There is a very huge possibility that people in their late twenties to mid-thirties find anything that is popular now a little baffling. No, boys and girls, we don’t get your duckface Facebook profile pictures. We don’t get why some of you have Justin Bieber haircuts. We don’t understand how you like hanging out with your iPad more than other kids at age five. These are just general observations though. For those of us who right now are exactly 30, or a year on either side, there are more specific concerns: Whatever happened to the quality of entertainment for tweens and teens? And more importantly, why are teens and tweens okay with the over-processed, synthesized everything they’re being fed in the name of music and movies? Get up, stand up, stand up for your right to intelligent content! Or, you know, just shut up and watch some Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

The teen movie

The teen movie has always been a huge phenomenon, and we could go on about cashing in on a demographic as contributing to the genre’s success, but the answer is simple: Teen movies are the best kind of fluff. We’ll still watch anything from the golden era of teen movies also known as the ‘90s, and this could just be a ‘90s child bias, but those movies were good! Of course we can step back to the ‘80s too.

The Breakfast Club (1985)

Let’s just call John Hughes the king of all teen movies, and hold up ‘85’s The Breakfast Club as a shining example of a great film for those angst-ridden years. Whether you’re a troublemaker or a straight-A student or a misfit, The Breakfast Club is kind of an optimistic day in the life of clique-crossover. The great thing about a script such as the one for TBC is that these are characters, qualities, and situations we will forever find in the world, or within ourselves. Unless there is a possibility that 18-year-old glittery vampires will soon take over the world. In that case, show us the way to the next zombie apocalypse.

10 Things I Hate About You (1999)

This is the film that gave us the young feminist with unruly hair. True, Julia Stiles set a stereotype for ‘smart’ girls, but 10 Things I Hate About You also gave us Heath Ledger, and the fab idea to publicly serenade girls who are otherwise unapproachable. Actually, did that not come with ‘89’s Say Anything? Can someone please see the romance in holding up a boom box playing something sweet outside their crush’s house and steal the move already (in this day and age)? Please tell us how it goes, and also refrain from playing songs that are 80 per cent made up of the words, ‘baby, baby, baby, oh’. The ‘90s were generally a time where directors did try to step it up a bit and adapted everything written by Shakespeare to teen-speak and then cast Julia Stiles as the lead. We had Les Liaisons dangereuses turn into a dark (for that time) tale about rich, urban teens in Cruel Intentions. Actually, the ‘90s teen movie, apart from the Julia Stiles tough-but-vulnerable girl character had another staple: Freddie Prinze Jr. That alone wins the battle, but for the sake of further polemic, ‘90s teen movies include a tremendous work of cinema called Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead. Checkmate.

The Twilight Saga (2009)

Of course you may argue that the sweet romance found in ‘99s Never Been Kissed was in fact a little disturbing and may have encouraged student-teacher relationships, but Josie Geller was actually 25, and you know what? That is definitely more ethical than a 198-year-old vampire macking on a 17-year-old. Twilight may not be everything that is wrong with the world today, but it definitely is an indicator of what may be wrong: the fact that we’re ready to throw some great looking terrible actors together in a pretty below average film based on some pretty mediocre writing, and sell it to completely impressionable kids. These kids are impressionable at 14, and they remain just as open to suggestion when they are 21, though officially they may be considered adults at 18. Stephenie Meyer has argued that her books preach abstinence, but abstinence at the cost of sanity because a beyond-geriatric boyfriend must control how, when and how much his girlfriend can see him to the point of her breaking down and becoming suicidal is too high a price to pay. Refer back to 10 Things, and you will find in one of Julia Stiles’ many impassioned speeches a reference to not just doing something everyone else is doing. And she was way cooler than Bella.

The teen pop

Let’s not even be a little serious and include the incredibly brilliant grunge and alternative scene that cropped up in the ‘90s that a lot of us grew up on and still listen to, and has been passed on to younger generations. Teen pop is an entity of its own and deserves a whole separate mention.

Madonna (400 B.C. – Present)

Madonna may have morphed into a paragon of ridiculousness, but honestly? Who didn’t love her? She’s the mother of Girl Power, and female popstars to this day aspire to achieve some kind of Madonna in their careers. The ‘80s had all kinds of great music going for it, including some incredible teen pop, and if ‘True Blue’ doesn’t make you want to fall in love, you’re dead inside. There was of course, also Debbie Gibson and Tiffany, and Cindy Lauper, and New Kids On The Block. There was Simple Minds’ anthem for The Breakfast Club, ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’. This counts as teen pop for obvious reasons. We had A-Ha and Climie Fisher (most likely a one-hit wonder), and The Bangles. The ‘80s are generally a goldmine of great music and definitely worth digging back into, be it pop, or synth, or new wave.

The Backstreet Boys (1996)

The ‘90s teen pop scene was basically an explosion of the boyband. The Backstreet Boys, Take That, Boyzone, NSync, the poor man’s boyband, 98 Degrees, The Lyte Funky Ones (LFO)…there were so many pretty boys who had hair with frosted tips and openly romantic hearts looking for love on our TV screens that an entire anthropological paper can be written on matter of the boy band vs. Disney movies in giving young girls unrealistic expectations of love. Where are the boys without fancy cars that will walk a thousand miles to get to us? However, for every single boyband, there were five new musicians or musical outfits belonging to other genres. Kids had choices back then, and they could be broody and angsty as they listened to Garbage or Blur or Oasis, or secretly listened to ‘Quit Playing Games With My Heart’ on repeat. Which some of us may still do, in an ironic way, of course.

Justin Bieber (Born: 20 seconds ago)

The Bieb is actually a king among men, as how many millionaire toddlers do we know who have their own entourage and maybe hooked up with Kim Kardashian? The answer is obviously: All of them. But Justin Bieber is a human phenomenon that just keeps growing, and of course there will come a time he peaks, but he will probably have his empire in place by then. Details. What is important here is that there are literally millions of girls around the globe going absolutely bananas for him, to borrow an expression from 1876. Justin Bieber too, can be the mascot for the music that younger people now are most acquainted with. Yes, we know some of you love you some Misfits, but we’re really not talking about you. Whether it’s Taylor Swift, the lyrics to whose songs are kind of astonishingly stupid at times, or Katy Perry/ Lady Gaga/ Rihanna, who mostly sound alike and it’s very possible no one over the age of 27 can tell them apart; teen pop in the ‘10s is just…uninspiring in every way. The ‘90s may have had a Hanson, but there was just one of them – today, if it is even possible, every single music act for teens is Hanson, dumbed down.