• DOI:10.1080/14649361003774563
• Corpus ID: 144263983

‘The best thing ever’: how children's popular culture matters

@article{Horton2010TheBT,
  title={‘The best thing ever’: how children's popular culture matters},
  author={John Horton},
  journal={Social \& Cultural Geography},
  year={2010},
  volume={11},
  pages={377 - 398}
}

• J. Horton
• Published 21 May 2010
• Sociology
• Social & Cultural Geography

This paper reflects upon a popular cultural event which was, briefly, for a particular grouping of children in the UK, ‘the best thing ever’: namely the release of the CD-single Reach, by the British pop group S Club 7. I suggest that this event was illustrative of manifold cultural forms and practices which—being ostensibly banal, fun, faddish, lowbrow and ‘childish’—continue to go largely unheralded by many social/cultural geographers. Against this grain, this paper presents three apprehensions of S Club 7’s significance. First, I restate a particular case made via Anglo-American cultural studies that ‘children's popular culture’, ought to be taken more seriously in contexts salient to social/cultural geographers. Second, I detail how the S Club 7 phenomenon existed, practically and materially, and mattered, in some children's everyday lives. Third, refracting cultural geographers' recent apprehensions of affective, evental aspects of cultural practices, I suggest that the pop cultural phenomenon described herein mattered (to those children, there and then) in ways which elude and exceed canonical scholarly habits of writing/knowing popular cultural phenomena.