The problem with fan studies
Are we entrenching stan culture instead of dissecting it?
I’ve been thinking about contemporary fan studies since reading Idolcast’s post on the K-Pop variant and in light of yet another college course being offered on Taylor Swift’s Literary Legacy at Canada’s Queen’s University.
This college class is far from the first (or the last) on Swift’s brand, and she is far from the only celebrity whose brand is being treated with reverence by higher ed.
There’s even a Psychology of Taylor Swift course offered at Arizona State. You’d think that might offer an incisive look into Swiftie fan psychology, but no. According to PhD student Alexandra Wormley, who will be teaching the class, they arrived at the syllabus as such: “We went through a different album of hers and talked about related psychology topics.”
That’s a far cry from the fan psychology/stan culture dissection that I believe is so deeply needed.
Perhaps you think I’m too hard on Swift and her fans specifically, but I don’t think they are the problem; it’s the way the fan hagiographies are embraced and promoted so readily by those who should know better that really bothers me. It’s the ahistoricism and the apparent steel-blinders that are being erected and buttressed by academia and legacy media.
This isn’t about Taylor Swift, the person, or even Taylor Swift, the brand: it’s about the elevation of fan lore into official narratives, it’s about enshrining fan-sourced press releases as historical documents.
[A]lmost everything in K-Pop Studies today is about fan consumption within the K-Pop Kayfabe. References inserted into music videos specifically for fans to find are treated as sacred totems of the idols’ true beliefs rather than references inserted for fans to find and discuss—whether that’s politics or shipping. The lack of interest in the production or even the domestic reception of this material is breathtaking.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with enjoying the music under Swift’s brand—and I word it as such very deliberately. While universities are endorsing the framing of her music as a confessional genius and a genuine contribution to the literary canon, the reality is she is only one of the puzzle pieces involved in writing it, and the songs and the albums are but one facet of her brand, and I’m not sure if it’s even the most important part of it.
Swift’s sonic contribution to the literary canon has been co-created with multiple people who outsource their work to those who can pay for it. Most notable of these co-creators is Max Martin, the Swede who is third in the list of songwriters with the most number-one singles in the history of Billboard’s Hot 100 chart.
The two songwriters ahead of him? Paul McCartney and John Lennon, who Martin will no doubt pass at some point.
People Magazine made the bold claim that Martin has written “every pop song you’ve ever loved,” which is overshooting it, but it would be fair to say that if you have been listening to any mainstream music outlets between 1996 and now, you will be familiar with at least a handful of his songs.1
You can certainly question how much input Martin had with any of the songs that bear his name. But we know what his proteges (whose own collaborations litter the charts as well) have to say about his work.
“Martin is known to insist that the artists he works with sing his songs exactly the way he sings them on the demos. In a sense, Spears, Perry, and Swift are all singing covers of Max Martin recordings,” says John Seabrook, author of The Song Machine.
I might not be able to clock a Martin song on a first listen, but those in the know seem to find his work instantly recognizable, as Stereogum’s Michael Nelson claims, “It’s not a coincidence that I can hear a song on the radio anywhere, everywhere, and even if I don’t know the singer, I can still recognize the voice.”
Do not misunderstand me: I am not saying that we should be studying Max Martin instead of the human brands that peddle his product. He is also but a puzzle piece, one of the cooks in the kitchen behind the oh-so-personal and intimate lyrics and melodies we’re being spoonfed.
I feel very strongly that there are many aspects of modern fandom/standom that can and should be investigated and researched. But this requires an unflinching look at the bigger picture, the way fans are manipulated and manipulate, the role of industry and independent agents in narrative formation, and the psychology behind the backlashes that I refer to as crises of faith rather than tantrums.
It’s the relationships between the fans and the brands, the relationships between the fans themselves, that are having a significant impact on our culture. And if we want to look at the product itself, then surely we should be looking at the context it thrives in rather than just what the fans are telling themselves about their idols?
We give stans so much credit, but they are hagiographers, not historians. They are believers, not analysts. They are sitting ducks for marketing departments, not empowered consumers.
This isn’t to say there isn’t space for these types of works— believers are permitted their manifestos and hagiographies, their letters of worship. But that’s all we’re being offered right now.
I’m writing about my own fandom experience because I know I’m not the only one to have been swept into such a tornado of belief and manipulation. I have my own biases and anti-fandom struggles, and I try to be as transparent about that as possible because modern fandom is fundamentally a group construct.
This also isn’t about Swift herself. She isn’t an anomaly: she’s just a very convenient, currently hyper-visible example of the modern-day celebrity brand. She’s in the middle of a publicity cycle, after all.
There are plenty of Youtube compilations and a very long Wikipedia entry to peruse if you doubt this, but let’s just say he’s worked with: Lizzo, Coldplay, Ed Sheeran, Adele, The Weeknd, Katy Perry, Pink, Ariana Grande, Maroon 5, Justin Timberlake, Daughtry, Bon Jovi, Adam Lambert. He was the go-to for Britney Spears, ‘N sync and Backstreet Boys when they were competing against one another in the charts.
I stumbled on your blog on Notes, and I am having a great time reading through older posts when I take a break from work during the day. Thanks for your writing.
Anyway, here's one perspective from someone who's working in an English department: academics really want to avoid seeming like elitists. In my discipline, this attitude stems from the long "canon wars" of, largely, the 80s and 90s. Scholars focusing on women's literature, African American literature, and literature from other marginalized groups began arguing that many "artistic" judgments (e.g., "women's literature from the 19th century is sentimental and psychologically shallow") were actually prejudicial and parochial. In many, many cases, I think they were right. Unfortunately, this substantive debate was eventually simplified into the assumption that any kind of artistic judgment, especially of popular art or literature, was potentially classist, racist, misogynistic, and so on. But, as the lit critic Michael Clune argues in his book A Defense of Judgment, this often means that the only method left for valuing art is by how it performs in the marketplace and in consumer culture. To avoid seeming biased or elitist, I think that some academics avoid criticizing things that are very popular. The results, as you suggest, can often be a studied credulity among academics, a refusal to transcend or criticize the dictates of consumer taste. Which is precisely what you'd hope academics would be capable of doing.
And Max Martin has surpassed John Lennon, this past March!
This post reminds me of bible classes in my high-school (in Israel), where I had very good teachers and the text was studied as a human artifact, treated as a document created at a time and place with a political agenda, and compared to such other texts as the Tale of Gilgamesh and the law code of Hammurabi as literary precedents/ context. These were much more interesting than the classes that just took the bible to be sacred, transcending/ beyond/ apart of history and our world.