ABSTRACT
Fan studies has had much to say about the devoted consumption of popular music, often examining case studies of specific artists’ fandoms, eg. the likes of lifelong Bowie fans (Stevenson 2006), Duran Duran fans (Anderson 2012), Led Zeppelin fans (Fast 2001), Madonna fans (Garde-Hansen 2011), REM fans (Bennett 2009), Rush fans (McDonald 2009), Springsteen fans (Cavicchi 1998), or U2 fans (Lizie 2009). However, this focus on artist-centeed fans suggests that popular music fandom works in a particular way, implying the powerfully affective reception of specific musicians’ work. Fans, it is typically assumed, form a relationship of “non-reciprocal intimacy at a distance” with favored pop-rock artists (Thompson 1995). For example, analyzing online essays written by U2 fans, Clive Marsh and Vaughan Roberts suggest:
[There] is an intriguing thread running through some of the essays about how Bono’s voice, or Bono himself, is spoken about. Here are four examples: “Bono was there to help me get back on my feet” [9], “Bono’s voice became my medicine” [10], “it seems as though Bono is speaking directly into my ear” [18], “U2 and particularly Bono had changed my life, in some ways saved it” [40].
(2011, 423) Popular music is strongly personalized: fans don’t just have an imaginative, emotional connection to U2’s material, rather they seem to experience this as a connection to Bono himself, with the music acting as a conduit between self and other. Nick Stevenson’s sociological study of David Bowie fans demonstrates a similar phenomenon (2006, 159). Whether it is in relation to Bono, Bowie, or other popular musicians, fans reflexively “anchor a narrative of self” (Stevenson 2006, 183) by drawing on meanings linked to the musical celebrity as well as by articulating a sense of connection “beyond the category of rationality and … associated with … wonder and mystery” (ibid.). Specifically analyzing popular music celebrity, P. David Marshall argues:The music industry, through its stars, has constructed two sometimes contradictory levels of the “real” and the authentic. The recording has17 become the true representation of the music … [and] performer and audience were brought closer together … the private and personal activity of listening … privileged.
(1997, 153–154) For Marshall, recorded pop music offers one level of authenticity, meaning that live performance starts to have to approximate to a produced track. But at the same time, the technological mediation of pop music production (along with its typically individualized and privatized reception context) prioritizes listener-performer connections.