SUGABROS

If you asked me 20 years ago that I would be more excited about the Sugababes reuniting than the next Star Wars movie, I would have said, "Who are the Sugababes?"

When I was younger, my musical taste was incredibly insular.

If you do not know, I co-host a podcast about the British girl group the Sugababes. Every week for 14 weeks, a friend and I argued the merits of the group's first album, one track at a time.

I always considered myself open-minded, but doing a podcast about a British girl band has been a mind-expanding experience. 

While there were things I got into - like musicals and Audrey Hepburn movies - that I stuck with, most of the media I consumed as a teen and twenty-something was more concerned with action and violence. Not to say that these things are not consumed by a variety of people, but I was definitely in the camp that the things I was interested in - no matter how silly they were - were somehow worth more than the things that my sister was in.

This is not a new phenomenon - pop culture has always been framed into ridiculously gendered terms. A good example is romantic comedies - aside from a few examples, the genre is generally talked down and regarded as, at best, a diversion, and at worst, terrible.  

It really boils down to the way men talk about pop culture aimed at an audience that is not them - while I was aware of this framework, recording Sugabros was the first time I really considered it as a part of my own thinking.  

Listening to the Sugababes is one thing - talking about them has been something completely different. Listening back to the recordings during the editing process was somewhat embarrassing and humbling. 

Listening to the way I talked about the band and the songs, I began to notice the way that the language and framing I used to describe and evaluate the music was stepped in the same misogynistic framing that I have seen used to dismiss this kind of music. Even as a fan, I was still funnelling my enjoyment and engagement with the music through the prism that it was intrinsically a lesser art form.

While this process was extremely humbling AND embarrassing - it ended up being a real benefit to the podcast. I would not speak for my co-host, but I personally found that I was re-positioning myself in relation to the music, so that I was not trying to make some kind of allowance to the idea that girl bands are garbage.

By the end of the first season, the whole premise of the show began to formulate into something neither of us had anticipated. This process continued while we were recording Season Two. In fact, I would say that the format has been thrown out. This has been a good thing: The initial concept was incredibly limited in terms of discussing the songs and the group, and it was also rooted in a particularly sexist notions of 'good music'. 

I cannot say wether we have fully escaped that mindset, but it is a present and ongoing part of our discussion in the show. 

If you are interested, here are links to the various episodes in Season One. 

1. Overload
2. One Foot In
3. Same Old Story
4. Just Let It Go
5. Look At Me
6. Soul Sound
7. One Touch
8. Lush Life
9. Real Thing
10. New Year
11. Promises
12. Run For Cover
13. B-Sides
14. Finale

Season Two of the SugaBros will begin on 1 June.