Fan Culture @ Swarthmore

Danielle Tocchet

Full Paper: fan-culture-tocchet.pdf

I will be looking at the relationship between The Beatles’ popularity and the mass production and promotion of Beatles paraphernalia in the growing mass media consumer market of the early to mid 1960s. The news and media at the time had a significant role in prolonging and bolstering the hysteria surrounding the Four Mop Tops from Britain. When The Beatles played a gig, newspapers did not write stories about how well the band had performed, but wrote instead about the scenes of chaos and hysteria they had caused. Using a couple of the most comprehensive biographies of The Beatles, I will argue that it was the combination of the individual personalities of the four Beatles that started the large fan following surrounding the group, and that once the media got involved, the business world recognized the “biggest marketing opportunity since Walt Disney had created Mickey Mouse.” This led to the mass production of Beatles paraphernalia and created a music fandom rooted in popular culture and the creation of star identities, rather than the music itself. I will also use the essays in Fandom to draw similarities and differences between other forms of music fandom, but this proves difficult because Beatlemania is such an extreme example.

Ileana Quintano

Full Paper: “Boys Don’t Cry”: The Search for Masculinity in the Indie Rock Community

Abstract: This paper will explore the participation of white heterosexual males in the fandom of indie (short for “independent”) music as a mechanism employed to cope with their insecurities, specifically ones concerning their perceived masculinity. Many male indie fans who have at one point or another during their lives been labeled with demasculinizing pejoratives, such as “queer” or “fag”, feel a connection to male indie stars who fit the cast of the sensitive poet. Indie stars tend to be deemed unmasculine because the sensitivity they convey in their lyrics and because of their physical appearance which tends to be of an effeminate nature. On top of that, such artists often find themselves the center of female fan attention, a clear indicator to male fans that they could easily attract girls without having to indulge in the macho persona of more mainstream culture. Instead, inspired by their indie idols, they take a more poetic route to the hearts of young women.

Ari Klafter

Full paper: fan-culture-klafter.pdf

Abstract: I look at common notions of fans of metal music and see how they match up with real life examples of fans. I interviewed students on campus and people in the Ville, asking them what comes to mind when they think of a metal fan. Using posts from message boards on the official websites of two popular metal bands–Metallica and Black Sabbath–as well as several examples of metal fans on campus and one article, I was able to compare them to the testimonies I collected. Save those concerning style, I found these common ideas about metal fans to be invalid.

Lauren Smith

Full paper: Popslash and Bandom: Two Waves of Celebrity Fandom
Popslash and Bandom: Appendix (Sources)

Abstract: Fans of popular musicians often extend their interest to the personal lives of those musicians, following their activities through entertainment journalism. Some fans transform this news about their favorite artists into narratives that are dramatic, not journalistic, and congregate online to share their stories, which range from write-ups of actual events to purely fantastical fiction. Many of these fans write and read “slash” fiction, which pairs musicians in homosexual relationships, usually between men. In this paper, I plan to examine two movements of such celebrity fandom from the last decade– “popslash”, which focused on boybands, and “bandslash”, which focuses on emo bands”, and conclude that academics studying fan relationships to popular media should mirror some of the practices of celebrity fans themselves in acknowledging mass-culture influences upon their own ideas. (To follow my own advice, I’m attaching an appendix of quotations and links to the sources of my own understanding of celebrity music fandom.)