Preorder my new book! Recently, Taylor Swift has been facing some heat from fans over persistent rumors that she’s dating Matt Healy, the lead singer of British group The 1975. I know nothing about any of this - I think I can name a single song by the 1975 and maybe five by Swift - but it strikes me as a sign of our parasocial times, when fans have such a massive sense of entitlement that they think they can dictate to an adult who she can and can’t date, entitlement driven by the understandable but false sense that they in some sense share a personal relationship with her. Of course, as is so often the case, these fans have leveraged quasi-political complaints to do so - Healy apparently has said some offensive things in the past, though what’s considered offensive is now so loose that it’s always hard for me to tell how legitimate these claims are. Well, I’m afraid it’s not enough for fans to vet who Swift takes as a boyfriend, they’re now also picking her friends for her.
More on topic, I was just talking to a friend about how strange it is that our culture seems to push everyone to try to be at least mini-celebrities. You're expected to live your life publicly, and it changes the way you approach everything you do - instead of experiencing your life, you're more like a director, framing and contextualizing shots and text in real time to create an illusory persona for others to interact with. The ultimate dream is that you can gain a large following of people interested in your constructed persona.
It's like Erving Goffman gone off the rails - while there's an element of performance in all human interaction, now there is an element of mass performance in all human interactions. And it's turned real relationships into fandoms and fandoms into bizarre parasocial monstrosities.
I felt like a similar dynamic played out with the recent John Mulaney special. Mulaney wasn't just a comedian that had a drug problem, which led to the dissolution of his marriage. He was a Wife Guy who had committed a moral crime against his fans. I was just blown away by how many people would name-drop his ex-wife's name in comments or reviews. What the hell? Was the special funny or not? I don't care how bad you feel for his ex. Way too many people were personally invested in a marriage that was none of their business.
I can't name any Taylor Swift songs, she's just not my thing, but if she told these people "if you think you own me, fuck right off.", I'd buy one of her albums. (and then probably give it to my niece or something).
I'm one of those original Metallica fans who think Metallica stopped making good music right before the black album. However, I respect that they do what they want and not what I want. Their old albums aren't going anywhere.
I completely agree with the premise that these parasocial relationships with celebrities are dysfunctional and sad. See, for example, the hysterics over JK Rowling from grown adults who acted like she was their mom.
My only caveat is that some celebrities cultivate those relationships by feigning intimacy with fans on social media. I have no idea whether Taylor Swift does this, because I know literally nothing about her, but I’ve seen it from others. Obviously it’s all for money, just like companies pretend “we’re a family” to extract more labor and loyalty from credulous workers. They obliterate boundaries in order to make money, so they can’t entirely blame fans/workers who think they have a relationship where the celebrity/company cares about them. Should adults be able to see through the BS? Yes, of course, but people are idiots and if you bait them, that’s on both of you.
I think the deference to fans is a result of pareto distribution - the 20% of fans who are the most absolutely insane probably account for 80% of the income she receives. These would be people who buy all the merch, special releases of her stuff, etc.
Not saying that it's good, but there's a reason that businesses put up with a lot of crap from their most devoted 20% of customers - if they don't they lose our in a hugely disproportionate way.
I agree in principle, but Taylor Swift's whole public persona actively encourages this parasocial behaviour in her fandom. Nearly all of her songs are incredibly diaristic and obviously about her highly publicized romantic relationships or personal beefs with other famous people; the constant speculation about who each song is about has fuelled interest in her career. I love Taylor Swift's music, but I don't think she would've achieved superstar status without playing the PR game.
She's been re-recording her old albums, and when she did Red in 2021 (an album originally released in 2012), she included a 10 minute version for the fan favourite song 'All Too Well,' a song about how she felt victimized by dating Jake Gyllenhaal; the accompanying 'short film' provides even more detail about their relationship and even more leans into the victimization "I was too young!" bit by casting one of the Stranger Things kids as herself. Just wildly profiting off of fueling her fans' sense of outrage on her behalf over a three month long relationship that was over a decade ago!
Her re-recording her old albums (and getting her fans to fork over money for music that they already own) is ostensibly about intellectual property and not having ownership over her old masters, but really it's because Scooter Braun is the person who now owns her masters and he was Kanye West's manager during the whole "I made that bitch famous" drama.
I've been to a Swift concert, watched her Miss Americana and Folklore documentaries, and observed her cultivating her fandom on social media. She is very good at making her fans think she is actually their best friend, from the way she talks and interacts with her fans to the amount she shares about her personal life.
So for her to come out and tell her fans to not be deeply invested in her relationships would not only be hypocritical, it would be bad for her future money-making opportunities. Because she's re-recording Speak Now this summer, and she NEEDS Swifties to be just as mad about John Mayer as they have been about Jake Gyllenhaal and The Scarf.
That was controversial, and I don't understand why.
Not that I pay much attention to Taylor Swift, but apparently a few years back she had a song with a chorus that said something like "Just Shake it Off".
The reason I know this - some idiot wrote a 500 word editorial criticizing Swift for this because there were a lot of bad things going on in the world, and here she was telling all the Swifties to "shake it off". But, Swift wasn't telling her fans anything - she was singing a dang song.
I agree that artists shouldn't always do what fans want (or, more precisely, that they should do what fans don't know they want yet instead of what fans explicitly say they want).
However, I also think that kind of attitude can be used to excuse poor writing. I'm thinking in particular of how the writers of "Game of Thrones" became so enamored with "subverting viewer expectations" that in the last two seasons the viewer expectations they subverted started to include things like "making logical sense" and "paying off things that are built up."
Has anyone seen Adam Curtis's documentary "Century of the Self"? "Being what we buy" was a concept and practice intentionally manufactured by Freud's nephew (pairing products with psychological needs) and it is arguably one of the most profoundly influential decisions of modern life.
I certainly see this same thing play out in troubling fashion in the BTS fandom, but with the additional pressures of Korean shame culture and Korea's much more traditional style of moral censoriousness (Korean celebrities can have their careers killed for smoking weed, or gambling, or for having any kind of sex with anybody).
There's a huge contingent of fans who have absolutely unhealthy fixations on the BTS members, and to a troubling extent the marketing engine of the band encourages these unhealthy tendencies.
Taylor Swift could tell her pathological fans to fuck off, in precisely those words, because she's an American and a solo artist (I still don't think she ever will, unless something bad happens to her personally, because the optimal strategy is to ignore the weirdos but keep taking their money). That would be much harder for BTS, because they have a greater feeling of obligation toward their company and their fellow members, and because they have deliberately cultivated a sense that they are "available" to their fans in a personal sense.
I hope that, over time as they get older, BTS finds a way to reduce their participation in the parasocial aspects of their fandom. But I confess, I understand why they do it. For one thing, it brings in so much money. But beyond that, a lot of fans feel that they get a lot of positive effects from that feeling of imagined relationship, so from the artist's perspective it would feel like cutting those fans off and harming them.
And I think there actually are plenty of fans who have healthy and beneficial fan relationships to artists like BTS or Taylor Swift that don't descend into pathology (or, to get more complicated, some fans have both pathological effects and positive ones, and who knows which one outweighs the other?). So I'm not at all opposed to fandom in principle.
So while telling the entitled weirdos to fuck off might indeed be a good reaction, I think there might a lot of other, less dramatic ways in which mega-stars could do a better job of correcting the excesses of their fandoms. But I'm not prepared to suggest exactly what they should do differently.
The thing that makes it tricky with Taylor Swift is that few celebrities have done more to cultivate an intensely parasocial fan base. She interacts with fans in ways that most celebrities couldn't begin to imagine. Several years back, she sent a friend's tween daughter, a loyal Swifty but a total stranger with no substantial social media presence, a bunch of exquisite gifts, which were somehow exactly what this girl wanted and also a gigantic surprise--expensive items, too, personalized for her in such a way that suggested intimate knowledge of her tastes and preferences. I was stunned, only to discover that Swift (via her team of paid proxies, no doubt) does stuff like that all the time. I'm not suggesting that she deserves the creepy and downright frightening consequences of her Swifties. But it does seem to be a natural byproduct of the way she has constructed her own version of celebrity, with all her biographical easter eggs and coded references to current and previous amours. When you don't want people to speculate about your love life, you write gnomic verses about nobodies, not easily deciphered allusions to Jake Gyllenhaall, and you don't interact quite so personally with individual members of your fan base, chosen seemingly at random.
Girls is one of the greatest pieces of American Millennial art. I've watched it from start to finish at least 5 times and I constantly reference it. Absolutely brilliant.
Imagine what fresh hells the likes of Bowie or Freddie Mercury or Elton John or Johnny Cash or a myriad of other celebrities would have gone through had social media and super-duper fan culture had existed back when they were in mid-career prime.
How many people like their dirty laundry exposed? No one that I know of. Who wants their personal lives scrutinized to such a degree that these supposed fans feel entitled to do towards celebrities and athletes? I'm fairly certain that no one does not even these preening on-line superfan dipshits.
These people really do need to get lives, as in real, normal, well-adjusted lives instead of the celebrity bestie dreamscapes, or Marvel / Star Wars / Harry Potter / Tolkien / D&D / whatever universe they're LARPing in.
"Now, if I was Taylor Swift - worth half a billion, got a dozen Grammys, celebrated as an icon, and now 33 years old - I would just tell angry fans to fuck off."
By just ignoring her fans while letting them mortgage their houses to buy a concert ticket isn't Swift doing exactly that?
More on topic, I was just talking to a friend about how strange it is that our culture seems to push everyone to try to be at least mini-celebrities. You're expected to live your life publicly, and it changes the way you approach everything you do - instead of experiencing your life, you're more like a director, framing and contextualizing shots and text in real time to create an illusory persona for others to interact with. The ultimate dream is that you can gain a large following of people interested in your constructed persona.
It's like Erving Goffman gone off the rails - while there's an element of performance in all human interaction, now there is an element of mass performance in all human interactions. And it's turned real relationships into fandoms and fandoms into bizarre parasocial monstrosities.
I felt like a similar dynamic played out with the recent John Mulaney special. Mulaney wasn't just a comedian that had a drug problem, which led to the dissolution of his marriage. He was a Wife Guy who had committed a moral crime against his fans. I was just blown away by how many people would name-drop his ex-wife's name in comments or reviews. What the hell? Was the special funny or not? I don't care how bad you feel for his ex. Way too many people were personally invested in a marriage that was none of their business.
I can't name any Taylor Swift songs, she's just not my thing, but if she told these people "if you think you own me, fuck right off.", I'd buy one of her albums. (and then probably give it to my niece or something).
I'm one of those original Metallica fans who think Metallica stopped making good music right before the black album. However, I respect that they do what they want and not what I want. Their old albums aren't going anywhere.
I completely agree with the premise that these parasocial relationships with celebrities are dysfunctional and sad. See, for example, the hysterics over JK Rowling from grown adults who acted like she was their mom.
My only caveat is that some celebrities cultivate those relationships by feigning intimacy with fans on social media. I have no idea whether Taylor Swift does this, because I know literally nothing about her, but I’ve seen it from others. Obviously it’s all for money, just like companies pretend “we’re a family” to extract more labor and loyalty from credulous workers. They obliterate boundaries in order to make money, so they can’t entirely blame fans/workers who think they have a relationship where the celebrity/company cares about them. Should adults be able to see through the BS? Yes, of course, but people are idiots and if you bait them, that’s on both of you.
I think the deference to fans is a result of pareto distribution - the 20% of fans who are the most absolutely insane probably account for 80% of the income she receives. These would be people who buy all the merch, special releases of her stuff, etc.
Not saying that it's good, but there's a reason that businesses put up with a lot of crap from their most devoted 20% of customers - if they don't they lose our in a hugely disproportionate way.
I agree in principle, but Taylor Swift's whole public persona actively encourages this parasocial behaviour in her fandom. Nearly all of her songs are incredibly diaristic and obviously about her highly publicized romantic relationships or personal beefs with other famous people; the constant speculation about who each song is about has fuelled interest in her career. I love Taylor Swift's music, but I don't think she would've achieved superstar status without playing the PR game.
She's been re-recording her old albums, and when she did Red in 2021 (an album originally released in 2012), she included a 10 minute version for the fan favourite song 'All Too Well,' a song about how she felt victimized by dating Jake Gyllenhaal; the accompanying 'short film' provides even more detail about their relationship and even more leans into the victimization "I was too young!" bit by casting one of the Stranger Things kids as herself. Just wildly profiting off of fueling her fans' sense of outrage on her behalf over a three month long relationship that was over a decade ago!
Her re-recording her old albums (and getting her fans to fork over money for music that they already own) is ostensibly about intellectual property and not having ownership over her old masters, but really it's because Scooter Braun is the person who now owns her masters and he was Kanye West's manager during the whole "I made that bitch famous" drama.
I've been to a Swift concert, watched her Miss Americana and Folklore documentaries, and observed her cultivating her fandom on social media. She is very good at making her fans think she is actually their best friend, from the way she talks and interacts with her fans to the amount she shares about her personal life.
So for her to come out and tell her fans to not be deeply invested in her relationships would not only be hypocritical, it would be bad for her future money-making opportunities. Because she's re-recording Speak Now this summer, and she NEEDS Swifties to be just as mad about John Mayer as they have been about Jake Gyllenhaal and The Scarf.
I don't have much to say about this other than that the intersection of online fan culture and online social justice culture is fascinating.
Charles Barkley - "I am not a Role Model"
That was controversial, and I don't understand why.
Not that I pay much attention to Taylor Swift, but apparently a few years back she had a song with a chorus that said something like "Just Shake it Off".
The reason I know this - some idiot wrote a 500 word editorial criticizing Swift for this because there were a lot of bad things going on in the world, and here she was telling all the Swifties to "shake it off". But, Swift wasn't telling her fans anything - she was singing a dang song.
I agree that artists shouldn't always do what fans want (or, more precisely, that they should do what fans don't know they want yet instead of what fans explicitly say they want).
However, I also think that kind of attitude can be used to excuse poor writing. I'm thinking in particular of how the writers of "Game of Thrones" became so enamored with "subverting viewer expectations" that in the last two seasons the viewer expectations they subverted started to include things like "making logical sense" and "paying off things that are built up."
I wonder if there's a vicious cycle going on with a lot of these kinds of fans.
1. They become overly attached to and begin to identify with certain celebrities/franchises.
2. They withdraw from normal human relationships, in part because no one seems to "get" their fandom.
3. Because of the withdrawal, they form parasocial delusions about their proximity to celebrities.
Honestly not sure which comes first in this cycle, but it seems like a pretty lamentable case of self-perpetuating problems.
Has anyone seen Adam Curtis's documentary "Century of the Self"? "Being what we buy" was a concept and practice intentionally manufactured by Freud's nephew (pairing products with psychological needs) and it is arguably one of the most profoundly influential decisions of modern life.
I certainly see this same thing play out in troubling fashion in the BTS fandom, but with the additional pressures of Korean shame culture and Korea's much more traditional style of moral censoriousness (Korean celebrities can have their careers killed for smoking weed, or gambling, or for having any kind of sex with anybody).
There's a huge contingent of fans who have absolutely unhealthy fixations on the BTS members, and to a troubling extent the marketing engine of the band encourages these unhealthy tendencies.
Taylor Swift could tell her pathological fans to fuck off, in precisely those words, because she's an American and a solo artist (I still don't think she ever will, unless something bad happens to her personally, because the optimal strategy is to ignore the weirdos but keep taking their money). That would be much harder for BTS, because they have a greater feeling of obligation toward their company and their fellow members, and because they have deliberately cultivated a sense that they are "available" to their fans in a personal sense.
I hope that, over time as they get older, BTS finds a way to reduce their participation in the parasocial aspects of their fandom. But I confess, I understand why they do it. For one thing, it brings in so much money. But beyond that, a lot of fans feel that they get a lot of positive effects from that feeling of imagined relationship, so from the artist's perspective it would feel like cutting those fans off and harming them.
And I think there actually are plenty of fans who have healthy and beneficial fan relationships to artists like BTS or Taylor Swift that don't descend into pathology (or, to get more complicated, some fans have both pathological effects and positive ones, and who knows which one outweighs the other?). So I'm not at all opposed to fandom in principle.
So while telling the entitled weirdos to fuck off might indeed be a good reaction, I think there might a lot of other, less dramatic ways in which mega-stars could do a better job of correcting the excesses of their fandoms. But I'm not prepared to suggest exactly what they should do differently.
The thing that makes it tricky with Taylor Swift is that few celebrities have done more to cultivate an intensely parasocial fan base. She interacts with fans in ways that most celebrities couldn't begin to imagine. Several years back, she sent a friend's tween daughter, a loyal Swifty but a total stranger with no substantial social media presence, a bunch of exquisite gifts, which were somehow exactly what this girl wanted and also a gigantic surprise--expensive items, too, personalized for her in such a way that suggested intimate knowledge of her tastes and preferences. I was stunned, only to discover that Swift (via her team of paid proxies, no doubt) does stuff like that all the time. I'm not suggesting that she deserves the creepy and downright frightening consequences of her Swifties. But it does seem to be a natural byproduct of the way she has constructed her own version of celebrity, with all her biographical easter eggs and coded references to current and previous amours. When you don't want people to speculate about your love life, you write gnomic verses about nobodies, not easily deciphered allusions to Jake Gyllenhaall, and you don't interact quite so personally with individual members of your fan base, chosen seemingly at random.
Girls is one of the greatest pieces of American Millennial art. I've watched it from start to finish at least 5 times and I constantly reference it. Absolutely brilliant.
Imagine what fresh hells the likes of Bowie or Freddie Mercury or Elton John or Johnny Cash or a myriad of other celebrities would have gone through had social media and super-duper fan culture had existed back when they were in mid-career prime.
How many people like their dirty laundry exposed? No one that I know of. Who wants their personal lives scrutinized to such a degree that these supposed fans feel entitled to do towards celebrities and athletes? I'm fairly certain that no one does not even these preening on-line superfan dipshits.
These people really do need to get lives, as in real, normal, well-adjusted lives instead of the celebrity bestie dreamscapes, or Marvel / Star Wars / Harry Potter / Tolkien / D&D / whatever universe they're LARPing in.
"Now, if I was Taylor Swift - worth half a billion, got a dozen Grammys, celebrated as an icon, and now 33 years old - I would just tell angry fans to fuck off."
By just ignoring her fans while letting them mortgage their houses to buy a concert ticket isn't Swift doing exactly that?