Suzanne Harrington: Taylor Swift fan culture is too bland — and too sterile
Eras Stadium On Edinburgh Swift In Her Taylor Date: 7, June The Friday During Picture At 2024 Tour Performs Murrayfield Stage
As I pack for Glastonbury – wellies, factor 50, rain poncho, sun glasses, tent, blow up bed, earplugs, paracetamol, HRT – I’m thinking about the woman who flew with her nine-year-old from New York to Edinburgh so the kid could go to a Taylor Swift concert.
That’s 5,245km across the north Atlantic for a gig. Makes my slow drive to southwest England in a rackety car seem a bit, well, could-try-harder.
Being a fan is hard graft. Glastonbury sold out in 20 minutes, which I why I will spend eight hour days hoovering dressing rooms and restocking mini-fridges, in return for a ticket and a tent space behind the Pyramid Stage (hence the earplugs).
In exchange for an access-all-areas wristband, we dressing room zhuzhers have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, although these days headline acts are all about green juice, Pilates and mindfulness, making such documents redundant.
The debauchery happens further afield, where the famous fear to tread.
Still, it could be worse. I could be a superfan, or the parent of a superfan.
To be honest I’m a bit scared of superfans, and not just Taylor Swift’s righteous army of lip-glossed zealots who police reactions to their idol as though she were the head deity of a particularly touchy religion.
You’d be wary of any superfandom that demands high levels of conformity and brand loyalty, where the focus of your adoration is not art but product: bland, shiny, desexualised, ubiquitous, an avatar for mass merch consumption.
Sorry Taylor, nothing personal.
Fan culture has become unhinged in all the wrong ways: obsessive, puritanical, expensive, and insanely well-groomed. Sterile and self-monitoring.
Whatever happened to old-school fan culture like those teenage Beatles fans who peed themselves in excitement, ripped the seats out of venues, flung themselves on moving vehicles and rioted?
I know it’s classic for older people to spout on about back in the day. Your parents did it (banging on about ‘the hop’) and now you’re doing it. Banging on about ‘the rave’.
And yet as you observe the legions of immaculately turned-out fans chasing corporate superstars around the planet, clutching their iPhone15s, as they upload every second, every moment, you may find yourself thinking wistfully of long closed venues, of squatted warehouses and 10K rigs in fields, the thumping music that went on for days.
Where glorious dishevelment was de rigueur and unrecorded.
Attempting a re-enactment of such magical times would these days induce a hip replacement, possibly a nervous breakdown, but at least we oldies know what it felt like to go wild in the country, feral in the city.
How it felt to be scruffy, skint, phoneless and free, making it up as we went along instead of part of a digitally organised army of consumerist ultras.
Capitalism has eaten fandom, and regurgitated a mutant strain that doxxes and death threats its apostates.
What a relief then, to know that after a hard day’s Glasto-hoovering, there’ll be bands like Fontaines, Kneecap and Sprints to jump around to in a field, not a stadium.
After a fistful of preventative paracetamol, obviously.
