THE SURFBOARD, THE BOY, AND THE ROOM THAT DIDN'T STOP
Teen Vogue on the summer ceremony where a piano prodigy became a pop-culture object, and stayed himself anyway.
The Teen Choice Awards are decided by teenagers. They are voted on by teenagers, in a window of about eight weeks in the summer, and they are given out at a ceremony in Los Angeles, on a stage designed to look, in the ordinary year, like a beach. The trophy is a surfboard. It is bright orange. It weighs, per one of our own reporters who once tried to lift one, more than you would think. On Sunday night the Breakout Artist surfboard was handed to a thirteen-year-old classical pianist from Loudoun County, Virginia, who accepted it in both hands and looked, per every photograph we have seen, quietly delighted.
“This one is my favorite. I would like to keep this one in my room, if my mom says I can.”
He was told, on the walk back to the green room, that he could, in fact, keep the surfboard in his room. He was, per one of our reporters, visibly relieved. He held the surfboard for the entire walk. He held it, per the same reporter, at his sister's elbow, in a chair against the far wall of the green room, for the remainder of the ceremony. He did not put it down until his mother came to collect him, after the show, and lifted it out of his hands so that he could get his coat on.
This is not, on its face, a story about the surfboard. It is a story about the room the surfboard came from. Teen Choice is not, historically, a room that pays attention to classical instrumentalists. It is a room designed for the most fluent teen pop stars in the industry, with dedicated fandoms, dedicated social channels, and, in most cases, dedicated tour buses. STARR is not, in any conventional sense, any of those things. He has, per Amara, no personal social account. He does not, per Amara, film himself. He does not, per Amara, do most of the things that other artists his age do to compete for a Teen Choice ballot.
He won it anyway, per the ceremony's own count, on a ballot in which the runner-up was the frontman of the most-streamed teen pop group of the summer. The margin, per the ceremony's producers, was north of two to one. It is, per the ceremony's own historian, the largest margin in the Breakout category in the last decade.
Teen Vogue asked, at our own after-party in a hotel across the street from the venue, a small handful of teenaged voters why they had voted the way they had. The answers, in aggregate, were remarkable. Not one of the voters we spoke to cited La Dernière specifically. They cited, instead, in different words, roughly the same idea: that STARR was, in a summer of shouting, a room that was, at last, quiet. One fifteen-year-old, from Ohio, told us that she had voted for him because “he plays like he is thinking, and I am tired of people not thinking.” We are, in this magazine, willing to take that at face value.
The surfboard, per Amara, has been carefully strapped into the back of the family SUV for the flight home. It will, per Amara, live in Luca's bedroom, on the wall opposite the piano. His mother has, per Amara, already agreed.