Popular Music Fandom


Book Description

This book explores popular music fandom from a cultural studies perspective that incorporates popular music studies, audience research, and media fandom. The essays draw together recent work on fandom in popular music studies and begin a dialogue with the wider field of media fan research, raising questions about how popular music fandom can be understood as a cultural phenomenon and how much it has changed in light of recent developments. Exploring the topic in this way broaches questions on how to define, theorize, and empirically research popular music fan culture, and how music fandom relates to other roles, practices, and forms of social identity. Fandom itself has been brought center stage by the rise of the internet and an industrial structure aiming to incorporate, systematize, and legitimate dimensions of it as an emotionally-engaged form of consumerism. Once perceived as the pariah practice of an overly attached audience, media fandom has become a standardized industrial subject-position called upon to sell box sets, concert tickets, new television series, and special editions. Meanwhile, recent scholarship has escaped the legacy of interpretations that framed fans as passive, pathological, or defiantly empowered, taking its object seriously as a complex formation of identities, roles, and practices. While popular music studies has examined some forms of identity and audience practice, such as the way that people use music in daily life and listener participation in subcultures, scenes and, tribes, this volume is the first to examine music fans as a specific object of study.




Understanding Fandom


Book Description

Fans used to be seen as an overly obsessed fraction of the audience. In the last few decades, shifts in media technology and production have instead made fandom a central mode of consumption. A range of ideas has emerged to explore different facets of this growing phenomenon. With a foreword by Matt Hills, Understanding Fandom introduces the whole field of fan research by looking at the history of debate, key paradigms and methodological issues. The book discusses insights from scholars working with fans of different texts, genres and media forms, including television and popular music. Mark Duffett shows that fan research is an emergent interdisciplinary field with its own key thinkers: a tradition that is distinct from both textual analysis and reception studies. Drawing on a range of debates from media studies, cultural studies and psychology, Duffett argues that fandom is a particular kind of engagement with the power relations of media culture.




Fan Identities and Practices in Context


Book Description

Popular music is not simply a series of musicians, moments, genres or recordings. Audiences matter; and the most ardent audience members are the fans. To be a fan is to feel a connection with music. The study of fandom has begun to emerge as a vital strand of academic research, one that offers a fresh perspective on the nature of music culture. Dedicated to Music investigates fan identities and practices in different contexts and in relation to different bands and artists. Through a series of empirical case studies the book reflects a diverse array of objects and perspectives associated with this vibrant new field of study. Contributors examine how fans negotiate their identities and actively pursue their particular interests, touching on a range of issues including cultural capital, generational memory, gender, fan fiction and the use of new media. This book was originally published as two special issues of Popular Music and Society.




Fangirls


Book Description

"To be a fan is to scream alone together." This is the discovery Hannah Ewens makes in Fangirls: how music fandom is at once a journey of self-definition and a conduit for connection and camaraderie; how it is both complicated and empowering; and how now, more than ever, fandoms composed of girls and young queer people create cultures that shape and change an entire industry. This book is about what it means to be a fangirl. Speaking to hundreds of fans from the UK, US, Europe, and Japan, Ewens tells the story of music fandom using its own voices, recounting previously untold or glossed-over scenes from modern pop and rock music history. In doing so, she uncovers the importance of fan devotion: how Ariana Grande represents both tragedy and resilience to her followers, or what it means to meet an artist like Lady Gaga in person. From One Directioners, to members of the Beyhive, to the author's own fandom experiences, this book reclaims the "fangirl" label for its young members, celebrating their purpose, their power, and, most of all, their passion for the music they love.




Fandom as Methodology


Book Description

An illustrated exploration of fandom that combines academic essays with artist pages and experimental texts. Fandom as Methodology examines fandom as a set of practices for approaching and writing about art. The collection includes experimental texts, autobiography, fiction, and new academic perspectives on fandom in and as art. Key to the idea of “fandom as methodology” is a focus on the potential for fandom in art to create oppositional spaces, communities, and practices, particularly from queer perspectives, but also through transnational, feminist and artist-of-color fandoms. The book provides a range of examples of artists and writers working in this vein, as well as academic essays that explore the ways in which fandom can be theorized as a methodology for art practice and art history. Fandom as Methodology proposes that many artists and art writers already draw on affective strategies found in fandom. With the current focus in many areas of art history, art writing, and performance studies around affective engagement with artworks and imaginative potentials, fandom is a key methodology that has yet to be explored. Interwoven into the academic essays are lavishly designed artist pages in which artists offer an introduction to their use of fandom as methodology. Contributors Taylor J. Acosta, Catherine Grant, Dominic Johnson, Kate Random Love, Maud Lavin, Owen G. Parry, Alice Butler, SooJin Lee, Jenny Lin, Judy Batalion, Ika Willis. Artists featured in the artist pages Jeremy Deller, Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski, Anna Bunting-Branch, Maria Fusco, Cathy Lomax, Kamau Amu Patton, Holly Pester, Dawn Mellor, Michelle Williams Gamaker, The Women of Colour Index Reading Group, Liv Wynter, Zhiyuan Yang




Popular Music Fandom


Book Description

This book explores popular music fandom from a cultural studies perspective that incorporates popular music studies, audience research, and media fandom. The essays draw together recent work on fandom in popular music studies and begin a dialogue with the wider field of media fan research, raising questions about how popular music fandom can be understood as a cultural phenomenon and how much it has changed in light of recent developments. Exploring the topic in this way broaches questions on how to define, theorize, and empirically research popular music fan culture, and how music fandom relates to other roles, practices, and forms of social identity. Fandom itself has been brought center stage by the rise of the internet and an industrial structure aiming to incorporate, systematize, and legitimate dimensions of it as an emotionally-engaged form of consumerism. Once perceived as the pariah practice of an overly attached audience, media fandom has become a standardized industrial subject-position called upon to sell box sets, concert tickets, new television series, and special editions. Meanwhile, recent scholarship has escaped the legacy of interpretations that framed fans as passive, pathological, or defiantly empowered, taking its object seriously as a complex formation of identities, roles, and practices. While popular music studies has examined some forms of identity and audience practice, such as the way that people use music in daily life and listener participation in subcultures, scenes and, tribes, this volume is the first to examine music fans as a specific object of study.




Playing to the Crowd


Book Description

Explains what happened to music—for both artists and fans—when music went online. Playing to the Crowd explores and explains how the rise of digital communication platforms has transformed artist-fan relationships into something closer to friendship or family. Through in-depth interviews with musicians such as Billy Bragg and Richie Hawtin, as well as members of the Cure, UB40, and Throwing Muses, Baym reveals how new media has facilitated these connections through the active, and often required, participation of the artists and their devoted, digital fan base. Before the rise of social sharing and user-generated content, fans were mostly seen as an undifferentiated and unidentifiable mass, often mediated through record labels and the press. However, in today’s networked era, musicians and fans have built more active relationships through social media, fan sites, and artist sites, giving fans a new sense of intimacy and offering artists unparalleled information about their audiences. However, this comes at a price. For audiences, meeting their heroes can kill the mystique. And for artists, maintaining active relationships with so many people can be both personally and financially draining, as well as extremely labor intensive. Drawing on her own rich history as an active and deeply connected music fan, Baym offers an entirely new approach to media culture, arguing that the work musicians put in to create and maintain these intimate relationships reflect the demands of the gig economy, one which requires resources and strategies that we must all come to recognize and appreciate.




Fandom, Second Edition


Book Description

Introduction: why still study fans? / Cornel Sandvoss, Jonathan Gray, and C. Lee Harrington -- Fan texts and objects -- The death of the reader? : literary theory and the study of texts in popular culture / Cornel Sandvoss -- Intimate intertextuality and performative fragments in media fanfiction / Kristina Busse -- Media academics as media audiences : aesthetic judgments in media and cultural studies / Matt Hills -- Copyright law, fan practices, and the rights of the author (2017) / Rebecca Tushnet -- Toy fandom, adulthood, and the ludic age : creative material culture as play / Katriina Heljakka -- Spaces of fandom -- Loving music : listeners, entertainments, and the origins of music fandom in nineteenth-century America / Daniel Cavicchi -- Resisting technology in music fandom : nostalgia, authenticity, and Kate Bush's "Before the dawn" / Lucy Bennett -- I scream therefore I fan? : music audiences and affective citizenship / Mark Duffett -- A sort of homecoming: fan viewing and symbolic pilgrimage / Will Brooker -- Reimagining the imagined community : online media fandoms in the age of global convergence / Lori Hitchcock Morimoto and Bertha Chin -- Temporalities of fandom -- Do all "good things" come to an end? : revisiting Martha Stewart fans after imclone / Melissa A. Click -- The lives of fandoms / Denise D. Bielby and C. Lee Harrington -- "What are you collecting now?" seth, comics, and meaning management / Henry Jenkins -- Sex, utopia, and the queer temporalities of fannish love / Alexis Lothian -- The fan citizen: fan politics and activism -- The news : you gotta love it / Jonathan Gray -- Memory, archive, and history in political fan fiction / Abigail De Kosnik -- Between rowdies and rasikas : rethinking fan activity in Indian film culture / Aswin Punathambekar -- Black twitter and the politics of viewing scandal / Dayna Chatman -- Deploying oppositional fandoms : activists' use of sports fandom in the Redskins controversy / Lori Kido Lopez and Jason Kido Lopez -- Fan labor and fan-producer interactions -- Ethics of fansubbing in Anime's hybrid public culture / Mizuko Ito -- Live from hall H : fan/producer symbiosis at San Diego comic-con / Anne Gilbert -- Fantagonism: factions, institutions, and constitutive hegemonies of fandom -- Derek johnson -- The powers that squee : Orlando Jones and intersectional fan studies / Suzanne Scott -- Measuring fandom : social tv analytics and the integration of fandom into television audience measurement / Philip M. Napoli and Allie Kosterich -- About the contributors -- Index




Seeing Fans


Book Description

Split into four sections, Seeing Fans analyzes the representations of fans in the mass media through a diverse range of perspectives. This collection opens with a preface by noted actor and fan Orlando Jones (Sleepy Hollow), whose recent work on fandom (appearing with Henry Jenkins at Comic Con and speaking at the Fan Studies Network symposium) bridges the worlds of academia and the media industry. Section one focuses on the representations of fans in documentaries and news reports and includes an interview with Roger Nygard, director of Trekkies and Trekkies 2. The second section then examines fictional representations of fans through analyses of television and film, featuring interviews with Emily Perkins of Supernatural, Robert Burnett, director of the film Free Enterprise, and Luminosity, a fan who has been interviewed in the New York Magazine for her exemplary work in fandom. Section three explores cultural perspectives on fan representations, and includes an interview with Laurent Malaquais, director of Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony. Lastly, the final section looks at global perspectives on the ways fans have been represented and finishes with an interview with Jeanie Finlay, director of the music documentary Sound it Out. The collection then closes with an afterword by fan studies scholar Professor Matt Hills.




Anti-Fandom


Book Description

A revealing look at the pleasure we get from hating figures like politicians, celebrities, and TV characters, showcased in approaches that explore snark, hate-watching, and trolling The work of a fan takes many forms: following a favorite celebrity on Instagram, writing steamy fan fiction fantasies, attending meet-and-greets, and creating fan art as homages to adored characters. While fandom that manifests as feelings of like and love are commonly understood, examined less frequently are the equally intense, but opposite feelings of dislike and hatred. Disinterest. Disgust. Hate. This is anti-fandom. It is visible in many of the same spaces where you see fandom: in the long lines at ComicCon, in our politics, and in numerous online forums like Twitter, Tumblr, Reddit, and the ever dreaded comments section. This is where fans and fandoms debate and discipline. This is where we love to hate. Anti-Fandom,a collection of 15 original and innovative essays, provides a framework for future study through theoretical and methodological exemplars that examine anti-fandom in the contemporary digital environment through gender, generation, sexuality, race, taste, authenticity, nationality, celebrity, and more. From hatewatching Girls and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo to trolling celebrities and their characters on Twitter, these chapters ground the emerging area of anti-fan studies with a productive foundation. The book demonstrates the importance of constructing a complex knowledge of emotion and media in fan studies. Its focus on the pleasures, performances, and practices that constitute anti-fandom will generate new perspectives for understanding the impact of hate on our identities, relationships, and communities.