expression of that fandom. So girls are doing it not only to assert their
passion for the band, but to compete with each other and to signal to each
other that, ‘This is what I care about.’ It’s part competition, but partly a
way to connect. During adolescence for girls, that’s a very complex and
important drive.”
Chasez of
’N Sync says he’s seen that competitive connection manifest through
fascinating displays of vocal teamwork.
The screams that
most frequently caught the singer’s attention onstage during ‘N Sync’s heyday
often came from “groups of three or four,” Chasez says. “They’d be holding
hands and jumping up and down, screaming together.”
Whether it’s an
expression of excitement or pleasure or anguish, screaming is ultimately a form
of communication — and its fundamental message is almost always the same: “Over
here!”
Harold Gouzoules,
chairman of the psychology department at Emory University outside Atlanta,
recently began studying human screams after years of studying
how rhesus monkeys use screams to communicate.
Now Gouzoules is
compiling an audio library of human screams and asking his research subjects to
try to discern between screams of joy, excitement, surprise, fear, pain,
aggression and exasperation. So far, his subjects have been pretty good at it,
partially because screaming seems to transcend culture.
“We scream as a
species,” Gouzoules says. “Evolutionarily, it probably came about as a way to
startle a predator. But as [humans] developed socially, you get a greater
complexity of interaction, and screams could serve a function within a social
group.”
During childhood,
the effectiveness of our screaming is often reinforced through play. “I can
imagine ancestral humans screaming the same way we see kids playing in the back
yard today,” says Gouzoules.
And that playful
way of being noticed is something Gouzoules says can be traced back to public
events that predate the rise of the Beatles, Elvis and Frank Sinatra.
“If you got back to
Nazi rallies in the ’30s, when Hitler was rising to prominence, there are
historical accounts that young women were screaming,” Gouzoules says. “There’s
something about that kind of social event — there’s excitement being generated
by somebody who has power or authority. . . . And those
screams are attention-getting. That’s how they serve monkeys. That’s how they
serve us a lot of the time.”
But somewhere
between childhood and adulthood, those screams cool into shouts, cheers and
other forms of hollering we see more commonly in the expressive crowd.
For reunited boy
bands, though, the scream will always be the barometer of success.
“You have to know
how to bring every side of the building to the same decibel level,” says Michael Bivins, the
45-year-old vocalist currently on tour with the reunited ’80s boy band New
Edition. “It’s scientific, in a sense. If there isn’t screaming, there’s
disappointment.”
In the summer of
2014 — nearly 30 years after the release of the group’s signature hit, “Cool It Now”
— New Edition’s original fans are now middle-aged, but they’re still coming out
to see the band in concert. The ritual maintains its shape, even if it sounds a
little different.
“Their voices are
bigger!” Bivins says. “But it’s still the same feeling. They’re screaming for
the same parts they were screaming for when we were kids.”
Staff researchers
Eddy Palanzo and Magda Jean-Louis contributed to this report.
Chris Richards became the Washington Post's
pop music critic in 2009. He has covered D.I.Y. house shows, White House
concerts, go-go and Gaga.
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