F Sharp: Passionate fandom deserves your respect


Shutianyi Li/Daily Trojan

My favorite artist in high school was the Christian rock band Skillet. Over the course of two years, I convinced my parents to let me see Skillet five times, and I collected many of its studio albums. I followed Skillet’s tour diaries religiously, and at one point, I got into a fight at church over fan trivia that I had to prove I knew better. I look back on this period of my life fondly, even after I realized the music wasn’t as good as I had once believed.

As someone who gets anxious whenever I have to choose what I want for lunch, being so open and proud about my favorite band was a rare part of my life where I actually gained confidence. I was the textbook definition of a fangirl, and it was fun.

There’s a certain image and description that comes to mind when the word “fangirl” is thrown around. When the fangirl’s favorite artist puts out a new song, she’s already got a million theories about what the album will be about, based on obscure clues the artist may or may not have threaded together for months.

She’s the first one to purchase tickets with her presale code after waiting on Ticketmaster for hours before the official on-sale time. She’s in the front row of the pit holding a sign over her head while she jumps in time to the warble of the bass. She knows every lyric of every song — even the B-sides and rarities.

But there’s also a side of the fangirl’s music fandom that can be problematic. There’s the fanfiction pairing up her favorite members of a band together or inserting herself as the object of their affection. It’s harmless fun, until that band member gets a girlfriend who immediately receives a barrage of death threats from total strangers.

The endless fan accounts on social platforms, which chronicle their favorite celebrity’s every move in copious detail, aren’t bad until the accounts take it upon themselves to determine which fans are real and which are irrelevant.

It’s useful to me to separate the toxic parts of music fandom from the healthy parts, by labelling the latter as fandom and the former as “stan” culture. “Stanning,” as a concept, can be traced back to the year 2000, when Eminem launched his magnum opus “The Marshall Mathers LP.” One of the standouts, a personal favorite of mine, is “Stan,” a song that deconstructs toxic fandom in four verses. By the end of verse three, the titular Stan is so incensed by Eminem’s lack of communication that he throws his pregnant girlfriend into the back of his car and drives off a bridge.

Stan felt he understood Eminem better than anyone else in the world, and that deep understanding earned him the right to all of Eminem’s time and attention. While I might put out that I stan an artist from time to time, I also understand the history behind that term and how most self-declared stans behave.

While it’s important to acknowledge that many of Stan’s behaviors in the song ring eerily true about what stans look like in 2019: They are a small but vocal subset of a large body of fans. What’s interesting to me is how Eminem envisioned the epitome of toxic fandom as a white man in the song, yet overtime we’ve associated it with young girls.

Wasn’t it mostly white men who felt their unique understanding of Star Wars entitled them to send Kelly Marie Tran death threats, until they forced her to deactivate her Instagram? Wasn’t it mostly white men who harassed Leslie Jones because they didn’t want her ruining their Ghostbusters franchise? Why then do we label girls as the main proponents of toxicity in music fandom when every other fan community provides evidence for another culprit?

What I feel is most harmful about this attitude is the message sent when we discount artists entirely because of their “teenage, screaming fangirls.”

Deciding something isn’t good when a girl likes it lets those girls know their interests aren’t valued the way a man’s is. Their opinion isn’t rational or important enough to count, so when expressed, it is ignored or used as a marker for what not to believe or like. It has become acceptable to diminish a girl’s passion to her age and alleged lack of emotional maturity. She is not taken seriously, so the object of her interest is not either.

Stan culture is not exclusive to music (I think it’s worse in anime fandom), but musicians are often at the forefront of our collective consciousness. If we buy into it, we are the ones who are ignorant — not the girls who love and feel with conviction, who should instead be lauded. It’s their passion that sells tickets and albums, that racks up streams on Spotify and determines which artist is on top.

They are the pulse of the music industry. It’s time they received their due recognition.

Baylee Shlichtman is junior writing about women in music. Her column, “F Sharp,” runs every other Monday.