Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

Post by Danielle Tocchet and Sarah Reynolds

After doing the readings on music fandom for this week, we decided to look into online fan communities and focus on the fascination with music personalities as well as the commoditization of music. As two girls who grew up during the heyday of boy bands, *NSYNC was the first fan following that came to mind and, thus, became the topic of our fan artifact presentation. In our search for artifacts, we found a website that seemed to aptly illustrate common music fandom behavior. NSYNCery.com highlights many similarities between music fandom and the other fandoms we have already studied in this class as well. Apart from the typical photo galleries, band bios, and news updates that many music fan sites contain, this site also includes fan fiction, fan art, fan poetry, and a pen pal section where *NSYNC fans can locate other fans around the world to share in the *NSYNC fan community. Another really interesting feature of the site was a series of “obsession quizzes.” These quizzes essentially test the intensity of fans’ obsessions with the group as a whole and with individual band members specifically based on meeting certain criteria, such as, “Your friends keep telling you that you are sad and your *NSYNC obsession is constantly getting worse and you will end up in a mental hospital if you don’t snap out of it.” This quote seems to reinforce the saying we have used over and over in this class to explain interactions among fans:”I laugh because I understand.” The fans on this site have created a safe community in which they can share their intense emotional attachments to *NSYNC without being judged by the people who do not “understand.”

Once we found this site, we thought the Cavicchi article was particularly useful in understanding the content of our fan artifact. In talking about the origins of music fandom in the mid-nineteenth century, Cavicchi pays close attention to the star quality of musicians that seems to spark fan attention. He writes, “the act of loving music often idealized identification with performers” (238). He uses the example of Jenny Lind, a Swedish opera singer, to illustrate this more personal connection between fan and artist and argues that although Lind fans enjoyed her music, they were just as entertained and fascinated by her personal character. In fact, it sometimes appeared that the personal character of the star was more appealing to fans than the music was. We also found the Scodari piece to be important in understanding the additional romantic attachment many fans develop toward objects of music fandom. This is extremely relevant to the types of practices *NSYNC fans are partaking in on this website. Although these fantasies exist in other fandoms, Scodari draws a distinction between the different types of fans by arguing that these feelings and practices are often intensified when the subjects in question are real-life people rather than fictional characters (54).

We also wanted to talk about the commoditization of music briefly since we think it played a significant role in the *NSYNC fandom. Although Cavicchi intended his arguments for music fandom in the 19th century, the commoditization of music can be applied to current day fandom too. Cavicchi discusses that Boston “first created markets around making music, including sheet music publishing and instrument sales” as one of the results of the popularity of the music industry (237). In current day, this could be akin to sales of *NSYNC cd’s, the popularity of websites such as www.lyrics.com, and perhaps the use of the pop band songs in Karaoke bars. However, Cavicchi also mentions the early trend of consumer culture around goods that are unrelated to the music, and rather more relevant to the fandom surrounding the “stars” themselves, discussed above. Cavicchi writes, “with the growth of the music press at mid-century, including regular reviews and the use of lithography and photography for circulating images of musical stars, scrap-books supplanted diaries and sheet music binders as music lovers most useful tool, able to contain descriptive writing, clippings of reviews, and images” (243-244). The use of the word scrapbook, although likely unintentional on the part of Cavicchi, led us to a connotation of teeny-boppers making *NSYNC collages and scrapbooks. This leads us to another interesting fan artifact(s), which is the varied and quite interesting eBay search results for *NSYNC: http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&_trksid=m37&satitle=nsync&category0=, which include bobble-head dolls, tee-shirts, barbies, cd’s and much, much more. Finally, if we had gone back in time a few years, we could have found *NSYNC tickets on sale for hundreds of dollars for the big concerts on this site. The evolution of what Cavicchi calls “commodification of music in concerts” certainly occurred, although now it is perhaps more than what he terms “the ways in which hearing could become a form of consumption,” as the performance part of the concert (the dancing, special effects, and the star’s speeches) has become of increased importance during the boy band era (248).

Discussion Questions:

1. Similar to in other fandoms, we face the question of where to draw the line on who is a fan and who is not. How would we attempt to do so in music fandom? (See Cavicchi 248-249)
2. How do we distinguish fandoms that revolve more around the music and those that revolve almost solely around the celebrity? Is it a distinction we have to make?
3. How had the existence of sites like YouTube, where we can see the musicians perform their songs, affected the importance of the commodification of concerts?
4. With increased media (MTV, celebrity sites etc), have music fandoms become less about the music? Or has this trend always existed?
5. There are some fans who worry that their favorite band may be tainted somehow by entering the music mainstream through the radio, TRL, etc. How do we fit these fans into the big picture of fandom?