When I was twenty-five, I was lonely again. It felt clarifying, kind of like that game kids play in restaurants where they see who can hold their hand above a candle for the longest, at the closest distance. Usually, I would instigate that game and then lose immediately, but this time I was really winning.
I wouldn’t do anything interesting. I would get a cheap manicure and then browse the used bookstore near my apartment for an hour or sit in front of the bagel shop with a Diet Coke and a cup of ice for most of an afternoon. Sometimes I would walk to a junk store on the other side of Brooklyn and look at old dishes and postcards, or I would take the train all the way to the top of Manhattan to visit a diner I’d liked during my first summer in New York. I don’t know that I had anything useful to think about—mainly I was pushing into wounds from the breakup my friends were sick of hearing about and avoiding exposure to anyone who seemed happy—but it felt at least a little better than making conversation or watching television.
In the fall, I met a financial analyst I described as having goldfish eyes and cartoon hair. On our first date, I asked him to tell me a secret, and he told me that when he was sixteen, growing up in Kansas, he’d driven into the woods and been cursed by a witch who lived there. I thought this was incredible, and I reasoned I could date someone who worked in finance, so long as they were also cursed by a Kansan witch. But I actually couldn’t. I broke up with him after two months, a few days before I was set to fly to California to see the release show for Harry Styles’s second album and to find the shrine to his vomit on the freeway. I cried over it not because I was going to miss him, but because I’d have to go back to being a little freak, wandering around aimlessly and sneaking chicken salad sandwiches into buildings they shouldn’t be in. I would have to go back to dealing with myself, which had been making me so tired. Once it was done, I regretted it, and wondered if I could take it back. Simultaneously, I was thrilled. I knew that I’d done it so that I wouldn’t have to keep in touch via text while I was in California. I wanted to be totally free, and not have to try to explain my experience to anyone while it was happening. At 4:30 in the morning, getting into a car to go to the airport, I downloaded the new album, which had been released only hours before. I listened to it in the back seat, dropping in and out of sleep. But about halfway through, I opened my eyes.
“Don’t call me baby again,” Styles said, a bit petulantly, following the curious plucking of a ukulele and some hand-clapping. “It’s hard for me to go home, be so lonely.” The chorus was mostly that: “To be so lonely / To be so.” Stupidly, the taxi became a getaway car and the darkness of early morning became electric. How important that Harry Styles and I were learning about love with such similar timing, I thought, and that we are the same age. “I’m just an arrogant son of a bitch,” he said with the familiar cadence of someone who thinks that epiphanies will last. There is a cello on this song, I realized—how sweet! There was also something chant-y about it, in a soccer team way. I felt like I was jogging. It was one of the rare moments in which the shape of my life, normally hazy, took on a bright outline. There are so few things I love to do more than coughing up money for a cheap hotel, sleeping there alone, and waking up in the morning with a sight to see: a boy in pearls and high-waisted pants, for example, plus fifteen thousand people who have grounded themselves the same way I have, using someone else’s gestures and vocal tics to mark time, to help them remember, and to return them over and over to the question of who they are.
By the end of One Direction, the media’s treatment of the band’s music and its fans had changed significantly. In part, this was because of a rise in the estimation of pop music among critics, and a new focus among content makers on women’s websites for celebrating almost everything any girl did as “inspiring” and “empowering.” Guilty pleasures were to be enjoyed, not insulted, and then in the next churn of the blogging cycle, it was rude to call them guilty pleasures at all. Pop music fans also worked hard to drive these cultural changes for their own reasons, particularly within boy band fandoms. After Tumblr’s full-court press, “No Control” became a favorite among serious music writers, who started to look at the band’s work in retrospect and uncover gems they had ignored. The indie rock star Mitski recorded a cover of “Fireproof,” a song from the band’s fourth album. Zayn Malik’s solo album was reviewed by Pitchfork, then Harry Styles’s was too. It is inappropriate now to make fun of girls for screaming or boy bands for existing or anybody for liking anything—this is what we asked for, but it doesn’t feel like enough.
In the spring of 2017, Harry Styles appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone, interviewed by the music journalist and Almost Famous writer-director Cameron Crowe. It was just three months after the Women’s March, the perfect time to discuss a pop star’s entry into some version of feminism, and Styles delivered. “Who’s to say that young girls who like pop music—short for popular, right?—have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy? That’s not up to you to say,” he told Crowe, addressing an undefined audience. “Young girls like the Beatles. You gonna tell me they’re not serious? How can you say young girls don’t get it? They’re our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going.” He really went for it. “Teenage-girl fans—they don’t lie. If they like you, they’re there. They don’t act ‘too cool.’ They like you, and they tell you. Which is sick.”1 This was what they call a Big Deal online, and to this day there is hardly a piece of writing about Styles that doesn’t mention it.
I’m happy that he said that, because I know it meant something important to a lot of people. But it’s hard to celebrate the victories of fangirls the way I’d like to, because those victories are also being celebrated by the sort of people who will use them to make more money off of us. And they’re being celebrated by well-meaning people in sort of embarrassing ways—as if liking a boy band is a radical political act, the same way wearing well-designed T-shirts with punchy slogans on them is a sincere expression of feminism, and the same way Pantone creating a shade of red called “Period” is empowering for anyone who menstruates. Not all women are “our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents,” I would love to tell Harry Styles. Not all women keep the world going! And it is not, in fact, okay to like whatever you want. Some stuff is genuinely bad, like Mark Zuckerberg or the Harry Styles song “Woman.”
Many of the changes of the last few years are illusory in their generosity toward the people who have made pop music a foundation of their personal histories. As is often the case with “acceptance,” what’s really been agreed on is that women and girls are “important” enough where it makes good business sense that they be marketed to with greater specificity than they were before. This somehow winds up being as impersonal as it is invasive. I first started to notice it at the end of 2017, when Ticketmaster launched its Verified Fan product, a new technology designed to kill professional ticket scalping.2 The idea was that the program could determine—in some opaque way—who is really a fan and therefore unlikely to resell the ticket they are buying to a concert. Some artists customize the system by adding a layer of “boosts,” which are opportunities for fans to improve their position in a Ticketmaster queue by purchasing copies of the artist’s album or other merchandise. Fans who don’t have the extra money to spend on such things can perform less dignified tasks, such as watching a music video some absurd number of times. But when all is said and done, those mechanisms are frills. Really, Ticketmaster considers a “fan” any person who is not a piece of software.
Stan Twitter has also been turned into a product. It is famously annoying, and so many of its cultural contributions have slid under the radar, but its capacity for profit never has. Those with large enough followings are sometimes rewarded with access to the celebrities they love—they can boast about direct messages or handwritten notes or invitations to secret listening parties to further bolster their brands. In recent years, record labels have caught on to the possibility of making friends with these Twitter superstars, feeding them exclusive content that they can post without fear of copyright takedowns in exchange for promotion of industry-approved campaigns. I once met a Taylor Swift fan who had been paid to promote sponsored content from some of the brands Swift had endorsement deals with.3 I spoke to a Lorde fan who was offered free tickets to an award show in exchange for tweeting branded promotional images, and who had started adding public relations skills to his résumé.4 All of their work, done for free, was being repackaged into something productive.
Now brands can speak like fans, too. Whoever runs Ticketmaster’s social media accounts takes care to make it sound as if the brand itself relates to the experiences of those with a crushing love for a boy band. “My best friend in high school had a 1D ship account on Tumblr,” the company’s official Twitter account shared on One Direction’s tenth anniversary, “and when I got shipped with Niall I almost cried tears of joy.”5 This kind of thing makes me want to cry, too!
Because One Direction is dead, the girls on Twitter call them by the name “1Dead.”
The tweets tend to be cold, clear-eyed—I remember when I used to stan 1Dead, that was years ago, I was a child, haven’t heard that name in years. Or they’ll be the opposite: “life ended with 1Dead, Twitter was pointless after 2015, each year is a series of dates that used to be important and now mean nothing.” The nickname is both a sign of disrespect and a sign of unending love. It both hurts me and delights me to see it.
At its best, fandom is an inside joke that never ends. Years after some Tumblr user shared that bad second-person micro-fiction suggesting that Niall Horan had crawled into the ear of whoever was reading it, my sister came across a TikTok video of a woman my age with a gravelly voice, digitally shrinking her head down to mite size and dragging it into Niall Horan’s ear canal. “Oh, how the tables have turned,” she taunted him as she went. “Yes, sir. I am in there.”6 I can’t tell you how many times I have watched this clip, always wondering why that ridiculous post affected her the same way that it did me. Why did she remember it for so long? Why am I touching my ear?
I wrote this book in part in defense of myself, a fangirl, because I know that my experience is typical. The little indignities of being young and the big disappointments of not finding the love you want or of not becoming the person you’d hoped—these things are tempered by fandom, which is such an ugly, boring word. Fandom is an interruption; it’s as simple as enjoying something for no reason, and it’s as complicated as growing up. It should be celebrated for what it can provide in individual lives, but it should also be taken seriously for what it can do at scale—not because I like it or because being a girl is cool now, but because fans are connecting based on affinity and instinct and participating in hyperconnected networks that they built for one purpose but can use for many others. We need to know what fandom can do and what it can’t, and we need to figure out who might try to manipulate it and why. Everything we need is right in front of us. We should talk about how we went online, driven by some sort of longing, and why we stayed there, pushing that want outward, over and over, until it couldn’t be ignored.