Visiting cathedrals
Reflections on not being a super fan
Fandom is less like being in love than like being in love with love.
Michael Joseph-Gross, Starstruck
I have been thinking a bit lately about being a super-fan. Not as in, thinking of becoming a super-fan, but reflecting on the phenomenon.
I have always been someone who enjoys a lot of things at a mid level. This has been a good way to live, with plenty of room in my heart for new things. Music, art, books, tv, movie stars.. they find me and sometimes leave me at different times in my life. In fact, I can associate culture with different life stages and events. Singing Nick Cave songs to my new baby, having powerful teenage feelings about Kurt Cobain, seeing Van Gogh’s Starry Night in New York, listening to Radiohead on my disc-man when I had moved away from my hometown, watching X Files in the early years of my marriage to my ex-husband, watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and visiting James Turrell installations with my new partner.
There were things that I enjoyed as a child and a young person that imprinted on me in a special way. Contemporary art was my big thing as a teenager - people I met in my 20s like Peter Blake, Cornelia Parker and Bridget Riley were rockstars to me.
The closest I probably ever came to idolising actual rockstars was with the Scottish band Idlewild. They were on the bill at the first ever gig I went to at age 14, and I have probably seen them.. 12 times? Mostly when I was under 25 but once more recently and I am going in October. I used to buy their singles and demos at record fairs but as their sound raced away towards a more chill REM sound so did my enthusiasm. Which is not to say that I never take chance to brag about being in their music video for the song Roseability.
I keep up with the Kardashians, which has been a full time job since around 2015. They launched their reality show in 2007 and for the last 10 years I have read, watched, listened to everything about them. I think about our world and late stage capitalism through a Kardashian lens. I even tried to get the Leverhulme Trust to fund me to undertake a post doc about them (they declined, but the research will surface in another way..). I am bubbling over with trivia - I can name 13 of Kris Jenner’s grandchildren without a pause - I actually watched Revenge Body, I have lots of thoughts about whether Kourtney is more stupid since being a with Travis Barker and I am ready at the drop of a hat to discuss the throughline between Peggy Guggenheim’s curation of her own image and Kim’s Selfie book. But I don’t know if I would call it fandom.. it’s somewhere between an intellectual exercise and a guilty pleasure (guilt was definitely the dominant feeling when Kim partnered with Tesla recently).
I’ve just seen Bruce Springsteen at Anfield. I started listening to Bruce’s music during lockdown and it stuck. Unlike other music I listened to a lot during 2020 (Kanye West, Lizzo and Mott the Hoople? What can I say, it was a difficult time) Bruce has stayed with me. I gotta say it though, I am most familiar with the hits, which super fans would probably fine appalling.
I don’t live in Liverpool but I missed out on Manchester tickets. Probably because the capacity of Co op Live is 23,000 and Anfield is over 60,000. Wow. That’s so many people and it looked sold out to me from my vantage point in the top tier of the Main Stand. Months earlier as I clicked to pay several hundreds of pounds for tickets I thought, seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band at Anfield will be an incredible experience. And it was.
One of my absolute favourite thing about the concert - aside from the songs, the incredible talent of every person on the stage and the message about art standing up to authoritarianism which gave me chills - was seeing the super fans when them camera turned on them. It was like watching a spiritual experience. To touch him, to have their faces for just one second on the big screen where his face has been, to raise their hands and move their fingers in a display of connection to him, to the band, to each other. For all intents and purposes this is religion. And their spiritual leader has just exchanged his harmonica for a small bottle of whisky, which he drank on the spot to their delight.
It didn’t matter if the songs were from the 70s, or written in the wake of 9/11 or written last year. They knew every word. The centre of the energy in the whole 10s of 1000s-seater stadium was not so much on the stage as some sort of kinetic energy that existed between the musicians and the first maybe 1000 people directly in front of them. And the rest of us held both our own experience, and the power in waves from the standing crowd.
My thoughts were interrupted about 3/4s of the way though the concert by the total shock and incredible pleasure of Bruce Springsteen announcing that he was inviting a young man on to the stage. A young man who was really going places. At the moment that 82-year old Sir Paul McCartney entered the stage the whole stadium was united in a pure moment of shock and awe. The existing energy was magnified by a hundred. Bruce’s obvious joy at sharing a stage with Paul for the first time, the fact they were doing this in Liverpool, home of the Beatles, in the stadium of the team who weeks earlier had won the champions league. Two songs but an unforgettable electricity. And for me, my relatively new connection to the E Street Band was tied in a bow with my long-term connection to the Beatles, which stretches back to watching the films obsessively in childhood.
I regret not seeing Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. I tried to sign up for tickets to see it in Liverpool but when I didn’t get tickets I gave up. Not enough of a fan. Later I thought, I could have travelled! I could have seen it in Lisbon or London! Probably more so than seeing her, I wanted to experience the phenomenon. I wanted to absorb some of the energy of the Swifties first hand, I wanted to see their joy and maybe take home a little piece manifest in a friendship bracelet. Fortunately we do have the fabulous writing of Taffy Brodesser-Akner to live the experience through.
Going back to Bruce and the E Street Band. The super fans were normal looking people- teenagers, others walking on crutches, couples, grandparents, in mid-life and introducing their young children to the experience. In their every day lives they probably don’t get to create resonances that fill a stadium. Or maybe they do? Maybe they channel their super fan energies into the every day.
Unless a new super fandom finds me, I will never know what it feels like to carry that with me. From the outside, it seems like being a super fan is like flying, total immersion, turning off critical thought and giving in to faith and connection to the band and to their fellow fans. I take a huge amount of pleasure from joining these people in the cathedrals in which they practice. But I will probably never know what it feels like to have the faith.