In stan culture, there’s the good, the bad, and the ugly. Shaikha Rahimi speaks to stans and experts on this fascinating and transformative phenomenon
Trigger warning: suicide, childhood trauma.
To the everyday person, February 2, 2023 may be the National Day of Crepes. It may be National Tater Tot Day. It may even be just another Thursday.
To the BeyHives, it’s the day their idol releases tickets to the Renaissance World Tour. The BeyHive is desperate. Feral. It’s a race. It’s the Hunger Games.
Beyoncé hasn’t had a world tour since the Formation World Tour in 2016. She had two shows at Coachella in 2018 and one in Dubai in January, which was her first show in five years. It wasn’t exactly easy to attend.
When Beyoncé announced her world tour’s sale date, the BeyHive knew they had to prepare for one of the industry’s most anticipated tours. Beyoncé used to regularly tour in the 2010s, but now it’s Gen Z’s time to catch a full-fledged performance.
Some have been saving money for years, others took off work to make sure they have a chance to buy tickets, and Ebony Mark spent her student loan on concert tickets.
“This is incredibly important and meaningful to me. Seeing Beyoncé perform live brings me so much joy and inspiration. Investing in this experience is worth every penny.
“As a Black girl, it feels like I’ve always liked Beyoncé. I grew up seeing my family celebrate her success, and we always listened to her. As a kid, I was very commonly racially abused and bullied for the colour of my skin. It never made sense to me because I would think to myself: “But Beyoncé has dark skin too. It must be fine and not that big of a deal.” I used to come home and cry to my mom. She would hug me and say: “Your skin is beautiful.”
“When I heard Brown Skin Girl for the first time, it resonated with me so much. ‘If ever you are in doubt, remember what Mama told me / Brown skin girl / Your skin just like pearls.’ It was so personal to me because it echoed the words of my own mother.
“Beyoncé is the reason I love my Blackness. She exudes the spirit of Black joy, and the BeyHive celebrates her for it.
“The first time I saw Beyoncé was during the Mrs. Carter Show World Tour in 2014. Then I also went to the Formation World Tour in 2016. It was a cathartic moment, and from that day forward, I’ve been seeking the same feeling everywhere I go.
“The thought of seeing Beyoncé live again is unreal. When I first saw her, it felt like a spiritual experience. It’s priceless. I don’t know if she’s going to do too much touring after Renaissance, so if it’s her last big tour, I want to be there.
“Yes, I’m broke. However, I do have a Beyoncé ticket. I think that’s a fair trade-off,” says Ebony while letting out a laugh.
“Seeing her live will light a fire under my a** and I’ll work overtime to make up for it.”
Ebony’s first experience at a Beyoncé concert had left an indelible mark on her soul. To her, Beyoncé transports her to a realm where music and Black pride coalesce into a singular expression of power. “And I’m not the only one,” she says.
Stan culture has been observed and studied for decades, but the rise of social media and the internet has taken it to a whole new level. Fandoms can mobilise and unionise like never before.
Stans find a piece of themselves reflected in artists. Beyoncé celebrates Black joy, which prompted fans to shell out big bucks for tickets to her Renaissance World Tour. Lady Gaga has been an advocate for LGBTQ+ rights since her career’s inception and has inspired countless fans to come out to their families.
For many, stan culture is about belonging.
Amethyst, an avid Taylor Swift fan, finds belonging in the Swiftie community.
“During the pandemic, I was in a very malleable state, and so was the world. It was a huge period of change. I was open to anything and that put me in a good condition to rethink Taylor’s music.
“I never listened to her music even though I was surrounded by it. I just was never intrigued, and that was because I perceived her music in a very heteronormative way. It just never appealed to me.
“When Folklore was released, something stirred within me. I was amid the process of rediscovering my relationship with myself, and the album aligned with me in inexplicable ways. Something about that album shifted my entire perception of Taylor and made me reconsider her music.
“Listening to Folklore during the pandemic shattered the glass wall. That was when I found a sense of connection in being a Swiftie. I was able to create my own meaning through her lyricism, which is finding Queer interpretations and aligning them with her music.
“When I first listened to Seven, I distinctly remember being in bed and feeling so heard and seen in ways I never expected. ‘I think you should come live with me and we can be pirates / Then you won't have to cry / Or hide in the closet’.
“That invited me to reconsider my heteronormative interpretations of her music. And none of this is about her sexuality or who she wrote it for. It’s about how I took it in,” says Amethyst.
“It’s one of my favourite parts of being a Swiftie. No matter anyone’s experience, Taylor still finds ways to invite you into the world she creates with her song writing.
“Taylor likes to intentionally drop hints and create Easter eggs, and the Swifties live for it. We obsess over lots of theories. If someone isn’t within the Swifties community they wouldn’t particularly understand those theories, but that’s part of it.
“Having these theories adds to the feeling of being part of a world that doesn’t exist for everyone. A world where everything means something. It’s exciting.
“It’s fun to obsess over someone and have a parasocial relationship with them. But besides that, being a Swiftie makes me feel that I have a community I belong in. It’s like living in a simulation where Taylor doesn’t know I exist but I still consider her my mother.
“But she liked my TikTok, so she technically knows I exist.”
The album that invited Amethyst to the Swiftie community is the same one that put Jillian Mapes’ life under threat.
Mapes, the senior editor at Pitchfork, wrote a review of Taylor Swift’s eighth album Folklore and gave it an eight out of 10 rating. Shortly after the publication of the review, she was bombarded with furious messages on social media. The Swifties went so far as to share her address, phone number, and some even threatened to burn her home.
Don’t worry, Amethyst wasn’t one of them.
Obsessions with artists can become all-consuming, and for some, it can have serious consequences. But what’s behind this type of behaviour?
Dr. Audrey, a chartered psychologist with the British Psychological Society, says the preference for a pseudo relationship over a real one can often be linked to intense feelings of loneliness and a strong desire for connection.
“It can be problematic when it disrupts someone’s ability to function day to day. But we also need to pose the question of what happened in that person’s life for a pseudo relationship to be preferred over a real one,” says Dr Audrey.
“Humans often seek these connections because they lack connectivity in their own lives. So, they reach out and latch on to anything that they can connect to. This can also be observed when people become highly engrossed in fictional characters, and these pseudo relationships become their realities.
“The more insular someone becomes, the more time they invest in these pseudo relationships.
“Individuals who report experiencing intense feelings of loneliness during childhood often seek solace in films or music, which can actually be a healthy coping mechanism,” she says.
“It's also possible that those who have experienced traumatic relationships may habitually seek out new ones that have no real chance of success as a safety net to avoid pain.”
Dr Audrey says there is powerful research in suicide awareness training that shows people often dismiss warning signs of suicide and fail to recognise seriousness. Comments such as "you're such a pain" and "get over it" are commonly heard preceding a suicide.
In the aftermath, people often express regret for not recognising the warning signs and wish they could have intervened. “The same applies to stan culture,” says Dr Audrey.
“It is always about going back and posing the question of what is so lonely in that person’s life that this is their preferred choice of relationships. We need to be more compassionate towards this issue rather than vilifying people,” says Dr Audrey.
But even for the most loyal stans, there are boundaries that cannot be overstepped.
Matty Healy, frontman of The 1975, made an appearance on the Adam Friedland podcast. During the show he giggled along disparaging remarks aimed at women, Queer people, and people of Chinese, Hawaiian, and Inuit descent. He went so far as to crack jokes about concentration camps.
Character-Jeweler392 on Reddit, an ardent The 1975 fan, spoke about being distressed by Matty's comments. “For so long, The 1975’s music was a place I would turn to for solace, but to hear Matty espouse the kind of hate that is diametrically opposed to the values his lyrics promote: racism, sexism, transphobia - really all the “isms'' and phobias you can think of - I could hardly believe my ears.
“I’m part mad, part sad, and I feel betrayed,” they say.
“If there’s one thing I could tell him, it’s that he should have called the new album Being Funny in a Forbidden Language. And that language is hate speech.”
A woman tweeted selfies she took with Matty a day before the Friedland interview and said: “These were taken around 24 hours before that garbage podcast episode went up. How can you go about being nice and friendly to my face and then turn around the next day to join your bros and laugh along racist remarks of my identity?”
Even the most devout stans can agree on one thing: their idol is not immune to being an a******.
During such moments, stans often turn to one another for support, rather than solely relying on their idol. It is in moments when things go south that they forge bonds so strong and so unbreakable with each other.
There’s chaos everywhere and every day in life, and that can leave us feeling disconnected and alone. But stan culture offers a sense of community, belonging, and identity, both among fellow fans and towards their idol.
To Ebony, it’s priceless. To Amethyst, it’s invaluable. And to stan communities, it's a fervent devotion that transcends time, distance, and any obstacle.
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