The Rising Power of Fan Groups - Spook Magazine September 2015
Music fandom has evolved from peaceful gatherings outside recording studios to congregations of keyboard warriors, fighting on the frontline, protected by touch screens and quirky nom de plumes. Alexandra English takes a look at how online anonymity has changed fan groups.
Recently, a Facebook acquaintance of mine posted a photo of herself with a member of a band I had never heard of. I glanced briefly, noting that her brow game was on point, and moved on. Later, I refreshed my newsfeed in the hope that something new would be there, much in the same way I kept checking my empty fridge even though I hadn’t been grocery shopping in a week. Her photo floated by again.
This time it had been flooded with likes and comments and had been shared by the kinds of acquaintances and strangers who appear in your newsfeed for no reason. She had disturbed the fandom equilibrium by posting that photo online; they had all seen it, assumed that she was a new Love Interest, and a rain of fury was unleashed up her. Hell hath no fury like a fan girl scorned.
My Facebook fridge had been filled. I watched the saga unfold with an interest that was equal parts enjoyment and repulsion. The *shouts* of “WHO IS SHE!?” “Go kill yourself,” and “If you ever hurt him I will hunt you down,” were relentless and it goes without saying that they were uncalled for, but it didn’t last long. Later that day a photo emerged of the same musician posing with a different girl, and so just like that, the swarm of bees buzzed off to a different flower. My acquaintance was relatively unharmed and pretty chuffed about the hundreds of new Instagram followers she gained, but was left reeling after such a strange, intense and essentially pointless encounter with the internet’s anonymous trolls.
Fan groups are the super villains of the internet, with powers of anonymity and omnipresence that are terrifying to the mere civilians. Fan groups used to be at the frontline of the music scene, then they crossed that line into the stalker scene, and then they retreated to hide behind their smartphone screens.
For as long as people have been making music, there have been other people plucking out their eyelashes and sending them to the band, but it was when the Beatles came along that things really escalated. They attracted some real freaks; a natural consequence of making music that literally everyone likes, including the murderous cult leader Charles Manson. He believed that the Beatles were using their music to program black people to rise and overthrow white people; an event which some believe was the catalyst for the infamous Manson Murders. Then there was Mark David Chapman who went so far as to actually shoot and kill John Lennon.
Those terrifying lunatics aside, the Beatles fared pretty well from their fans. One group, The Apple Scruffs (a name coined by George Harrison), were known for loitering around the Apple Corps building and Abbey Road Studios in the late ‘ 60s, waiting and hoping to catch a glimpse of one of the band members. Their persistence paid off when Paul McCartney asked two Scruffs to perform backing vocals on “Across The Universe” in 1968, which you can hear on the version that Lennon donated to the UK charity album No One’s Gonna Change Our World.
Some of the Scruffs were also hired to package records when EMI didn’t approve of John and Yoko’s full nudity on the cover of Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins. When EMI refused to produce the album the Scruffs sat in a basement of the old Apple shop and packed the records into sleeves.
Their reputation was tarnished however when they broke into McCartney’s house, stole a photograph, and took it in turns to try on his trousers. McCartney demanded they return the photograph, but was inspired enough by the event to write “She Came in Through the Bathroom Window”, and Harrison wrote a tribute to them on his 1970 album All Things Must Pass.
Where the love of the music is stronger than the desire to wear someone else’s dirty laundry, the fan groups are slightly mellower but no less impassioned. The Grateful Dead’s Deadheads are arguably one of the most famous fan groups in recent history.
While their geographical spread alone is impressive, their commitment to following the band cross- country to see as many gigs as possible, while remaining as high as possible is something to be admired. They even managed to find enough clarity through their haze to record shows and make tapes to share with other fans – a ritual that created the largest bootlegging system in the world until the Internet came along. Their number one man, Jerry Garcia, died 20 years ago but the Deadheads are still going strong in all corners of the globe, easily identifiable by the red and blue Grateful Dead tattoos that are beginning to wrinkle and sag with age.
As with any group of human beings, there is a scale on which we operate that runs from mild to extreme, and Led Zeppelin fans, aka Zep Heads, were also no exception. Sitting pretty on the mild end of the bell curve were the ones who were just in it for the music, and spent their time searching record stores for third and fourth copies of each album. On the extreme end there were the ones who spent their time delving into the occult in order to understand the meaning of the symbols on Led Zeppelin IV.
The ‘60s and ‘70s were ripe with fan groups who, while slightly creepy and not without warped sensibilities, did what they did for the love of the music. But as time crawled on towards the ‘80s and ‘90s, fan groups evolved into strange, twisted mobs of people who had completely lost touch with reality. Case in point: Michael Jackson’s Moonwalkers.
MJ inspired levels of fanaticism usually reserved for prophets and the offspring of gods, of which
he was neither, and just when no one thought the Moonwalkers could get more devout, their hero died. In 2009 MJ succumbed to acute propofol intoxication and his fans upped the ante on the crazy. They went especially nuts when his queen-sized deathbed went up for auction starting at just US$3,000. His family eventually pulled the bed from auction; a moment of realisation that probably should have come sooner.
The term ‘fan group’ no longer conjures up images of stoners in vans spacing out while they listen to records, or screaming crowds in the front row of a concert. Fan groups are now completely online. They’re sitting out there in the ether somewhere, still in their pyjamas, keeping tabs on everything that everyone is doing.
When I was younger the only way to find out what Nick Carter named his dog was to read Smash Hits, and I still find myself pausing before I Google something to wonder where the internet is actually kept. But if I do a quick Instagram search right now I can see what Justin Timberlake ate for breakfast easier than I can see what I’m eating for breakfast because my phone is in the way.
The thing is, the online fandom knows they’re crazy and they know there’s nothing we can do about it. They harass girlfriends, attack non-fans, and speak of relationships with musicians as if they are real.
One anonymous Directioner (fan of One Direction) was recently quoted as saying: “We hacked into an airport security system to look at Harry Styles doing absolutely nothing...[we found] out how many times they peed so far this year...[we’re] obsessing over bodyguard, drummer, girlfriends and anyone associated with 1D. We can also ruin the lives of anyone who hates them.”
While we’re on the subject of offensive pop music, Justin Bieber recently posted a photo of a woman on Instagram and sent the fandom into frenzy. At the time of writing this there are 11,000 comments along the horrendous lines of “WHO IS SHE”, “Wtf Justin she’s so ugly!” and “Who the fuck is this bitch?” It turns out that “bitch” is Laura Lentz, a leading pastor at Hillsong Church, and if you look closely you can see her husband in the background. Perhaps technology-savvy does not equal actually savvy.
I am of the opinion that if someone doesn’t realise that their love for a complete stranger is unrequited then they should not be allowed to live in our shared reality. But I will never tell them that because there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching fan groups unleash a rain of fury on my acquaintance, and it’s to never poke the bear in the eye.
This story originally appeared in Spook Magazine in September, 2015.
Main image: Beatles fans being held back by police at Buckingham Palace, 1965 (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images).