TeenSet, Teen Fan Magazines, and Rock Journalism
TeenSet, Teen Fan Magazines, and Rock Journalism
Don't Let the Name Fool You
Since the magazine’s first issue in 1964, TeenSet’s role in popular music journalism has been overlooked and underappreciated. Teen fan magazines, often written by women and assumed to be read only by young girls, have been misconstrued by scholars and journalists to lack “seriousness” in their coverage of popular music. TeenSet, Teen Fan Magazines, and Rock Journalism: Don’t Let the Name Fool You disputes the prevailing conception that teen fan magazines are insignificant and elevates the publications to their proper place in popular music history.
Analyzing TeenSet across its five-year publication span, Allison Bumsted shows that the magazine is an important artifact of 1960s American popular culture. Through its critical commentary and iconic rock photography, TeenSet engaged not only with musical genres and scenes, but also broader social issues such as politics, race, and gender. These countercultural discourses have been widely overlooked due to a generalization of teen fan magazines, which have wrongly presumed the magazine to be antithetical to rock music and as unimportant to broader American culture at the time.
Bumsted also examines the leadership of editor Judith Sims and female TeenSet staff writers such as Carol Gold. By offering a counternarrative to leading male-oriented narratives in music journalism, she challenges current discourses that have marginalized women in popular music history. Ultimately, the book illustrates that TeenSet and teen fan magazines were meaningful not only to readers, but also to the broader development of the popular music press and 1960s cultural commentary.
Allison Bumsted offers readers a compelling narrative about women within the 1960s music scene and how their agency and presence of mind—particularly that of TeenSet’s remarkable editor Judith Sims—were key to documenting the emergent rock culture of this dynamic decade. Indeed, the story of Sims and TeenSet offers a unique bird’s-eye view of the impact and influence female music writers had before the masculinization of rock journalism took hold. This book is a must-read for anyone interested in better understanding women’s involvement in popular culture during the 1960s and beyond.
As a teenaged fan of DIG magazine and a contributor to TeenSet before joining Rolling Stone, I applaud Allison Bumsted’s deep dive into the teen publications of yesteryear and their coverage of music and pop culture. She gives overdue credit to Judith Sims, TeenSet’s editor, one of several fab (and female) pioneer editors of magazines that spoke to a new generation. As Bumsted notes, Sims had the most important qualification to oversee TeenSet: she loved music.
TeenSet, Teen Fan Magazines, and Rock Journalism draws readers into the journey of teenaged fans and teen magazines, capturing the energy and excitement of the phenomenon’s early days, as well as the manner in which it exerted significant cultural power during its heyday.
Bumsted’s deep dive into the history of teen magazines and rock journalism offers a much-needed corrective to conventional wisdom. Essential reading for anyone interested in ’60s pop culture and its vast, ongoing impact.
Allison Bumsted teaches humanities at Austin Community College. Her work has been published in the Journal of Beatles Studies and the edited volume Words, Music, and the Popular: Global Perspectives on Intermedial Relations. She has also appeared on many Beatles podcasts such as Something about the Beatles and Another Kind of Mind.
