Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture

By Hannah Ewens

One of Pitchfork’s 15 Favorite Music Books of 2020: “An entertaining, in-depth examination of fan subcultures.” ―The A.V. Club

“To be a fan is to scream alone together”—this is the discovery Hannah Ewens makes in Fangirls: how music fandom is at once a journey of self-definition and a conduit for connection and camaraderie; how it is both complicated and empowering; and how now, more than ever, fandoms composed of girls and young queer people create cultures that shape and change an entire industry.

Speaking to hundreds of fans from the UK, US, Europe, and Japan, Ewens tells the story of music fandom using its own voices, recounting previously untold or glossed-over scenes from modern pop and rock music history. In doing so, she uncovers the importance of fan devotion: how Ariana Grande represents both tragedy and resilience to her followers, or what it means to meet an artist like Lady Gaga in person. From One Directioners to members of the Beyhive to the author’s own fandom experiences, this book reclaims the “fangirl” label for its young members, celebrating their purpose, their power, and, most of all, their passion for the music they love.
 
“Excellent.” —The Independent

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 18, 2020
• ISBN: 9781477322116

Book preview

American Music Series

Jessica Hopper and Charles Hughes, Editors

FANGIRLS

SCENES FROM MODERN MUSIC CULTURE

HANNAH EWENS

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2020 by Hannah Ewens

All rights reserved

First University of Texas Press edition, 2020

This work was originally published in 2019 in the United Kingdom by Quadrille, an imprint of Hardie Grant Publishing

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

Permissions

University of Texas Press

P.O. Box 7819

Austin, TX 78713-7819

utpress.utexas.edu/rp-form

ISBN 978-1-4773-2209-3 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2210-9 (library ebook)

ISBN 9781477322109 (nonlibrary ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020937035

doi:10.7560/322093

For every girl who has ever had an obsession

Suggestion: replace the word ‘fan girl’ with ‘expert’ and see what happens.

– Jessica Hopper, music critic and author

Look what I found! A conceptual space where women can come together and create – to investigate new forms for their art and for their living outside the restrictive boundaries men have placed on their public behaviour! Not a place or a time, but a state of being.

– Camille Bacon-Smith, fan scholar

CONTENTS

Preface

1. An Animal within an Animal: A Brief Fangirl History

2. The Waiting Game

3. I’m (Not) Okay: To Retreat and Return

4. Lady Gaga Will See You Now

5. Sex & iPhones & Rock & Roll

(i) ‘Fuck Me Daddy’ (or Screaming Obscenities at Objects of Desire)

(ii) Queering with Strangers

6. ‘We Are the Media’: Inside the Hive Mind

7. Harry’s Girls, Long-Distance Love and Global Fangirling

8. Dangerous Women and Political Fun

9. Our Tears Dry on Their Own: Amy, Grief and British Female Fans

10. Witches Always Live Through This: Courtney Love’s Older Fangirls

Afterword

Beyond ‘Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture’

Acknowledgements

PREFACE

My parents weren’t big fans of music. My dad loved football but I’d never enter the living room after a game was scheduled. The thunder hung around the ceiling and he’d be sitting straight-backed, stiffly sniffing and otherwise silent. Mealtimes following could be deeply unpleasant. He should just support a better team, I thought. On the odd occasion they won, glee would creep into every crease of his face. We’d know then to ask, ‘Dad, how did they play?’ and he’d fist the air suggestively.

I distinctly remember being cynical about fostering this sort of connection with something – with anything. What good was being a supporter if your very being was so precariously balanced on the shoulders of men you didn’t know, creating enough resentment to permeate our whole house? I now know it took him away from us, from the house, to people who felt like friends, colleagues, to feeling a part of something bigger, when we lived, quite literally, on an island away from everything. That it was possible to transcend your surroundings.

The island I grew up on is small enough to walk across from one side to the other in a day, but big enough that you’d never bother to. Mobile reception is still intermittent, although not as unreliable as it was, and you could pick up radio stations just across the water from France (an otherworldly message, when transmitted into your car as you drove over the downs). It’s a place where restaurant banners spell their own name wrong but don’t bother to correct it and menus inside are yellowed; where the families that come each year for almost-warm weeks get fewer and fewer, and disappear, taking the need for jobs, and leaving empty wine bottles and summer crushes behind. It’s somewhere with an ageing population, where you might hear a Beach Boys track in the biting cold of winter, but whose more appropriate soundtrack might be the eerie warble of a theremin. Somewhere beautiful and, to me, sad.

My feeling is that being deprived of real communication definitely contributed to my disposition. There was an aloneness that enhanced yearning of various kinds.

I wouldn’t have guessed it but I would soon self-define in one way or another by being a fan. To my mind, life started at ten years old in the early noughties. I was taken under the wing of one girl, E—. With her coarse ginger hair and freckles so unruly in the summer they joined together to make a blob, she was considered almost as much of a weirdo as me, save only for the fact she’d been around longer. Her breath smelt of stale bubblegum; she seemed to always be chewing. She was very strange. I was strange. Soon we were inseparable, and the boys could only conclude: ‘You lesbians are weird’.

Unlike mine, where other interests or worries commandeered the time, E’s whole family lived through film, TV, art and, above all, music. I didn’t have other friends or older siblings who had shown me culture before. And so long school holidays were spent at hers, as were weekends or evenings. I tried on everything she had: expressions, clothes, songs. Her mum, a photographer (which seemed impossibly cool), encouraged our interests by casually passing both of us banknotes through the driver’s seat window on the way to the one nearby music retailer or even occasionally getting us tickets for gigs on the mainland.

E had many quirks. She could only fall asleep listening to quite loud music so we’d lie in darkness wearing her pyjamas listening to Marilyn Manson or Blink-182 or David Bowie. Despite trying to keep up conversation for as long as possible to avoid being left awake, I always was. Her Hi-Fi system worked like a record player and would restart an album once it was finished, leaving me in an endless loop of heavy metal through the night. Sometimes I’d creep out of bed and turn it off but it’d often wake her up, so mostly I’d lie there anxious, oscillating between frustration and appreciation for the time to learn the lyrics.

Much of the time we’d be creating on some minor scale: learning to play guitar, writing out songs or singing over instrumental tracks into webcams. But our greatest pleasure would be one of us exploding over a song that the other, coyly waiting for a reaction, had discovered. From this we picked a soundtrack beyond what we were fed. With this we could: pretend to inhale our first cigarettes; black our eyelids and dye our hair; get as drunk as our bodies would allow with scene kids from neighbouring schools on the outskirts of the woodland that faced the sea, watching boys on other worlds, having taken drugs we’d never heard of. In a way, it was like a secret club. Our personal fan club – one we weren’t taught to have, but instinctively knew how to create together. Here we could avoid having combative dialogues about who was the best guitarist or which album in a band’s discography was better with boys our own age. No response to music was off limits and I always felt validated. Nowhere else gave me the insight into personal politics that music did; I spent every evening on our first family computer researching riot grrrl and punk and feminism. Everything hideous that was happening to me as a teenage girl, either music or E had something to say about it.

Being a fan paradoxically gave me both the invisibility cloak I desperately wanted and a proud identity at an age when I felt smug about little else; it was the only identity that felt like it fitted comfortably.

The night I decided to put together this book, it was autumn and I was in a church. Ex-My Chemical Romance member and solo artist Frank Iero had just played an intimate show. I drifted about in front of the altar hoping to say goodbye to him. All I could see was his back, him sitting behind a table, and the faces of hundreds of fans feeling joy, agony, confusion, a mix of many incongruent things. I watched them move through: an emotional assembly line of girls, each mildly overbearing (apologising for their behaviour and existence; crying), asking very little (to be seen; their gifts taken; the ‘thank you for saving me’ heard), and, gathering around the door, they were transformed somehow.

I’d felt the same way too. I wanted to know why, at twenty-five, I was witnessing the same things I’d done a decade previous and I knew to have been done by fans before me, decades before. I tried to remember everything I’d learnt or read about music fan culture but recalled documentaries that showed fans merely as a footnote that highlighted the power of the musician, or articles by grown-up journalists remembering when they’d been a devoted fan (past tense). Work on this subject where young women are involved is frequently overtly celebratory or critically marginalising, neither of which are appropriate for the richness of their experience. I’ve often thought the people around the spectacle as curious as the spectacle itself – and as worthy of proper investigation. The question being not just what is captivating these people but who are those captivated?

I wanted to know more about what it meant to be a fan, to ask what they were doing, why they were doing it. I wanted to look (and with care) away from the stars themselves towards the people who gave them any luminescent quality. Those people are, so frequently, teenage girls.

‘I don’t see it as possible or desirable to understand fandom without gender being part of the mix, at least not until a time in the future where we are past gender,’ communication and fan studies professor Nancy Baym wrote in 2017. ‘But I suspect that rather than getting past it, we are more likely to keep delving deeper into not just how it colours so much of how we think, understand, evaluate and behave, but how many ways of being gendered there are, and how those genderings intersect with all the other social identities people claim or have forced on them.’ Once you accept that, you see that there are infinite and nuanced ways in which to be a fan and that those suggesting that there is any correct way to ‘do’ it – which happens both externally, to fandoms, and internally, within them – are making subjective judgements.

This is a book about music fandom by music fans; previously untold or glossed-over scenes from modern pop and rock music history. To privilege a female experience I spoke to hundreds of women and girls, from the UK, Europe, North America and Japan, to illuminate themes for these chapters and gather stories to fill them. Since young fans are also increasingly exploring and embracing their gender-nonconformity or identifying as non-binary, it felt natural to reflect that in the research and interviews. My aim was to be as inclusive as possible whilst accurately representing fan bases. It would never be enough to write a singular ‘fangirling’ narrative because there simply isn’t one, and we should not expect women fans, or any fans, to be conveniently categorised.

We’re in a time now where, more than ever, girls and young queer people create modern mainstream music and fan cultures with their outlooks and actions. They’re the ones at the helm of fan practices that the public have a vague awareness of: tweeting their favourite artist incessantly, writing fan fiction, religiously updating devoted social media profiles, buying ‘meet-and-greet’ tickets and following the band around to various show dates. This is slowly being acknowledged, in part for the money it generates for a changing music industry, and in part because of the ‘women in music’ literature that has been published in the 2010s. It has been heartening to read all of these books, to feel as though it does matter what women have to say about their relationship to music, even if it is only legacy musicians whose stories are heard (it’s so rare that teenage-girl interests and lives are treated as though they’re of consequence). Simultaneously, I’ve watched as fans of all genders have reclaimed the somewhat derogatory label of ‘fangirl’ online.

Of course, in its passionate exchange, fandom has never been inherently morally good – or bad. It deals in exchanges of money for goods, power struggles, privilege and intense interest or occasionally uncritical devotion towards another human being. To be a fan can be complicated, and I wanted to capture that with fairness.

E and I had an explosive argument in our teens, a fact confirmed by coldly cutting cords on social media and a one-way return of clothes and CDs. Like most immature friendship fallouts I can’t remember the specific hurt, but the final straw would’ve been innocuous. Soon after, she left school and I’ve not seen or spoken to her since. I reflected on our time together a lot while writing this book – wondered about looking her up online and thought better of it – because there is so much to thank her for. She gave me something of a framework to understand my life, my career and my adult friendships.

About halfway through my research, I realised what it meant to be a fan. Fandom is a portmanteau of fan and kingdom – there is, as that would suggest, a king or queen regent but also a territory and community of followers. To be a fan is to scream alone together. To go on a collective journey of self-definition. It means pulling on threads of your own narrative and doing so with friends and strangers who feel like friends.

Being a fan is a serious business and this is what girls wanted to say about it.

1

AN ANIMAL WITHIN AN ANIMAL: A BRIEF FANGIRL HISTORY

You and me got a whole lot of history

We could be the greatest thing that the world has ever seen

You and me got a whole lot of history

So don’t let it go, we can make some more, we can live forever

– One Direction, ‘Whole Lot of History’

Teenage-girl fans, they don’t lie

– Harry Styles

Imagine screaming so hard your lung collapses. You carry on cheering somehow, using your other lung, one that has not folded, because you’re having a magical time and stubbornly choose to believe you’re just out of breath. You go to the A&E afterwards when you realise something is seriously wrong. The examining doctor discovers you are not only breathing at an extraordinary rate per minute but with a tear in the lung that is causing air to escape between the lung and the chest wall, into the chest cavity and behind the throat. Imagine that when they press on certain parts of your body it makes a sound like Rice Krispies popping. The combination of the three symptoms is something the doctor has never seen before. They consult medical records and find what you have done to yourself to be so extremely rare to occur from screaming or singing that it’s only been recorded twice in medical history: to a drill sergeant and an opera singer.

That is the story of an unnamed girl who went to a One Direction concert in 2013; her story wasn’t published in a medical journal and publicised until late 2017. ‘I never saw her again,’ said Mack Slaughter, the doctor who treated the patient. ‘I told her she’d be famous and get to go on the Jimmy Fallon show and meet One Direction but she was too embarrassed.’

That same year, 2013, a documentary about 1D fans aired on Channel 4 at 10pm. This was certainly not for fans, to hold a mirror up to their fun behaviour, but for parents and for viewers wanting more rowdy or licentious post-watershed material. The title sequence exploded with emotion. ‘It’s like a drug addiction,’ says one girl. ‘I’ve met them sixty-four times,’ swears another. A voiceover dramatically declares, ‘They’ll stop at nothing to get close to the boys,’ before cutting to a pink-haired nineteen-year-old from Northern England called Becky who points high up a building and says, ‘I was sat outside your room when you was asleep, Zayn’. These girls are Crazy About One Direction.

Viewers are introduced to one group of friends outside Manchester Arena. As they crowd around the camera, it’s evident from their colliding energies that they have a clear leader, fourteen-year-old leopard-print-clad Sandra. Each of them grasps at their face, clutching their phones to their aching chests as they share how much they love the boys, their words clambering over each other’s. ‘I go home and cry every, every night,’ says Sandra, continuing after the others have stopped. What will you do if you get to meet him today? Suddenly they all scream and stamp their feet, Sandra convulsing, and one girl with dental braces almost out of shot says, ‘Have an asthma attack. And cry. And die!’

Tickets for another round of 1D shows are set to go on sale. Sixteen-year-old Nadia from Dublin leans over the balcony of her block of flats, a plastic crucifix dangling. A true tableau of melancholy. ‘It’s just constant tears and frustration and you don’t know what to do with your life.’ In the queue for tickets, she sobs. Once she has the tickets, she sobs.

After waiting hours outside Wembley Stadium for the chance to meet the boys, older girls take the failure of their mission with self-deprecating laughs. This is the lifestyle they’ve chosen, for better or for worse. For younger ones, it’s tantamount to heartbreak. The camera focuses on one girl of a group, her eyes filling with tears. A smudged ‘I ❤ 1D’ drawn on her sad face, and a faded red heart on each cheek, her lip wobbles. ‘They could’ve come by now and they’re clearly not coming.’ She self-consciously scrapes her fringe behind her ears, a gesture of shame for the time and effort put into their mission and: nothing. We watch her but she can’t meet the eye of the camera or filmmaker for more than a moment.

Yet those tears are a delicate side-serving to the rage featured. One tiny girl with wide kohled eyes says nonchalantly from behind her laptop, ‘I’m part of a fandom that could kill you if they wanted’. A large portion of the documentary is given over to their jealousy of the boys’ girlfriends, particularly pop superstar Taylor Swift, who at the time was romantically involved with Harry Styles. Sandra sent Swift death threats over Twitter which apparently led to Sandra’s account being blocked. Leading her down a slippery slope, a voice asks what she’d do if she saw Swift now. Sitting in a full-leopard-print room, Sandra grits her teeth and uses her hands as claws, a gesture that is as comical as it is faintly disconcerting for its aggression. ‘I’d stamp on her head, I’d rip all her hair out, I’d squeeze her eyeballs out, I’d step on her eyeballs.’ She ends with an angelic smile. ‘It’d just be like that.’

Plenty of the outpourings come from bedrooms, implying that whatever we hear are the girls’ distilled thoughts, and any dramatic moments we see are relatively unprompted. One of these is ‘the hunt’, words that refer to the tracking down of One Direction, but it’s uncertain if they are originally those of the subjects or the production team. In one sequence, girls pace around a hotel where the band are reportedly staying and find what they believe to be their room. In another, pink-haired Becky uses her phone to document the before and after of her crossing paths with Zayn. A large portion of the documentary is given to the often homoerotic sexual fan fiction and art that pairs Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson as a bromance or couple – with no context or explanation that this happens across all types of media fandoms. ‘Slash shipping’ is the very commonplace fan practice of same-sex romantic or sexual pairing as imagined by fans, more or less done officially since the start of the term’s use in the mid-seventies when the first slash ship – Kirk and Spock in Star Trek – became widely accepted. But of course the desire of fans to create relationships for characters, fictional or real, imagined straight or queer, predates the term. Ultimately, then, the tone of the entire hour could objectively be called ‘hysterical’.

Hayley and her friends were filmed for the documentary but never made the final edit. She lives in Scotland and still calls herself a fangirl at twenty-two, five years on. Her social media profiles show reams of crying emojis at new songs she likes, happy birthday wishes sent to pop stars or countdowns for the days until she is seeing an artist. She recently shared a tweet with over 44,000 retweets that reads ‘i’m sorry but girls who didn’t have a one direction phase probably don’t have a personality now’. When I ask why she thought she and her friends were not in the film, she says, ‘We just weren’t crazy enough’.

‘We initially thought it’d been because there’d been too many girls but after watching it we realised we weren’t outrageous. They asked us, What’s the most extreme thing you’ve done to see the boys? and I talked about the boys’ first tour and how I camped out for the tickets with my mum. They pushed, saying things like: Is that it? What else? It was like they were setting us up for failure. They were trying to hook, line and sinker. We knew that was the game so we just talked about real stuff. I was going through a hard time so I talked about how the boys helped me through difficult days because I’d put on their music. We talked about friendship. At eighteen we were saving every penny, birthday and Christmas money for this lifestyle. I’d not do anything because I needed the extra 20 quid in the bank account in case they did a tour or something, I was really prepared. But they wanted to know if we’d stopped over at their hotel or dragged them on Twitter. Just telling the good side of things didn’t make the cut.’

After months of waiting excitedly for the final product, the documentary came out and Hayley was smouldering with shame. ‘When the credits rolled we thought, Is that honestly how people see fans of One Direction? They wanted us to be crazy animals who are the reason the boys have security like they do. The girls in the documentary are supposed to look a danger to the boys when in reality they’re just people who have a passion and, OK, sometimes they do take it far, but most of the time us fans are just here to have a good time and listen to music.’

Hayley’s friend Lauren feels similarly about events. ‘I remember being so angry because it portrayed all us fans to be something that we’re not, if that makes sense,’ she tells me. ‘I remember when it came out people from my school were tweeting like, Oh, I can’t believe Lauren Hutcheon’s not on this doc because that’s how weird they thought we were. I was angry that people at my school had seen it.’

At the time it was disappointing to see she’d been cut from something that seemed significant for the fandom, but Lauren was soon grateful for their removal. ‘I said to Hayley, it’s a blessing in disguise. I don’t think I’d have been able to cope if I’d been in it. People at my school were horrible to me about it afterwards and I wasn’t even in the documentary so to think what would’ve happened to those girls…’ They did recognise and recall some of the girls who featured in the film because they were there on the day, being filmed. They, to Lauren, seemed ‘normal’, all friends, like her and Hayley, through One Direction, and loved 1D and that was more or less it. ‘I wonder whether they were made out to be weird when they were getting filmed.’

Bethany, who was also eighteen at the time of shooting, did make it into the film. She remembers how she was selected from millions of Directioners. ‘They found most people at concerts and that as a fan is when you’re at your crazier time. If they found people on the internet it would’ve been better because not everyone can afford to go to a big pop concert but everyone can afford the internet.’

To save money to get her own home, Bethany now stays with her dad in Nottinghamshire. She’s a huge fan of Disney films now but continues to save up for the solo concerts of the 1D boys. I notice her email avatar is a ‘KEEP CALM AND NEVER SAY NEVER’ picture, referencing Justin Bieber’s soaring R&B-inflected song. There’s just no turning back / When your heart’s under attack. Channel your truest version of self regardless of adversity, it said. Dig deep inside for bravery and strength because at one time or another you’ll need it.

‘They did pick out the worst moments and made us seem worse than what we were.’ But after a pause she gives a laugh. ‘Honestly? I’m crazy as it is so it didn’t really make a difference to me.’

If you sit a black-and-white photograph of ‘fangirls’ from 1966 next to a high-definition image from the 2010s, the only element that’s notably different is the fashion. Wet faces, eyes screwed up, fingers to hanging mouths or reaching outwards like straining talons: visual and audible signifiers of the female music fan. There’s a futileness to this image. Scream as much as you’d like – you’re unlikely to get closer to that someone, to touch them. You’re one of many, after all. There’s humour in it, humour directed at it, but also there’s power in ‘crazy’.

Hysteria – from the Greek word for uterus, hystera, ever the anatomical ‘source’ of problems – carries a lot of historical baggage. This womb-linked ‘illness’ manifests itself in a number of symptoms: anxiety, shortness of breath, irritability, nervousness, insomnia, fainting, as well as being promiscuous or desiring sex – that is: feeling things, strongly. Ancient Greek physician Aretaeus described the womb as ‘an animal within an animal’ and Hippocrates went even further to say that, especially in virgins, widows, single or sterile women, this ‘bad’ uterus also produces toxic fumes, which cause hysteria.

Among the limitless