Since the magazine’s first issue in 1964,
Teen Set’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.
Teen Set, 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
Teen Set 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,
Teen Set 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
Teen Set 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
Teen Set 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.

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