if this is how we treat our heroes, i'm scared for our enemies
indie musician x social media x parasocial relationship discourse... let's stop trying to usher in the fall of the midwest princess
Chappell Roan, who has skyrocketed to broader mainstream fame truly rapidly in recent months, has once again asked her fans to try being normal. The not normal that she is talking about is a pretty wide range: getting upset when she’s not excited to be shouted at in public or wanting to take a photo, stalking her family, dissecting her life online. “I’m a random bitch, you’re a random bitch. Just think about that for a second, OK?” she says in one of the TikToks. Just think about that for a second. She’s not just pixels on a screen.
Being a famous musician (or other type of artist) might not be fathomable to most of us with other jobs, but it remains a job which means it also involves times when you’re not doing it. I think Jennette McCurdy does an incredible job illustrating the disruptive, tone-deafness of a benign fan approaching for a photo in her memoir. Sometimes shit is happening and you happen to be out and about. Not the time for someone to be coming up to you. Sometimes you just don’t want to be perceived. Taking a photo with a fan is actually not in anyone’s job description unless it’s some kind of VIP experience that specifically promises that. It should be an honor or a compliment that anyone wants to take a photo with you! It can be conceptually an honor and experientially a violation or inconvenience.
Most art is not usually a service that the artist is providing for you specifically. You are not “paying their bills” and you are not their boss. Even if you were, some fans are STILL acting deeply inappropriately in the ways they convey their disapproval and the things that they disapprove about.
This happens a lot more to female artists and celebrities, and perhaps especially to singer-songwriters who have developed a fanbase who strongly identify with their music for its sharing of intimate experiences. It is harder to parse what’s real and what’s a persona for musicians who are often mining their personal experiences and often performing under their real names (Chappell Roan actually makes a point of differentiating between Chappell Roan, her stage name and persona, and her real life and identity). But the answer also isn’t that hard—everyone is always performing to some level, and as John Mulaney says with emphasis in his most recent comedy special, don’t trust the persona. It is also suspicious to me how often the idea that female artists should be grateful and therefore uncritical of their experience of fame, as though it is a gift bestowed upon them and not a product of hard work, talent, circumstance, and luck (which it is for everyone).
Someone disclosing something vulnerable never, in any situation, gives you free rein to speculate or critique. Having an opinion might be unavoidable, but choosing to share your opinion and believing your opinion is relevant and necessary is a judgment call. There is a difference between being entitled to your opinion and being entitled to a person. You are never entitled to the latter, whether or not you know them.
Another part of this that absolutely confounds me is the way so many people are eager to dismiss Chappell Roan and others musicians’ concerns as superfluous and “part of the job.” There is an eagerness to claim they deserve weird fucked up parasocial relationships and criminal stalking and harassment because they’ve also gotten to achieve some career dreams, as though playing Gov Ball means you cede the right to privacy. The underlying logic here is deeply unsettling in its preference for shitting on individuals instead of considering how we might make conditions better for everyone and the strange, impractical implication that people to whom good things have happened cannot lament any bad things that have happened. The latter would ultimately disqualify everyone, making it feel like we should all put our heads down and keep our mouths shut like good little cogs in a weird machine. The former justifies how things are now without question, denying the social and political imagination necessary to envision a healthier fan/artist relationship for all parties involved.
Eliza McLamb, a singer-songwriter and writer, points out that there is also the unease beyond the surface-level interaction: “I see this kind of frenetic energy in Roan’s videos. It’s not just “the picture” or “the hello;” it’s the convergence of online admiration and real-world interaction. It’s the all-consuming knowledge that people are consuming you.” Why would you put anything out in public then? I can hear the critics from the preceding paragraph already. Well, putting out music is not equivalent to putting your entire personhood and all your choices on display. The speed with which we want to generalize from one specific context to a person’s whole moral character is another essay.
What haunts me about the all-consuming knowledge that people are consuming you is that while it’s much more extreme and intense for public artists like McLamb and even more for Roan, the sense also applies to the rest of us. When I interviewed Taylor Lorenz last year for her book, she mentioned the stress of seeing people try to map out social networks and treat friendships as public content, leading her to refrain from posting friends. She pointed out that, “The struggles of fame are the struggles of everyone thanks to social media.” It’s a theme brought up in discussions of teenage mental health and social media—knowing too much is sometimes a curse. We also see this tension bubble up repeatedly regarding topics including filming people in public, disproportionate backlash, main characters like West Elm Caleb. There is a thrill in learning a small subset of facts about a person and then casting your judgment on them like a petty god. That awareness, whether conscious or not, can easily end up amplifying a fear and anticipation of scrutiny that cannot possibly be good for our collective mental health.
It is easier to pretend you have some moral high ground and be a hater of other people. That doesn’t involve reckoning with your own mistakes, taking a risk, or really being an active participant of anything. Eliza McLamb points out, in a different essay with familiar themes, that while it’s normal to hear a piece of music and think you might have done something differently, that should be considered a basis for one’s own art or honing one’s critiques. She writes, “We have lost strength, culturally, in the creative muscle. We focus on if art is meaningful to us directly, if it’s up to our particular standards, and if it’s not, we seek to find fault either in the work or with ourselves. We’re moving towards a future of perfectly polished Artificial Intelligence music and playlists that are curated just for your ears so that one day, you may never have to hear a song that puzzles you ever again. What a bleak future that is.”
There is a thin line between fans and haters these days when both groups are engaging heavily with content and obsessively keeping tabs on celebrities, as Alex Sujong-Laughlin points out in her recent piece on influencer snark subreddits. There are too many stories to recount of female musicians fending off bizarre fans. I think often of Phoebe Bridgers talking about being harassed by accounts using her face as their profile picture after her father died.
“If you're a kid and the internet somehow taught you that that's an okay thing to do, then of course I hate capitalism and everything that led you to believe that it's okay to do that,” Bridgers says. But, she continues, “I, at one of the lowest points of my life, saw people who claim to love me fucking dehumanize me and shame me and fucking bully me on the way to my dad's wake.”
“It's not like they didn't know my dad just died,” she continues. “A lot of the top comments [were] like, ‘Hey, her dad just died, what are you guys doing?’” If you harass her with her face as your profile picture, “I fucking hate you,” Phoebe says, “and I hope you grow the fuck up.”
Obviously, the dehumanization component looms large here. I open Instagram and the little circles at the top are Stories from celebrities, friends, acquaintances, businesses, brands, with no delineation. The style and tone of posts have also homogenized over the years. No matter how logically one understands the difference when prompted to consider, I think everything is getting all tangled up deep down. Roles blur. Sometimes brands and influencers and celebrities want this because it makes it easier to sell you stuff. Instagram has incentive to push whatever keeps you on the platform. Individuals like to behave like little celebrities out of admiration, imitation, aspiration, etiquette, trend? The Internet isn’t a contained space for our worst and weirdest impulses—that shit leaks out, warps, remakes “real life.” The way that tides are turning on dating apps is an example of recognizing how streamlined, for-profit platforms promised something shiny and fun but ultimately enshittified (degraded/paywalled quality after capturing a user base) their products, altered social norms, and have not and will never be able to innovate their way into a solution to human connection.
I also think that some of this misdirected anger towards artists is about bigger, more abstract forces that are harder to yell at such as the Ticketmaster-LiveNation monopoly, isolation and weird bad hard to identify and surmount vibes probably contributed to by ongoing disasters, the enshittification of many products and companies, etc.
Just look at the AI friend you can wear around your neck that was announced earlier this summer. In many ways, it seems like the optimal friend for some people—you paid for it, you get what you want. It is a product and the user is a user and a consumer. On-demand, always listening, adapting to your desires without desires or boundaries of its own. Something else about the asking for a picture of someone specifically that I’m stuck on is that these people are clearly asking a yes or no question with zero belief that no is a valid answer. All this therapy discourse about setting boundaries was supposed to go both ways; treating other peoples’ boundaries as an affront to you suggests a self-centered misunderstanding of boundaries.
Other people are not content production machines, wish-fulfillers, or receptacles for your opinions and demands.
Honestly, there are lots of indie musicians I think I could feasibly be friends with. We’re a similar age, we have demonstrated similar neuroses, and they seem cool! I like their art! I’ve seen them perform live! There is clearly a difference in “we could be friends” and “we already are” or the twisted entitlement of a more consumer-product frame of mind. Friendship is so much about personality compatibility but also the luck of circumstances, the reciprocated effort of nurturing the original chemistry, and of sticking around and allowing both of you the space the space to evolve and grow throughout. Maybe I could be friends with them but it’s definitely never possible if they live on a pedestal in my mind and definitely not possible from one interaction at the merch table (sadly I’m not maximally charismatic). To conflate parasocial awareness of a person and their life with friendship is to misunderstand both the ingredients and the spoils of a good friendship.
There are a bunch of psychological tests developmental psychologists run on children to determine when they develop the capacity to understand that other people have different perspectives and to attempt to take other people’s perspectives. It’s a gradual process throughout childhood to grapple with the fact that other people experiencing the same thing will perceive, interpret, and act on it differently. I am no developmental psychologist, but it also feels like a skill we have to continually work on, especially in our currently splintered culture where something that can be dominating the discourse in my world is nonexistent in someone else’s media environment and our feeds are personalized to keep us scrolling.
I have a very bad habit (that I am working on) of telling a friend a piece of information and finding myself disappointed by their response. Only after the fact do I become aware that I had told them expecting a certain type of response based on our relationship, my understanding of them, what kind of validation or feedback I wanted. They didn’t know any of that. I didn’t specify—it would be kind of odd if I did? But I’m caught off guard when they don’t also hate the tweet or they don’t even know who Barry Keoghan is so him dating Sabrina Carpenter is irrelevant or they’re not as hype as I am. I was operating like the interaction was a button on a vending machine or ordering off a menu. It obviously was not. I feel hurt, not even necessarily by the person. It’s more of an acute pang of loneliness that feels like it has deeper psychological roots, especially when it’s about craving approval or validation.
There is a comfortable pleasure in predictability, a sense of security in knowing what comes next. Our brains are constantly trying to pattern match and use past knowledge to approximate what to expect. But the steepest joys and pitfalls of life do not exist in the bland, grey space of a pre-outlined agenda or the 2D shapes of what you think other people are like. Being the main character is way less fun than recognizing you’re a part of a great ensemble cast. Sometimes people are busy! Sometimes they’ll surprise you! Vice versa of course applies as well. Learning how to not just deal with that but accept and appreciate it as a part of the experience of connecting with other people is important. I think if there’s anything that applies to both our real friends and the musicians we feel emotionally proximate to, it’s that.
*Title credits to Karishma and reassuring me when I freak out and become convinced nothing I write coheres credits to Fumika and Karishma
content (not derogatory)
both of eliza mclamb’s essays on the same topic, which are mentioned above and will link again here: the right to art and the eeriness of fame
a close academic reading of chappell roan
this vulture compilation of obamacore media was a walk down memory lane
beautiful essay about… learning to ride a bike as an adult
how obama’s reading list gets made
anne helen petersen interviewed a former trad-wife on what it takes to leave that behind
dirt! in the nytimes! have been following daisy and dirt for a while, great fun publication that digs (ha) up some esoteric topics i’d never think about and publishes really great writing—bad waitress and aftersun/dogtooth have shown up in this section of my newsletter before. also enjoyed this jarring short story
200M people still playing candy crush… originally i thought “disturbing” but the way the company treats it seems at least kind of okay?
aggregation theory, which i sort of buy bc who likes sorting through the muck of all this content… like literally you’re reading this section of links so you’re kind of seeing the point
read this unhinged and fun charly bliss interview in paste and listen to their new album forever
so late to this but alexander chee’s essay about inheriting after his father’s early death and how it messed with his relationship to money
is it ethical to be a billionaire on neopets??
i, like many, watched all of veep recently. i was rooting for literally nobody on the show and it makes me wish we had some b613 scandal ass scheming happening in the bowels of DC
now i am watching industry which is like succession (hbo, psychosexual, corporate) but also not (british, ice cold, protagonists in their twenties, banking)
i recently read anna marie tendler’s memoir men have called her crazy, which i enjoyed! it didn’t come together all the way, and i think there are intriguing parts of her life i wish were covered (not even about her marriage in specific, but about the surely bizarre and complicated experience of being married to a famous person) but it got an out-loud reaction from me a couple times. now i am reading an honest woman by charlotte shane and becoming little shell by chris la tray!
saw the film didi which i recommend for everyone who was cringe in middle school (all of us) and extra recommend for the asian americans wahoo
started listening to dead eyes, a podcast about an actor/comedian’s experience 20 yrs ago being fired from a small role by tom hanks for having dead eyes and is mostly just really fun to hear about if you’re like me in that you’re fascinated and invested in hollywood with absolutely no proximity to it
At what point in a celebrity's ascent do we forget their humanity? Great piece