The Pop Corporation

Once upon a time in the days of black and white and the British pound being split up into unfathomable fractions, fans of football teams would clap and twirl their rattles, cheering on their favourite football team and having a pint or six, with a hard luck to or from the opposing fanbase.

Something changed in the 1970s and onward, where a small but incredibly noticeable faction of fans began to indulge in a number of incendiary and toxic ways.

For some, it was no longer enough to simply give a football club your time and money – you needed to prove to other fans that you were the meanest, most devoted group of fans on earth and anyone who stood in your way would get flattened.

You’d out-sing them. You’d play dirtier. You’d resort to violence if needed. For some, it was a weekend diversion to completely indulge yourself and further fuse your identity to the thing you were fanatical about. Some would go even further, egged on by the extreme behaviour of others. Regularly, it couldn’t remain self contained and it would spill out into public places, leaving a path of destruction in its wake.

We love this thing more than you love your thing, and woe betide anyone who tries to knock us off course, right?

Over the past decade, pop fandom has changed and in some cases, the similarity between pop culture and sports culture is a troubling one. In both instances, we see huge corporations, be they clubs or the assorted people around a group or singer, making millions of pounds from these toxic fanbases, selling them merchandise which is a direct way of showing your allegiance to someone or something, and doing very little other than lip service to dissuade these fanatics from curbing their actions and watching what they say.

In both instances, perfectly well behaved fans are wary of the ultra-keen people they encounter, and in sports the working class are demonised, whereas pop fandoms, we’re more likely to see misogyny or homophobia at play. Of course, there are super devoted fans who are totally harmless in pop, just as it is in sports. Equally, you wonder if this transpose into the often pointless tribalism in technology with phones, consoles, and the rest?

You see the way Stans relegate other artists based on chart performance, just like fans of big clubs deriding other teams for a lack of trophies and what-have-you. The accolades, the money rolled in, the size of stadiums, everything boringly tangible is weaponised against others, despite fanbases being little to do with the creative successes of those landing shiny prizes and courting large audiences. Stan Twitter talks about pop like Sports Twitter talks about fantasy teams and spread bets – it’s wild that they’re so at odds with each other, because they’ve got so much in common, being able to draw on obscure knowledge at the drop of a hat, whether anyone asked for it or not.

We’ve seen Chappell Roan sharing her worry about the toxic nature of modern pop fandom, which has been met with a degree of anger from certain quarters and huge support elsewhere. If football hooliganism left athletes feeling unsafe, the same can be said for anyone achieving any level of stardom in the current pop climate.

While sports saw fist-fights in the streets, pop stans are worried about people contacting their families and doxxing their workplaces, harassing them in the streets and indulging in online campaigns against other pop fandoms.

Celebrities, it seems, are the most frightened they’ve felt since Charles Manson sent his charges to the Hollywood hills and the hippies had to put fences around their homes.

And what’s so obvious in the current climate is that people feel more at ease abusing celebrities and the sense of ownership over them, because ‘we’ made you famous. Footballers are verbally abused because ‘we’ pay your wages, and pop stars can’t speak out about their harassment because ‘we’ gave you fame.

As ever, young famous people are finding it difficult to navigate this environment, because addressing the weird fans is read as berating ALL fans. When a famous person raises concerns, they’re not talking to normal fans – they’re speaking to the troubling minority. However, it is almost always misread, sometimes intentionally by bad actors who stand to gain from the ensuing mess.

Hooligans are a minority, just as toxic fans are. While there’s some comfort in that, it’s the minority that generate the most noise.

The fact that there is anger about being tarred with such a brush is also part of the problem. If you respond to a reasonable request with anger, then your anger needs to be looked at also, because as Roan said, in this set of circumstances, celebrities and athletes alike, don’t owe you shit.

One of the encouraging things in pop terms, is that young people are better equipped to hear a message like Roan’s. There will absolutely be some thinking done with a number of fanbases who want to be respectful of someone’s wishes while still being able to be fanatical in their support.

Not since The Beatles and their Beatlemania, and someone like Michael Jackson have we seen this level of ultra devoted fandom. If modern fans are able to navigate this in a better way than fans that came before, then we can avoid the tragedies of the aforementioned. Jackson became a worrying eccentric recluse, and Mark Chapman murdered John Lennon. While Taylor Swift’s personal jet usage is problematic, you can see why she is worried for her safety given that we’re now afforded the chance to track her movements, which wasn’t a thing in previous decades.

While football hooliganism hasn’t gone back to the dark days of the ’80s, there has been a resurgence in recent years. Pop stans have created a new, feverish level of enthusiasm which has clearly been enabled by record companies creating 360 deals so that people feel closer to the artists they love, and we’re all crossing our fingers that nothing boils over into something awful happening.

A mixture of COVID lockdowns, social media, 360 deals, artists singing about their feelings and identity issues have seen a kind of symbiotic relationship developing between musicians and pop lovers, and a new breed of fan has been created.

There’s no reason why young pop fans can’t work this out and learn from the mistakes of the past, and navigate this new territory themselves. It feels like this current breed of pop fans will be able to have an intelligent discussion about all of this in the coming months – we hope so, for everyone’s sake.