Bibliographic 2.2: On Being a Fan
Happy August!
This is the second installment of this monthly newsletter, and thank you again for reading/sharing/sending messages about the first. I love hearing from you, and I hope you’re all keeping well.
xoxo Teri
ON BEING A FAN
TIFFANY
Sometimes I think that I’ll never be able to create something truly beautiful, truly good, because my fundamental identity is that of a fan and not a creator. If the world is split into two types, the admired and the admirer, I’m the latter. I’ve always been good at being a fan, weaned from an early age on Tiger Beat and pinups of teen heartthrobs that I could easily convince myself I was interested in even if their allure was vaguely confusing to my eight/nine/ten-year-old self. I worshiped Kirk Cameron before he got extreme evangelical and made my mother bring me to the theatre to watch a movie he starred in where he… was on the debate team? And fought for abortion rights? I didn’t really grasp the concept of abortion, but I saved a few scraps of popcorn from that outing to commemorate the event anyway.
But it was pop music that really clicked. I fell hard for women performers: Madonna, Debbie Gibson, Paula Abdul, and then, my favourite, Tiffany. She did an amusement park tour with New Kids on the Block before they rebranded as NKOTB, and me and a friend convinced our mothers to get us tickets for the concert at Canada’s Wonderland. (Parents are such an important part of burgeoning fandom! Who else is going to drive you to the mall, buy the cassette tapes, chaperone you to concerts?) We arrived early for rides and were allowed to get souvenir t-shirts from the booth that superimposed your photo next to any celebrity. This was the era before Photoshop, and the grainy t-shirt print was such an impressive simulation to someone who never would’ve conceived of the concept of a deep fake. I, of course, chose a photo of Tiffany. Her red hair and jean jacket next to my pigtails and pre-orthodontic toothy grin, perfectly captioned with I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW. All these queer undertones, but of course none of this occurred to me.
When I saw Tiffany’s silhouette in the wings before coming onstage, my chest tightened with anticipation and excitement. I don’t remember the concert; I remember that feeling. A few months ago, when my mother did a pandemic purge, she found the t-shirt in a box in the attic. It was still in good condition because I’d barely worn it. Maybe it was too sacred.
PHOEBE
Phoebe Bridgers’ Punisher deals with fandom. A punisher is the type of fan that tracks down band members after a show and won’t leave them alone, almost punishing them with their love the way a toddler incessantly twists and pulls on their parents’ sleeve to get their attention. I wasn’t familiar with the term, but I knew exactly the kind of person it referred to. Punisher’s songs riff on this type of relationship in different formulations, but it also literally deals with that specific music fandom in the eponymous song about Elliott Smith. What if I told you, I feel like I know you? she sings. But we never met.
I grew out of Tiffany-style pop music and then when I was fifteen I discovered indie rock. The type of music might have changed, but that outsized love came back with a vengeance, and I needed an outlet for it. I poured it into fanzines, my first issues intense xeroxed tributes to the bands I loved. I got hooked on the feeling of converting my fandom into something tangible. Sometimes you figure out things about yourself when you’re young, and you never forget them. In “Garden Song” Phoebe sings, I hopped the fence when I was seventeen, then I knew what I wanted.
I listened to Punisher so much during the pandemic. I watched almost every livestream, Phoebe at home in her pajamas, even rock stars stranded in their bedrooms with nothing better to do than endless Zooms. I listened to the album when I’d drive around or at my dining room table when I worked. She released sweatpants as merch, skeleton bones on the legs and PHOEBE BRIDGERS across the ass in a gothic metal font. Her Instagram account would repost pictures fans would take of themselves contorted in mirrors so you could see her name, and these pictures were often accompanied by the words Phoebe Bridgers owns my ass. I ordered the sweatpants, my updated version of the Tiffany t-shirt, and I took a contorted butt selfie too, but didn’t post it publicly. I’m old enough to keep my Instagram locked.
I know that part of my love for Phoebe Bridgers is because of how she wears her fandoms on her sleeve. Sometimes you catch a glimpse of Elliott Smith in the way she sings, that back of throat vocal run that Smith did so beautifully. I love the idea that she listened to him when she was just barely a teenager, that she grew up into this twenty-six-year-old singer songwriter writing songs about hanging out at the bar he used to frequent. Part of my love Phoebe Bridgers is because she gives me this answer: you can be both the creator and the fan.
JULIEN
When you’re a teenager or in your twenties, stumbling across new music is so easy. Even if you have to dig for it, it’s fun like a treasure hunt. You have time for digressions, dead ends. I know things are different now, but I don’t want to complain about The Algorithm, about the way listening to music has changed or about how Spotify is the worst, even if all or at least some of these things are true. I think younger people will always discover music in their way, and sometimes it will be handed to them in an obvious way and sometimes it will be circuitous. If it’s life altering then it doesn’t matter how it’s delivered. But how do you maintain that sense of discovery as you get older? You have to be on the lookout, and there are so many more blinders that get in the way.
I discovered Phoebe Bridgers via the side project band she started with two other songwriters, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus. They called themselves boygenius and released an EP where they traded off on main vocals and backup. “Me and my Dog” made a few best of 2019 lists, which is where I sometimes trawl for music when I get that creaky grandma feeling. It’s a Phoebe song, and is written in the key of fucking yearning. I mean, it’s a lot, that song, about a relationship gone off the rails. It’s beautifully overwrought and sincere (I had a fever until I met you), and it pinged some kind of chord in me. I listened to it so many times before even attempting any of the other boygenius songs, and then I branched out into Phoebe Bridgers’ solo stuff, and then, having worked through that, turned to Julien Baker.
This family tree method is how I found a lot of music when I was a teenager, how you become a fan of one band or musician, exhaust their repertoire and then branch out to their friends, anyone they might namedrop in their liner notes. boygenius reminded me that I could still do that.
Julien Baker’s songs are so intense, full of images of holes punched into walls, boxing metaphors, reckonings with God. She sings often about the sting of kindness—of someone’s humiliating grace, of wishing you’d hurt me; it’s the mercy I can’t take. Born in Memphis, she reminds me of a character that Carson McCullers could’ve written a novella around, a scrappy, whipsmart Southern Christian-raised queer girl. “Graceland Too” from Punisher is supposedly about Julien Baker. She could do anything she wants to, Phoebe sings about her.
Julien Baker’s Little Oblivions was another pandemic release early in 2021. The day it came out, I was frustrated from the workday for some now long-forgotten reason and I logged off early, put on my running stuff, and figured I could listen through the album while attempting to jog. After my third kilometre I knew I could do four, and then when I hit four I decided to do five, and that’s how Little Oblivions became the soundtrack to my first 5k.
I paid for a livestream to watch Julien play songs from the album on a stage to an empty room. It started at 9:30 pm, and my daughter laid next to me when I had the laptop propped in my lap against my knees. She put her head against my shoulder, tired and up past her bedtime, but watched with me, this musician with tattoos running up her arms, long brown hair in her face, a Southern drawl voice. I hoped this version of what you could grow up to be would last with her. Someone tough and fierce, but also painfully sensitive.
LUCY
Little Oblivions came out during what felt like one of the darkest points of the pandemic, and all that wrestling with oneself that Julien Baker does in her songs felt appropriate. In the spring when Lucy Dacus started releasing singles from her forthcoming album Home Video, it also felt like the right timing: there was something to look forward to, an element of hopefulness. Her merch included a pair of gym shorts with LUCY across the butt and I ordered them without hesitation. The anticipation of a new album, fun shorts for the summer, tiny joyful things.
Lucy Dacus snuck up on me or maybe I was saving her for last. Home Video raids your teenage journals and blows up those relationships so that you see them exactly how they are, their earnest awkwardness, the faked self-confidence. Sometimes it’s kind of funny, like when she sings, When I asked you to coffee, could you tell I didn’t drink it? from “Partner in Crime”. Or it’s sharp: All I need for you to admit is that you never knew me like you thought you did, she repeats in “Brando”. But it’s often heartbreaking, about being young and unable to vocalize or understand your feelings, like in “Cartwheel”: Outgrew older sister's clothes again/ won't admit you're growing tall and thin/ you like your body pulling at the seams / you're not prepared for what the future brings. The song “Thumbs” deserves its own treatise, but what has stayed with me the most is the last song on the album when she triple dog dares someone to run away with her. It’s the weight of that request, the way a child knows the gravity of a triple dog dare (“you’re a chicken if you don’t”) that goes straight to my forty-something gut.
There’s also this string of friendship that exists in Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus’ albums that I’m so touched by. The idea of these three women as friends pitching in for each other on their albums is also included in my love for them. Lucy Dacus has them reunite on the song “Please Stay”, which would’ve fit into the boygenius EP seamlessly, and it wasn’t just the song I enjoyed, but also that frisson of recognizing lineage.
I can’t be a good critic because I’m soft on those I love. I forgive, I indulge, I give a song multiple chances until I find my way in to appreciate it. Sometimes I think I’ve outgrown it, but mostly I feel so comfortable slipping back into being a fan. I like the crush-y, effervescent aspects, but I like how it’s also accompanied by seriousness too. There’s a close reading that a fan does of an artist that a casual fan does not, and, particularly during the rootless times of the pandemic, it was comforting to have that anchor. I know I can get this feeling from books too, but you can mainline a song or an album in a way that goes straight to the most vital parts. It’s all feeling, intuition. The people I connect with most have this streak of fandom in them too, maybe not just with music, but with that same root.
In the end, though, the fan/artist relationship is an individual one, and it’s what a punisher gets wrong, not realizing that they should be looking inward instead. I might sometimes act like I’m on first name basis with my favourites, pin narratives or make assumptions, but I know enough by now to realize it’s all a kind of fiction and that ultimately we hear what we want to hear.
But it’s one thing to be in the third grade and obsessed with a pop star. What does it mean to feel that way deep into adulthood? Being a fan reminds me to stay open. Do I get callous or do I stay tender? Which of these is worse and which is better? Julien Baker asks in “Relative Fiction”. I want to remain tender. I want the simplicity of loving an album wholeheartedly, the easy joy of anticipating something you know will hit exactly where you want it to hit: your heart.