On the morning of August 25, 2014, a sixteen-year-old girl arrived at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in baffling condition. She was short of breath but had no chest pain. She had no history of any lung condition, and there were no abnormal sounds in her breathing. But when the emergency room doctor on duty pressed on her neck and chest, he heard noises like Rice Krispies crackling in a bowl of milk—spaces behind her throat, around her heart, and between her lungs and the walls of her chest were studded with pockets of air, an X-ray confirmed, and her lungs were very slightly collapsed. Somehow, the upper half of her body had become bubble wrap.
The doctors were confused until she said that she’d been screaming for hours the night before at the Dallas stop on One Direction’s Where We Are tour. The exertion, they hypothesized, had forced open a small hole in her respiratory tract. It wasn’t really a big deal—she was given extra oxygen and kept for observation overnight, requiring no follow-up treatment. But the incident was described in all its absurd, gory detail in a paper published in the Journal of Emergency Medicine three years later—titled “‘Screaming Your Lungs Out!’ A Case of Boy Band–Induced Pneumothorax, Pneumomediastinum, and Pneumoretropharyngeum.” The lead physician wrote that such a case had “yet to be described in the medical literature.” Doctors were familiar with military pilots, scuba divers, and weightlifters straining their respiratory tracts, but this case presented the first evidence that “forceful screaming during pop concerts” could have the same physical toll.1
This was a novelty news item: an easy headline and a culturally salient joke about the overzealousness of teenage girls. It was parody made real, and recorded with the deepest of seriousness, for all time, in a medical journal. I stumbled across that article while idly combing Google Scholar for stuff that would be personally interesting to me, a habit I developed in order to waste time at work while describing what I was doing as “research.” I probably typed in “One Direction” and “screaming.” It is kind of funny. When I tweeted about it, a woman I had already interviewed for this book replied immediately, “That’s worse than when I got so excited during ‘One Thing’ and bit down on a glow stick by accident, pouring viscous glow poison into my mouth.”2 I don’t know precisely when that happened to her, but she was thirty-four years old when she wrote the tweet, which I only bring up because loving One Direction enough to cause oneself physical harm is not unique to the teenage years. It’s just teenagers we picture when we talk about it.
I know nothing else about the girl who loved One Direction so much that she collapsed her lungs over it. Her doctor wrote to me that he’d asked, at the time, for her permission to tweet about the incident to Jimmy Fallon—he’d argued that maybe she would get to meet One Direction. “But she was too bashful!!!! Classic teenager,” he said, adding a laugh-crying emoji.3 I’ll never know who she is or hear her personal explanation of what made her scream so much. In this specific circumstance, that’s because of medical privacy laws, which are good. But it’s also emblematic of a bigger lack: we have had so many screaming girls. Every time we see them, we’re like, “They’re screaming.” And that’s it. It’s not that the image of the screaming fan isn’t true—we can all see it; it’s in the medical literature; many of us have embodied it. It’s that the screaming fan doesn’t scream for nothing, and screaming isn’t all the fan is doing. It never has been.
“Beatlemania struck with the force, if not the conviction, of a social movement,” Barbara Ehrenreich wrote in 1992.4
We’ve all seen the famous photos of girls open-mouthed and crying, arms draped over police barricades. Beatlemania was an on-the-ground occupation of Europe’s and America’s major cities. When the Beatles visited Dublin for the first time in 1963, The New York Times reported that “young limbs snapped like twigs in a tremendous free-for-all.”5 When they arrived in New York City in February 1964—a little over a month into the U.S. radio chart reign of “I Want to Hold Your Hand”—there were four thousand fans (and one hundred cops) waiting at the airport and reports of a “wild-eyed mob” in front of the Plaza Hotel.6 “The Beatles Are Coming” posters and stickers were distributed all over the country before that first 1964 visit, with Capitol Records sales managers instructed to put them up on “literally” any surface, “anywhere and everywhere they can be seen,” and to enlist unpaid high school students in the effort. (The sales managers were also asked to wear Beatles wigs to work “until further notice.”)7 On the night of the band’s historic Ed Sullivan Show performance, 73 million people tuned in—more than a third of the country’s entire population.8
“All day long some local disc jockeys [have] been encouraging truancy with repeated announcements of the Beatles’ travel plans, flight number, and estimated time of arrival,” the NBC news anchor Chet Huntley reported the evening the Beatles arrived. “Like a good little news organization, we sent three camera crews to stand among the shrieking youngsters and record the sights and sounds for posterity.”9 Ultimately that footage didn’t air—it was deemed too frivolous for the nightly news.
At the time, the media couldn’t figure Beatlemania out. They didn’t see a reason for so many girls to be so obviously disturbed. For The New York Times, the former war correspondent David Dempsey attempted a “psychological, logical, anthropological” explanation of Beatlemania.10 In it, he used German cultural theorist Theodor Adorno’s famous words on the conformity and brainlessness of “jitterbugs”—which was originally a racist excoriation of the dancers in Harlem’s jazz clubs. “They call themselves jitterbugs,” Adorno had written, explaining one of the ideas of his that has held up least well over time, “as if they simultaneously wanted to affirm and mock their loss of individuality, their transformation into beetles whirring around in fascination.”11 Dempsey was misquoting him really, playing superficially off the available beetle pun. He was defending the teenage girls by calling their passions stupid and harmless, and he either didn’t know or didn’t remember that Adorno found jitterbugs dangerous, and had also described their movements as resembling “the reflexes of mutilated animals.”12 (In their racism, however, the two were ultimately on the same page: Dempsey chided Black rock ’n’ roll artists for encouraging young white girls to act as vulgarly as “aboriginals,” and compared the Beatles to “witch doctors who put their spells on hundreds of shuffling and stamping natives.”)13
Nearly all the writing about the Beatles in mainstream American publications was done by established white male journalists—many of whom, at the most important papers, were not even music writers. One exception was Al Aronowitz, the rock critic best known for introducing the Beatles to Bob Dylan and to marijuana (simultaneously) in a New York City hotel room in the summer of 1964. That year, he reported that two thousand fans “mobbed the locked metal gates of Union Station” when the Beatles performed in Washington, D.C. Then, when the Beatles came to Miami, seven thousand teenagers created a four-mile-long traffic jam at the airport, and fans “shattered twenty-three windows and a plate-glass door.”14 A plate-glass door! These are compelling images, but I found it challenging to sort through the details in some of the reports of Beatlemania, many of which read to me as improbable or at least difficult to prove. There was the actual hysteria of the fans, and then, it seemed, there was the mythmaking of that hysteria. According to unsourced early reports, some cities tried to ban the Beatles from their airports because of the cost of securing them; legend has it that carpets and bedsheets from their hotel rooms were sometimes stolen by the entrepreneurial, cut up into thousands of pieces to be sold with certificates of authenticity.15 Supposedly, an entire swimming pool in Miami was bottled up and auctioned off after the Beatles swam in it.16
The media, having little to say about the Beatles’ music, had a lot to say about the women who went “ape” for it. After the Ed Sullivan Show debut, the New York Daily News reporter Anthony Burton recapped the event, describing a “wild screaming as if Dracula had appeared on stage.”17 The Simon & Schuster editor Alan Rinzler reviewed the Beatles’ equally famous Carnegie Hall performance for The Nation a few days later with a devastating description of what would become the popular image of a boy band audience:
The full house was made up largely of upper-middle class young ladies, stylishly dressed, carefully made up, brought into town by private cars or suburban buses for their night to howl, to let go, scream, bump, twist, and clutch themselves ecstatically out there in flood lights for everyone to see and with the full blessing of all authority; indulgent parents, profiteering businessmen, gleeful national media, even the police … Later they can all go home and grow up like their mommies, but this was their chance to attempt a very safe and very private kind of rapture.18
It’s all there: the disdain, the condescension, the awe, the panic, of course the screaming. There’s even, amid the mocking, maybe a little sympathy: “this was their chance.” The media’s bewildered contempt congealed into reflexive disdain and flat dismissal. In The New York Times, a cartoon showed a young woman coyly crossing her legs and explaining to an older man, flat-faced, “But naturally they make you want to scream, daddy-o; that’s the whole idea of the Beatles’ sound.”19 Was the screaming the “whole idea”?
The conditions for the Beatles’ arrival in America could not have been more ideal—meaning they were bleak. In November 1963, the band played “Twist and Shout” at the Prince of Wales Theatre with the queen and Princess Margaret in the audience—the concert, and the hysterics of its attendees, were rebroadcast on British television a week later, to widespread concern about the level of emotion on display, but American TV reports about the event were scrapped in the wake of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. There was a pall of anxiety hanging over the entire country, and it was caused not only by the president’s death. Barbara Ehrenreich, in her accounting of what made Beatlemania take hold in the United States, quotes Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, published in February 1963. Friedan had noticed “a new vacant, sleepwalking, playing-a-part quality of youngsters who do what they are supposed to do, what the other kids do, but do not seem to feel alive or real in doing it.” She described speaking to many such teenagers, including a thirteen-year-old girl from a Westchester suburb, who seemed “not quite awake, like a puppet with someone else pulling the strings.”20 The Beatles, Ehrenreich argued many years later, had presented an opportunity.
Ehrenreich interviewed women who had been young at the peak of Beatlemania. While they had found the Beatles “sexy,” and that was certainly part of the allure, many of them had also remembered a feeling of identification: they wanted to be, like the Beatles, free. They’d wanted to go on adventures and provoke feelings—“the louder you screamed, the less likely anyone would forget the power of fans,” Ehrenreich summarized.21 The band played into this explicitly: Paul McCartney reminisced about the group’s first American tour in a 1966 interview, saying, “There they were in America, all getting house-trained for adulthood.”22 He relished relieving the girls of that imperative, even if he was more general rabble-rouser than sincere feminist. But his intentions are largely beside the point. Every generation’s boy band serves a slightly different purpose, but if there is one unifying characteristic I can see, it’s that a boy band opens up space. Infatuation is irrational but it can be a precursor to introspection. The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time. Screaming at pop music is not direct action, and screaming does not make a person a revolutionary, or even resistant, but what screaming can and does do is punctuate prolonged periods of silence.
I wanted to know how the screaming fangirl became a trope.
“Being a fan is very much associated with feminine excess, with working-class people, people of color, people whose emotions are seen as being out of control,” says Allison McCracken, an associate professor and director of the American studies program at DePaul University. “Everything is set up against this idea of white straight masculinity, where the emotions are in control and the body is in control.”23
McCracken is an expert on the history of the “crooner” in American culture, and her 2015 book Real Men Don’t Sing credits Rudy Vallée and Bing Crosby for making the blueprint for a pop sensation in the late 1920s and early 1930s.24 (Vallée was the first, and became a star on NBC’s national radio network. Crosby was positioned as his rival when he rose to fame on CBS’s competing network a few years later.) The two were, she argued, gender blurrers, who performed emotion-filled and romantic music appreciated by women and feared by many men, who were threatened by this alternative mode of what masculinity could be. The kind of ardor they inspired in the early days of music radio was seen as a problem by psychologists, by educators, by the Catholic church, and by just about every major institutional power at the time—not least because of concern over whether the crooners’ massive success meant that women had somehow wrested control of American popular culture. (McCracken emphasized that the idea that only women were fans of the crooners was a media invention—their style had long been popular with working-class white male ethnic groups, especially immigrant and first- or second-generation audiences who were “almost completely erased by the press and critics,” but who were similarly subjected to shame over their aesthetic taste.)25
As part of her research, McCracken visited the American Radio Archives in Thousand Oaks, California, to see Vallée’s personal archive of fan letters, dating back to 1928.26 She was fascinated by them because they were so full of questions—the women who were writing to Vallée were surprised by their own emotional reactions to his music and were confused by the idea of falling in love with a voice they’d heard only over the radio. “They were responding to his voice and saying, I don’t understand why I’m so happy and joyous and why you’re moving me so much,” she told me.27 “They were writing to him and saying, Can you explain what’s happening to me?”
They were also writing to journalists, in ways that may sound familiar to anyone who has witnessed a Twitter altercation between a blogger and a fan army. In 1929, the New York Daily News columnist Mark Hellinger wrote a story about Rudy Vallée, calling him obnoxious and crossing his fingers that women would soon get over him and move on to someone else. (“He has women of 50 bouncing around as though they were 15,” he complained.) “You are jealous. You are stupid. You must be insane,” one woman countered. Fans wrote to him by the thousands. Some threatened violence or told him to hang himself. When Ben Gross of the Sunday News then wrote a negative column about Vallée, a fan reportedly wrote to him: “The sweetest music to my ears would be to hear Rudy play a march at your and Hellinger’s funeral.”28
“They didn’t have the word teen yet,” McCracken told me, so that wasn’t how journalists mocked the largely female audience that adored these stars. “They used moronic at that time. Women were seen to have the minds of children.” (She clarified that this was originally a clinical term coming out of the eugenics movement, used to indicate that a person’s IQ had peaked when they were about twelve years old, and that they were “primarily emotionally rather than intellectually responsive.”) The shift from “moron” to “bobby-soxer”—the term used in the 1940s, when Sinatra was king—didn’t have anything to do with a rising estimation of women, but rather with the premise of Sinatra’s marketing and publicity. It was a purely financial decision based on the even earlier age at which fandom was starting, with younger girls who were starting to receive some of their own spending money, and one that cemented the association between crooner idols and supposedly immature audiences.
Though psychologists had started describing adolescence as a unique stage of life in the early 1900s, the word “teenager” itself wasn’t widely used until the late 1940s, McCracken explained, and the most eager speakers of the term were also marketers. They realized in the postwar boom years that far fewer kids were dropping out of school to earn money for their families, and that far more were being given allowances and plenty of leisure time. The 1950s and 1960s saw more and more products marketed explicitly to teenagers, often reinforcing the idea that they were a distinct group of people with a separate identity from their parents, and with the rise of teen-marketed products came teen-oriented TV shows during which they could be advertised. The most popular of all was Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, the after-school music and dance hour widely credited with bringing rock ’n’ roll into the white mainstream and, according to Ehrenreich, making it “the organizing principle and premier theme of teen consumer culture.”29 In 1958, a review in the Pittsburgh Courier described the show: “The kids screamed and chomped gum. Dick Clark giggled and sold more gum.”30
So long as teens existed as a lucrative market category, the industry would supply them with a “teeny-bopper” idol. When these idols were written about by journalists and critics, it was often with full acquiescence to their marketing, tinged with disdain. This was the case as recently as the 2010s, when the idol was Justin Bieber. When he performed his first sold-out show at Madison Square Garden that September, the New York Times music critic Jon Caramanica titled his review “Send in the Heartthrobs, Cue the Shrieks” and wrote that Bieber “teased the crowd with flashes of direct emotional manipulation.”31 Two years later, another Times reporter covered the release of Bieber’s latest fragrance, Girlfriend, and the girls who camped outside Macy’s overnight to be the first to purchase it. “Justin Bieber’s Girlfriend” was “not only the name of the flowery fragrance,” he observed, “but also the fervent wish of many of those who bought it.”32
By that time, One Direction was battling Bieber for the number one spot on the U.S. charts, and in the hearts of American teenagers, and Caramanica started reviewing their output with equal attentiveness. He called their 2012 sophomore album, Take Me Home, “a reliable shriek inducer in girls who have not yet decided that shrieking doesn’t become them.”33 He panned their 2013 album, Midnight Memories, writing, “They play the part almost resentfully, with the mien of people who know better … Whether this is transparent to the squealers who make up their fanbase is tough to tell.”34 Aware of the machinations of the pop industry, he situates himself in alignment with the put-upon boys, and implicitly blames the girls who love them for the fact of their presumably beleaguered existence. Caramanica invokes history to make his point without having to make it; he understands that we all know what the shrieking girls look like. It’s easy to find photos of young Beatles fans with their hands out and their faces drawn into tearful shock. It’s also easy to find nearly identical photos of Backstreet Boys fans and Justin Bieber fans and One Direction fans and BTS fans—but placing them side by side to highlight their similarity does not feel satisfying to me. Visually, it’s a neat trick, but the timelessness of a scream isn’t much of an observation.
Daniela Marino was not impressed by One Direction when she initially learned about their existence. They were too popular.
“I didn’t like them at first because they were all over my timeline on Twitter and Tumblr,” she said.35 She was eighteen at the time. But then she watched the music video for “What Makes You Beautiful” once or twice, and then she started tweeting a little bit, and a decade later she waves the rest of that history away, saying, “Now I’m here, it’s been, what, almost ten years I’ve been here with One Direction?” As a teenager in Colombia, she became one of the organizers of a major One Direction fan club, which hosted meetups, birthday parties in honor of each of the band members, and anniversary parties every July commemorating the day One Direction was formed. She was on Twitter all the time, and the president of the fan club became one of her best friends. She had no real expectation that she would ever interact with any of the band members directly, but she felt a powerful connection to them because they were the same age. “We grew up together in a way,” she told me. “They’re just this amazing part of my history and biography.”
Daniela was twenty years old in 2013, when she moved to the United States with her mother and brother so that her mother could marry a man who lived in a large suburb of Atlanta. The transition was much worse than any of them expected. “We had a lot of moments where we just wanted to go back, and we questioned if we made the right choice,” she told me. She and her mother were unfamiliar with American culture, shaky on the language, and struggled to bond with a new stepfamily. “My mom was depressed for a while,” she said. “I was basically the only person she could rely on and she was the only person I could rely on. But I couldn’t tell my mom how I was feeling or cry because that would make it worse for her.” That was when she would go back to One Direction—the music, the videos, but also the online community she had built and the responsibilities she had assigned herself. She stayed in touch with the president of the Colombian fan club, whom she by then regarded as a sister. “They helped me stay put,” she said. “Their music was always there.” When she went to her first and only One Direction concert in 2014, in Atlanta, she went alone and screamed. “As soon as I set foot in that stadium, I lost it,” she said. “I was by myself; nobody went with me. That was the best moment for me, in my life, to be honest.”
Every scream has a personal context, but we rarely hear about it. The trope of the screaming fan also ignores the possibility that some fans know they’re being looked at, and that they don’t care. “My own family kind of judge me for still liking One Direction, but I’m obviously never going to not like them,” Freya Whitfield, a fan from London, told me breezily.36 Jacob Gaspar, a fan from Ohio, told me everyone thinks it’s a joke when he says he’s a One Direction fan. “I’m a straight male, and that’s not a big demographic for One Direction fans,” he said. “But I’m like, listen, I could play you like five songs and change your mind right now.” “A lot of people think I’m putting it on but it’s a genuine thing I really enjoy,” he insisted. “They ask me stuff and I prove my knowledge.”37
This style of self-aware acquiescence to an irrational passion may always have been part of the screaming fangirl experience. In 1964, a group of girls in Encino, California, founded an organization they called Beatlesaniacs, Ltd. It was advertised as “group therapy” and offered “withdrawal literature” for fans of the Beatles who felt that their emotions had gotten out of hand. In a 1964 issue of Life magazine, the group is covered credulously. (The spread on Beatlemania features a full-page image of a girl kneeling on the ground, grass clenched in her hand, tears streaming down her face—whether or not she was actually thinking, “Ringo! Ringo walked on this grass!” that is how the photo is captioned.) The club is mentioned in a small sidebar, titled “How to Kick the Beatle Habit.” “What Beatlesaniacs Ltd. offers is group therapy for those living near active chapters, and withdrawal literature for those going it alone at far-flung outposts,” it read. “Its membership card immediately identifies the bearer as someone who needs help.”38
The club was obviously a joke. Its rules included such items as “Do not mention the word Beatles (or beetles),” “Do not mention the word England,” “Do not speak with an English accent,” and “Do not speak English.” So not only was it a joke, it was a pretty funny one! But nobody is primed to see self-critique or sarcasm in fans. Seeing them toy with their own image, recognize their own condition, or mess with anyone’s heads contradicts the popular image that has circulated for the last one hundred or so years. The Beatlesaniacs president Cheryl Tuso was later compelled to write a letter to the editor of Life clarifying that her group was not in fact attempting to stop loving the Beatles.39 They were only “campaigning against any form of behavior which might endanger the Beatles or their fans (i.e., mob riots, throwing of objects onto the stage, attacking the Beatles, etc.).” Also, they were just kidding.
When I was in college, I had a small fight with my boyfriend because I wore a “Mrs. Horan” T-shirt to a One Direction concert in Toronto. My then twelve-year-old sister made it for me in advance, and she was joking. The zebra-print letters ironed onto the back were crooked and crumbling by the time the shirt made it to Canada. It was gauche on purpose, the tackiness of “wearing the merch to the show” taken to higher heights to make for a good bit. Wearing it, I was joking. I couldn’t believe this wasn’t obvious. I was impatient texting an explanation, mostly because I was furious that I’d been made to feel embarrassed. I hadn’t really thought Niall Horan might like to marry me or that I would like to marry him—an Irish teenager whose tweets indicated that he could barely spell. In fact, at twenty years old, I didn’t think much of myself at all, so it felt like being called out for having an overly aspirational crush on the star of a sports team, or the president. I wriggled out of it by saying “Sorry” and turning off my phone. As my mom drove our minivan through the streets of Toronto, Sophie peered out the windows with my dad’s military-grade binoculars, saying it was just in case she could catch a glimpse of Niall in traffic six lanes over. Or Harry in a hotel-room window twenty stories above. She was not seriously hopeful—she was twelve, and she was kidding. She hammed it up, hunting. I laughed so hard I activated the child safety lock on my seat belt.
At the time, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to situate myself in a lineage of screaming fangirls, but it’s fun to try it now. Beatlemania was “the first mass outburst of the 1960s to feature women,” Ehrenreich wrote the year before I was born. They weren’t rioting for anything, “but they did have plenty to riot against.”40 To see or hear me and my sisters at the One Direction concert that night, early August, you would say we were hysterical. We were screaming. I can’t speak for everyone in the crowd—the Rogers Centre holds more than fifty-three thousand—but for me, it wasn’t the sight of five famous boys that made me feel like something uncommon was happening. It wasn’t the sound of their voices, which I couldn’t even hear. It was the fifty-thousand-person shouting match disguised as a sing-along, and the thunderclap of sneakers hitting concrete on every downbeat, eliminating the need to speak or catch any individual eye. Outside, the strange things we were capable of feeling were sneered at or smiled off or commercially packaged as “girl power,” but here they were rough and loud. The sounds were ugly. Our hairlines were damp and the tendons in the backs of our knees were screaming. One pair of hands looked just like every other, outstretched in the dark, lining the bottom of other people’s camera frames. We knew that our lives would not be fantasies, except for the fact that they were right now. When we shrieked, it was at the knowledge that the moment would end.