Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly hesitant to identify as a fan of any living artist. There are plenty of artists whose work I like, or even love, but the entire concept of being a fan, and what the act of fandom entails, has shifted in ways I find both alienating and disturbing. What was once a straightforward expression of admiration—I’m such a fan!—has lately become more like a claim of obsessive entitlement.
Fans do not simply enjoy an album; they are in love with the person who created the work. Fans follow the celebrity object of their affection on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok and watch their every move. Fans join forums with other fans, who all believe that the celebrity is communicating with them via a series of riddles and hidden messages, which sometimes they really are.
I’m not the only one made uncomfortable by this situation. Artists, unsurprisingly, are expressing their distaste for the consequences of modern fan culture. Indie pop darling Chappell Roan posted two videos to TikTok yesterday that went megaviral. In the two videos, which combined have more than 15 million views, Roan speaks straight to the camera, imploring her fans to realize that she is not an object for them to play with, and more importantly, that they do not actually know her at all.
“I don’t care that abuse and harassment, stalking, whatever, is a normal thing to do to people who are famous or a little famous or whatever,” Roan says. “It’s weird how people think that you know a person just 'cause you see them online, and you listen to the art they make. That’s fucking weird!”
A number of the comments on these videos were from people replying to this plea for privacy with the exact sort of behavior that prompted it. It’s the cost of being famous, they said. Cry me a river, they said. We made you, they said. Maybe that’s because it is rare for a celebrity to set a firm boundary on how their fans interact with them. She is refreshingly direct—there’s no perfunctory hedging about how of course she is grateful for the attention, no self-effacing asides where she explains how she knows what a privilege this all is. She is not going on Oprah, teary-eyed, to explain how she has been hurt. She is looking her fans right in their eyes and telling them to knock it off.
The comments for the videos have since been turned off. The boundary is clear. The question is whether or not the fans will be able to respect it.
Roan’s rise to fame has been rapid, and somewhat unexpected. After signing to Atlantic Records as a teen, the label dropped her after the release of her single “Pink Pony Club” in 2020. The album she’s blowing up for this year, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, was released in September of 2023, to some critical acclaim but not a ton of attention. What did get her attention was opening on Olivia Rodrigo’s sell-out Guts Tour last summer, along with memorable performances on NPR’s Tiny Desk and at Coachella. She released a new single in April, in the midst of this spike in attention, called “Good Luck, Babe,” that peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.
A chart released by the company Chartmetric shows her monthly Spotify listens rocketing over the past year like a hockey stick graph. Currently, she has over 30 million listens per month. A few months ago, she had only 1 million. Her song “HOT TO GO!” with its helpful spelling and arm-centric coordinated dance, has become equally popular among Peloton moms, sorority girls, and alt lesbians. Many people believe that the camo Harris-Walz campaign hats are inspired by Roan’s camo Midwest Princess hats.
Roan's rise has been meteoric, and she has shared already how hard this has been on her. During a June show in North Carolina, she cried on stage. “I just want to be honest with the crowd and I just feel a little off today because I think that my career has just kind of gone really fast, and it’s really hard to keep up,” she said. “And so I’m just being honest that I’m just having a hard time today.” In June, she told host Drew Afualo on the podcast The Comment Section that “People have started to be freaks—like, follow me and know where my parents live, and where my sister works. All this weird shit.”
Many famous and microfamous people have already cheered on and echoed Roan’s latest videos. Afualo shared in her own TikTok response to Roan an experience of being stopped by a fan in the airport after her family had a terrible racist encounter with TSA. Lizzo posted on TikTok about a woman stalking her after a flight because she wanted a photo. All of their posts have something in common: Their own fans, who claim to love them, are making their lives difficult to live.
And before you dismiss this outright as a problem of the rich and famous, this kind of parasocial overreach is happening at all levels of the fame spectrum. I am famous in the way a spray-painted, run-down van that parks in a specific neighborhood can be famous—which is to say only to a certain group of people in a certain place. Sometimes, maybe twice a week, I meet someone who likes my writing or Normal Gossip. These interactions are almost always lovely, and I do genuinely like them. But it is odd and a little unnerving to find yourself in a situation where somebody clearly knows you and you do not know them. Imagine walking into a party filled with strangers, and realizing that a few of them are already talking about you. Now imagine you are famous enough that the whole world becomes like that.
“No amount of jobs regardless of what industry they are in, could ever prepare you for doing this for a fucking living,” Afualo said on TikTok. “You don’t just have a job, you are the job [...] so whether you are working or not you are being perceived constantly.”
“Over the course of the last three years, I’ve had several nervous breakdowns specifically about my relationship to my audience and their relationship to me,” writer and musician Eliza McLamb wrote on her Substack. “There was nothing I could do to prepare me for how even modest visibility would change my brain.” McLamb goes on to write about how people have scared her with their desire to be close to her, ignoring her boundaries, and then chastised her on social media for not giving them what they wanted.
What’s strange about the behavior of these fans isn’t that they want to meet a celebrity. That has always been true of fans. For as long as there have been stage doors, there have been people waiting outside of them. What’s new is that today’s fans aren’t looking for a fleeting chance to feel close to an artist they love—they’re seeking confirmation of the closeness they already assume exists.
On Taylor Swift’s most recent album, there is a song about performing The Eras Tour in the wake of her breakup with Joe Alwyn. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is an upbeat anthem about lying about your emotions. It lives in the same vein as Britney Spears’s “Lucky,” which itself was sampled earlier this summer by Halsey. What surprised me were the number of posts (on Tiktok and Instagram and Twitter) from Swifties who were visibly heartbroken by Taylor’s song. Not because of the experience she described, but because they felt like they should have seen it all along. How could they not have known? She was right there in front of them!
But of course they didn’t know, because a Swiftie does not actually know Taylor Swift. That this reminder of such an obvious truth should provoke distress among her fans is part of the problem less famous—and less materially able to support a constant security detail—artists like Roan are grappling with. When a fan asked Doja Cat to declare her love for them in July, she responded by tweeting “I don’t even know y’all.” The resulting backlash caused her to temporarily deactivate her account. “I’m a random bitch,” Roan said at the end of one of her videos. “You’re a random bitch.”
In 1956, Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl introduced the term “parasocial relationship” to explain how viewers perceived television characters. Now, of course, we use parasocial relationship as a catch-all term for how we relate to anyone we follow online. But Horton and Wohl’s findings are still true: It is difficult for our brains to maintain a distinction between a person we actually know in our real life, and a character or a celebrity we see only through our screens.
There is no distinction between how content from celebrities I follow and how posts from my friends show up in my Instagram stories. They come one after another. A girl I went to high school with had a baby. A Mormon mommy blogger I follow is making something from scratch. My friend is creating a new zine. An Instagram influencer whose name I can’t remember is in Greece. My sister has a new outfit. They bleed together in my subconscious.
“Because of the internet, people don’t know personal boundaries no more, and it’s normalized, and everyone thinks this shit is cute. It’s like, we don’t know each other,” Tyler the Creator said in an interview with XXL Magazine last week. “So because you like a fucking song, because you like a fucking movie, that gives you the permission to be a fucking weirdo?”
Tyler the Creator is talking mainly about stalking in person and online and not about more run-of-the-mill fan interactions, but he’s highlighting the very real problem. To most people, this behavior seems insane. But to fans, this is a sign of their devotion.
What’s interesting and complicated about all of this is that social media at large has transformed the concept of fame into something that anyone could have at any moment and that everyone should be pursuing. Fame has never been closer to all of us. One viral video, one little song you make up, and your life could change. One silly meme about being very demure, and you could pay for the transition surgery you want. Fame, even at a low level, is profitable and desirable.
This relationship to fame complicates the way normal people see the more traditional fame that Roan has. When someone has something everyone is supposed to want, it’s easy to become angry that they complain about it. But even if there are many people online willing to trade access to their private lives for fans, Roan is not one of them. She is an artist, and what she makes is music. The albums are what the public receives in exchange for their money and attention.
Perhaps part of why the fandom is so intense and so rabid with Roan is because the fans feel like they played a part in her creation. Her career (even though she has been and is again represented by a major label) feels somehow organic. And she does seem to have more control over her look and sound and choices than many other young musicians. To be able to make a statement like the one she put out on Monday feels rare, optimistic even.
I cannot help but think about another young indie darling popular with girls and gays, who felt in control of her own career and then was destroyed by it: Mitski. Both women have rabid fan bases. That both women work under stage names does not seem to be a coincidence. They are trying, as artists, to create an experience with their fans that is not reliant on who they are as people. In 2022 when Mitski asked her fans not to film her concerts, much of her fan base revolted.
“Every day, all the time, is exploitation,” Mitski told Vulture in an early 2022 interview. “You can’t be a human being. You have to be a product that’s being bought and sold and consumed, and you have to perceive yourself that way in order to function.”
That Roan has chosen, through direct entreaty, to make her fans responsible for their own behaviors feels important. But is it enough? It’s not unthinkable this could leverage the natural competitiveness among fans to become the most polite, most respectful, most chill as a way of proving their devotion. Certainly Roan has made clear that there is a line for her. She has said many times that if her family is ever in danger, she will quit. That is what’s at stake for the fans, whether they recognize it or not. If you want to consume a person fully, there will be nothing left at all.
