In 2013, a documentary, Crazy About One Direction, was broadcast on Channel 4; it chronicled the lives and obsessions of 1D superfans. They screamed and cried, monitored the band members’ every move on social media and viciously trolled their idols’ girlfriends. While some came over as passionate and excitable, others were depicted as wildly unhinged: 14-year-old Sandra cheerfully imagined dispatching Harry Styles’s then-partner, Taylor Swift: “I’d stamp on her head, I’d rip all her hair out, I’d squeeze her eyeballs out.”
From Beatlemaniacs and Brosettes to Directioners and Beliebers, female pop fans have long been gathered into amorphous groups and variously painted as sad, hysterical, sexually predatory and mentally ill. The message, both within and outside the music industry, is always the same: male musical appreciation has to do with a deep understanding of artistry while girls are driven by idolatry and lust. Labelled in relation to the men they admire, they are frequently dismissed as groupies or, in today’s parlance, “fangirls”. But as the American music critic Jessica Hopper once tweeted: “Replace the word ‘fangirl’ with ‘expert’ and see what happens.”
Rejoice, then, for the Vice journalist Hannah Ewens’s calm, thoughtful and illuminating study of female fandom, which not only challenges such dismissive attitudes but actively highlights and celebrates young girls, their musical obsessions and their impact on the artists they champion. These are the consumers who often make up a band’s core constituency, spending money on albums, concert tickets, merchandise and meet-and-greets, and who gather on social media and online forums, which they see as safe spaces where they can talk about their sexuality, mental health and friendships. Fangirls is about the ways that girls show their love for music, how it makes them feel and affects their sense of self: “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.”
The book touches on the author’s own experiences of being a music obsessive, and shares the reflections of musicians including Garbage’s Shirley Manson, the Slits’ Viv Albertine and the Hole and Smashing Pumpkins’ bassist Melissa Auf der Maur. Crucially, it gives voice to scores of everyday female music lovers, their thoughts and feelings exhaustively gathered by Ewens via fan forums, one-on-one interviews and through visiting the girls camped out overnight prior to gigs to ensure the best possible position at the front once the doors are opened. There, amid the sleeping bags, Ewens observes their codes of conduct, which include writing numbers on their hands to ensure they don’t lose their place in the queue, and older girls ensuring the younger ones stay fed and hydrated. In documenting these nocturnal get-togethers, Ewens captures the joy, camaraderie and community of young women bonded by their musical obsessions, as well as the messiness, confusion and sensitivity of adolescence.
Elsewhere, Ewens tackles the backlash from fans after the One Direction documentary, who said that those depicted represented “the hardcore fangirls, the 3 per cent fangirls”; they should’ve looked at “the 95 per cent”. And she devotes a chapter to Lady Gaga, who nurtures her “little monsters” through face-to-face meetings and sending them food and hot chocolate while they wait outside her hotel. The book also examines the moral panic that afflicts successive generations of parents and authority figures in relation to musical icons, from Marilyn Manson, who was blamed for the 1999 Columbine massacre, to My Chemical Romance, described by a British newspaper as a “suicide cult band” after a fan took her own life.
Ewens takes seriously the claims of girls with mental illness or difficult life circumstances who feel that their lives have been saved by musicians through songs or statements that identify with their struggles. For these fans, music can be a vital outlet and a community in which they can construct alternative identities. Most poignantly, she speaks to survivors of the 2017 terrorist attack on the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, which left 22 dead and hundreds injured, mainly young women, girls and members of the LGBTQ community. The sadness and stoicism of these young people, many of whom had been attending their first gig, makes for gut-wrenching reading.
The world is not short of academic investigations into fan culture, but in this book Ewens offers us something different: Fangirls is a warm and vivid portrait of the elation and devastation felt by female music fans and a place in which the passions and anxieties of young girls are really listened to and understood.
• Fangirls: Scenes From Modern Music Culture by Hannah Ewens is published by Quadrille (RRP £14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
