The fandom phenomenon

August 9, 2010 - 8:17AM

Michael Jackson fans mourn his death in Beijing. Photo: AFP

Why do fans take things so personally? Long-suffering R.E.M. acolyte Barry Divola puts himself and other tragics on the stand.

Sometimes I think my fandom, like my hair, is a thing of the past. Then four little words can turn me back into a sad, obsessive geek.

"It's a personal favourite," writes R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck in the liner notes to the recently re-released deluxe edition of the band's 1985 album Fables of the Reconstruction. "Oh no, it's not!" I exclaimed on reading his words, in a voice worryingly like that of a six-year-old girl who has felt wronged in some way.

You see, I know things. I am a fan. For me and R.E.M., the first kiss happened when I walked into my local record shop in 1983 to redeem a gift voucher. Flicking through the racks, I saw a record cover that intrigued me. It was a photograph of what looked like the surface of another planet, but was in fact thick tangles of kudzu grass in the American south. The album was R.E.M.'s debut, Murmur. I had no idea who R.E.M. were, but I loved that cover, which impelled me to hand over the voucher and take the album home. As soon as the stylus of my turntable hit the vinyl and those first snare cracks at the beginning of Radio Free Europe rang out, I was a goner.

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R.E.M's Michael Stipe. Photo: Reuters

On my first trip to the US, I undertook a pilgrimage (yes, Pilgrimage is the name of a song from Murmur; yes, I thought this was significant) to Athens, the college town in Georgia where they came from. This wasn't as a journalist but as a hopelessly devoted geek. I wanted to see for myself the place that had produced this music I loved. You can basically experience everything Athens has to offer in about 48 hours. I hung around for a week.

In 1985 I adored and treasured Fables of the Reconstruction, but I know that R.E.M. didn't like it at all. In fact, they were depressed and on the verge of breaking up when they made it. They felt unprepared and they were stuck recording in miserable March in London. Michael Stipe called the record "dark, dank and paranoid". The producer Joe Boyd later said: "I know the group doesn't like it, and that's obviously a source of disappointment to me." And Buck himself said this of the closing track: "I always hated Wendell Gee."

R.E.M. and I had a good run and were happy together for a long time, but then we drifted apart. Every serious fan knows that the band vowed that if one of the group left, they would break up. In 1997, drummer Bill Berry left. R.E.M. continued. They started to suck. I knew they would. It's a fan's job to know. Up (1998) and Reveal (2001) didn't completely suck, but they weren't particularly good, either. Around the Sun (2004) sucked so hard that the band could have been sponsored by Electrolux.

Fans set up a makeshift camp a week before the LA screening of Twilight Eclipse.

So, why do I still care so much? Why, as an otherwise rational human being, can Buck's words suddenly send me hurtling back to 1985?

"It's not irrational," says Cornel Sandvoss, senior lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey and author of the books Fans and A Game of Two Halves. "Being an R.E.M. fan is one of the strands of your identity. You believed the band to be one thing and they turned out differently, hence expectation is disappointed."

The late, great American music writer Lester Bangs once wrote: "It's tough having heroes. It's the hardest thing in the world. It's harder than beng a hero."

I know exactly what he meant. Heroes can let you down and fans feel it so keenly because they feel they know their heroes so well. "Knowing" a star is, of course, a relative term. Even though fans have probably never met their idol, and probably never will, they spend so much time studying them, gathering information about them, obsessing over them and sharing with other fans in online and real-life communities that in many ways they do know them.

"Fans become so highly knowledgeable that they can interpret new material, career changes, marketing strategies and so on in the light of years of previous engagement," says Dr Matt Hills, reader in Media and Cultural Studies at Cardiff University and author of the book Fan Cultures. "Fandom brings with it a keen sense of discrimination and distinction, as fans evaluate highs and lows in an idol's output."

When the idol doesn't conform to expectations, the backlash can cause whiplash. Bob Dylan experienced this when he picked up an electric guitar in 1965. Many Elvis Costello fans - and I count myself among that greying, geeky collective - wish he'd keep making his first five albums over and over again. Woody Allen satirised his own fanbase when he had an encounter with an alien in the 1980 film Stardust Memories, who told him: "We enjoy your films. Particularly the early funny ones." In the most extreme case of fan retribution, Mark Chapman was so incensed that John Lennon had sold out and become a phony (in Chapman's opinion) that he shot him dead in 1980.

"Fans care intensely about their fan objects, but they also tend to value consistencies and ongoing narratives," Hills says. "Fandom doesn't always deal so well with changes - line-up changes, bands breaking up and so on can all affect the 'authenticity' of the fan object in the fans' eyes."

Both Hills and Sandvoss are at pains to point out that fandom gets bad press. Yes, the love between fan and idol is unrequited and fandom does blur the line between fantasy and reality, but, then again, they say, so does "real" love between two people. We can be let down by a romantic partner just as easily as we can be let down by a pop star, because we have expectations of them both. Hills sees fandom as an "energising passion", where the love can be shared with other fans, as they build communities of like-minded people.

Indeed, fan communities can become so strong that fandom becomes more about the fans than the stars. The British journalist Sheryl Garratt has written about her Bay City Rollers fandom as a teenager in the 1970s.

"Looking back now, I hardly remember the gigs themselves, the songs, or even what the Rollers looked like," she wrote in the 1984 book Signed, Sealed And Delivered: True Stories of Women in Pop. "What I do remember are the bus rides, running home from school together to get to someone's house in time to watch Shang-a-Lang on TV, dancing in lines at the school disco and sitting in each others' bedrooms discussing our fantasies and compiling our scrap-books. Our real obsession was with ourselves: in the end, the actual men behind the posters had very little to do with it at all."

My 1998 book Fanclub had the subtitle It's a Fan's World, Pop Stars Just Live in it. I spent a year diving headfirst into the rabbit hole that is pop music fandom to find out what made the devoted so devoted. I attended Abba and Kiss conventions. I put a Sherbet and a Skyhooks fan in a room together to see if only one would emerge alive. I hung out with fans at airports at five in the morning waiting for a member of Take That to arrive. And at the book launch, all these different fans got along famously. My Kiss fan, a dreadlocked metal dude, chatted amiably with my Abba fan, a gay man who liked to dress up as Frida, and my Duran Duran fan, a magazine writer in her 30s who admitted she still had a piece of paper that she'd rubbed up against Nick Rhodes's dirty car in the '80s. They mightn't have understood each other's tastes, but they understood each other's enthusiasm and obsession. Fans speak the same language, it's just the dialects that are slightly different.

Twelve years later, there's one fan from Fanclub I particularly wonder about. Her fandom was extraordinary. She spoke about her idol with such passion and conviction, and she even managed to get up onstage at a Sydney concert in 1996 and dance with him. In the intervening years, so much had happened to her idol, and none of it was good - he'd been in a court case involving allegations of child molestation, he'd been criticised for dangling his own child over a hotel balcony, his stalled career and money problems had been pilloried by the media and then, on June 25 last year, he died of a heart attack at 50.

Yes, Loretta Tolnay was a Michael Jackson fan. Back then she told me that she would quite literally take a bullet for him, because "in the bigger picture and the greater scheme of things, I'm more dispensable than he is". But that was a long time ago. Would the light of fandom have dimmed in the intervening years?

No, as it turns out. Tolnay is now a 37-year-old learning and development consultant. The night before Jackson died, Tolnay went to bed happy. She had just found out she was pregnant with her second child. The next morning her phone rang with the bad news about her idol.

"My first reaction was disbelief, then horror when I realised it was true," she says. "I sobbed every day for weeks. I put on my work face and went into the office, but I kept running into the bathroom in tears. I couldn't control it. It was terrible."

In the following weeks, Jackson's music was played on the radio more than it had been in years. Normally Tolnay would have been happy and proud of that, but something had changed for her.

"There's a weight in my heart whenever a song of his comes on now," she says. "It makes me realise he's no longer with us and there's going to be no new music and I'll never get to see him on stage again. Unfortunately, I just can't separate the music from the sadness at the moment. I'm a grown woman with a little family, but it still affects me so much. I hope that will pass."

Tolnay and her husband like to say they met through a mutual friend. Eduardo Bolton was also a Jackson fan, who happened to work at the Sheraton on the Park when the star was staying there on his 1996 tour. Bolton wasn't rostered to work the day that Jackson was arriving but worked for free so he could carry the star's bags to his room. A year later, Tolnay was at the hotel and on a whim decided to inquire about having a look at the presidential suite on the pretext that she was planning a function - in reality she wanted to see the place where Jackson married Debbie Rowe in 1996. The person on the desk that night was Bolton, who immediately recognised her as the girl who danced on stage a year beforehand.

The two started dating and in 2003 they decided to marry. Tolnay sent a letter to Jackson. She included photos of the two of them on stage and wrote, "I just wanted to let you know that that moment where I danced with you onstage was the catalyst for two people meeting, and we're getting married this year."

Later that year, the compilation album Number Ones was released. There in the liner notes it says: "'L'" and 'E' - to the future with all my love. Love, Michael Jackson."

"I was so proud and happy that before he died, he knew his life had such a huge impact on these two people all the way around the other side of the world," she says. "If it wasn't for him and our shared appreciation of him, Eduardo and I would never have met. And I was glad that Michael got to hear a good story from some fans, instead of all these people trying to extort money from him or bring him down. He deserved to know that."

In 2008, when Tolnay gave birth to her first child, she dearly wanted to call him Michael. Unfortunately, her married name is Bolton. Even fans have limits. She settled for Miguel.