Written December 2018
In an interview with Rolling Stone Harry Styles was asked “if he spends pressure-filled evenings worried about proving credibility to an older crowd”. He replied, “Who’s to say that young girls who like pop music – short for popular, right? – have worse musical taste than a 30-year-old hipster guy? That’s not up to you to say.”
Styles sounded frustrated, it wasn’t the first time an artist was asked something along these lines and it probably won’t be the last. This is because suggesting that a young female’s music taste lacks credibility, appears to be a bit of a theme in the music scene. And when put like that, it hardly sounds like a good thing, so why is it happening?
“It’s sexism in its most reduced form,” believes Chase Lawrence, lead singer of indie-pop band Coin (another artist with a large female crowd), and it’s hard to argue with him. Just look at mainstream terms such as “real band” or “real music”, they’re often used to measure an artist’s value against whether they attract a male audience. Even 5 Seconds of Summer (5SOS), who famously have a highly-devoted following of female adolescents, didn’t question spreading the ideology. In a 2015 interview for Rolling Stone they said, “75% of our lives is [spent] proving we’re a real band. We’re getting good at it now. We don’t want to just be, like, for girls.”
“For many young females, their relationship to music is personal and defining. I don’t think that should be minimised or discounted,” argues Lawrence. But nevertheless, the minimising happens, particularly when an artist is considered to be attractive. Maha, 19, an owner of a Shawn Mendes update account on Twitter, boasting 48.3k followers, shares her encounter with the stereotype: “They [people] think fangirls are very shallow, ignorant and/or naïve. And speaking from first-hand experience, through updating and being ‘stans’ ourselves, most are fans of music first, and the person second.”
There are also further stigmas surrounding being a fangirl, as pointed out by Taylor Swift enthusiast Britt Vandevenne, 19: “In general fangirls are portrayed as overly obsessed, I feel like people don’t take us seriously,” she confesses. The support of fangirls can often be sidelined to allow focus to be placed on portraying them as crazy, too much and borderline weird – just google “hysterical Justin Bieber fans” and you’ll be hit with 23,000,000 results. “Paralleled to the acceptance of sports fanaticism in young males, the contradiction is hilarious. Passion is passion,” says Lawrence.
Fangirls have held this reputation even since the formation of the Beatles in the 60s where Beatlemania happened, girls’ excitement and screaming over the band was often labelled as “female hysteria” – once a medical diagnosis for women. Then we have Paul Johnson’s essay for The New Statesman as a famous example of a negative outlook on the four-piece’s female followers: "Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures," he wrote.
However, there are times the frankly undesirable representation might be argued as fair game. Terry Bloxham, editor of British Beatles Fan Club says, “You should look at those females who had crazy crushes on the Beatles and got upset when ‘their’ Beatle got married to someone else – those are the ones that are crazy.” While he’s specifically talking about the Beatles, this sort of outlook can be applied to incidents with artists like One Direction (1D). It wasn’t rare for death threats to be sent over social media to whoever one of the boys were spotted getting cosy with, and whenever it was Styles or Louis Tomlinson in the picture, it got particularly bad. Certain fans believed the pair were in a serious relationship and thought that any woman they were dating, was wrongfully playing the part of a fake girlfriend to hide the fact they’re gay. The supposed couple was denied by the bandmembers, but a lot of fans still persisted.
In an interview with Fader, ex-1D-member Zayn Malik said, “'It's not funny, and it still continues to be quite hard for them [Styles and Tomlinson]. They won't naturally go put their arm around each other because they're conscious of this thing that's going on, which is not even true.” So in essence, the point is, there are times where fangirls might very well cross the line over to “crazy”, taking something too far territory, but to brand every single young female fan as the same is probably controversial. Alexandra Pollard, music review editor at the Guardian, wrote a piece about how she was alarmed that journalists now say there were teenage girls in a concert audience as a sort of code for a “bad thing”.
Are girls the only ones getting enthused about artists anyway? William Boland, 22, who fainted when Taylor Swift tapped his head during her Red Tour in 2014, argues otherwise; “I am passionate and excited about artists that have a story to tell or produce music like no other.” But Boland has noticed that when male fans express this, he says they are often called “gay” or “feminine” – perhaps highlighting even further issues connected to this whole thing.
So, is it all doom and gloom when it comes to young females and music you might ask. Well not necessarily. First of all, whilst there is a lot of negative press on fangirls, there is a lot of coverage on how great they are – articles with headlines like ‘One Direction fans raise $30k for charity in honour of Harry Styles' birthday,’ ‘Fangirls might seem annoying – here’s why they’re actually awesome’ and ‘The powerful way Demi Lovato's fans showed their support for the singer’ are a few examples.
And though for instance Vandevenne thinks Swift’s female following affects what people think of Swift, her music and her fans (“The media loves to portray her as the crazy exgirlfriend who does nothing but plot revenger on her ex and cry over her exes. So only girls just as crazy would relate to that”), raising the fact the singer has ten Grammy’s should quickly quieten any person trying to tell a girl their music is not “real” music. Then if we consider how the Beatles are thought to be one of the best bands of all time, this also pretty much dismisses any theory that all young females have bad taste, right? Also, the validity of these “comebacks”, demonstrate there is a level of respect that exists for the music young women enjoy after all.
Another thing to keep in mind is that the majority of people probably understand that music is a lot about personal preference anyway. Plus, Katie Gavin of electronic pop, girl band Muna says “the stigma exists but I also believe that it is changing”, and maybe she is right, particularly with people like Styles sticking up for their fans.
“They’re [young women] our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going,” added Styles in the Rolling Stone piece. Maybe the answer is that we just all need to be a bit more Harry Styles.
Feature image: Royalty free from Google Images
Comentários