No. 45 - Stan army edition
What do we want from our musical heroes and to what extent are they obligated to fulfill those desires?
Prompted by a very kind reader who pre-emptively “donated” to the newsletter, I’ve turned on the paid subscriptions option for Kool Kids. Given the sluggish pace with which I churn these things out, I have no current plans to release tiered content. So everything I write will continue to be available to all, for free. That said, if you feel like sending some financial love my way, it would be much appreciated.
“Does anyone have any questions at this point?”
Hayden Dessner was about 45 minutes into his first-ever headlining show at Toronto’s Massey Hall when he uttered this rhetorical question into the microphone. Perhaps forgetting that part of Massey Hall’s intimate charm is that you can hear a pin drop when no one is playing, Dessner (and by extension, the audience) was quickly inundated by a string of hecklers lobbying verbal queries his way, interrupting what had been, up to that point, a pretty solemn performance.
What happened to Dessner isn’t that unusual but it is a mild example of a growing trend. No doubt by now you’ve noted the recent spat of fans going rogue at concerts. In June, someone threw a phone at Bebe Rehxa during a show, requiring the singer to get stitches (the person who threw it said that he thought hitting her with the phone “would be funny). Two days later, someone crawled onstage and slapped Ava Max in the face. Another fan threw the ashes of their dead mother on stage at a Pink show. In September a Drake fan wandered onstage with no apparent goal in mind other than getting a pound hug from the MC. And just this week Pink (again) was confronted with an audience member hoping to stage a one-man protest against circumcision from the front rows of her show. Weird! It’s gotten to the point that Adele has taken to (humorously) threatening anyone thinking of throwing things at her while onstage: “I’ll fucking kill you.”
What happened at the Hayden show does not come close to the incidents with Rexha and Max who both suffered physical injuries. But I think these incidents share a motivating factor, where fans don’t just want to bear witness to a show, they want to be part of it. This is of a piece with a broader reorientation of the fan-artist dynamic over the past decade, which begs the question: what do we want from our musical heroes and to what extent are they obligated to fulfill those desires?
“Just buy our t-shirts and talk about us everywhere”
Since the days of Lisztomania, a metaphorical wall has existed between artists and fans. Its porousness has always dictated the relationship, with new innovations (fan clubs, tour merch, music videos) further eroding, or at least creating the perception of eroding, that barrier.
Social media took a wrecking ball to that wall. Now fans theoretically had direct access to their heroes, or at least the heroes that didn’t pay someone else to maintain their online presence. Fan interactions, previously heavily choreographed affairs, were now potential free-for-alls.
Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no earth-shattering revelations really emerged from these conversations. I can’t think of an instance where a fan interaction on social media — public forums all of them — yielded any deep revelation or piece of breaking news that wasn’t pre-orchestrated by the artist or their team. Artists quickly took a curatorial approach to their Tweets, Insta posts, and Reddit AMAs, cherry-picking the questions, declarations, and subtweets to interact with that best suited their preferred public image. On the flip side, artists now had armies of fans who could be organized — some would argue weaponized — to promote them and their latest thing. That last point is where I see the problem. By building Stan army efforts into their promotion plans, artists are essentially exploiting their fans’ labour.
Take Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. It’s been through the robust efforts of extremely well-organized Swifties, hyping the tour on social media before, during and after each stop, that has allowed Swift to ascend to levels of fame heretofore unseen in pop music. In 2018, for example, she played two nights at the 55,000-capacity baseball stadium in Toronto. Next year she’s playing six nights. But the difficulty in just getting tickets, coupled with the astronomical costs if you did manage to snag one, only puts more pressure on her fans. No wonder when they finally get to the concert — to be in the presence of their idol — fans feel a sense of ownership over the experience they’ve worked so hard for.
Swift’s popularity makes her an easy target, and I don’t mean to single her out. This is a dynamic playing itself out to varying degrees across the pop-sphere where artists demand more and more from their fans. Frank Ocean’s much-parsed Coachella set (I highly recommend checking out the recap of the performance and its possible significance that
recently offered) is an extreme example of this: an artist who asks a lot of fans while offering very little in terms of new music or performances screwing the pooch (and I write that being a huge Frank fan).Perhaps taking a cue from the wave of recent union activity, fans are finally crying foul over the long-running power imbalance. For decades being part of a fan club gave you special privileges. Maybe it was a newsletter, special access to tickets or even exclusive recordings. These days, with artists wringing every scrap of information and dusty demo recordings for as many clicks as they can muster, and corporate pre-sales putting early access to concert tickets into the hands of literally anyone who has the right credit card or whatever, being a fan doesn’t get you beyond a sense of community. That’s not nothing. But it’s hard not to see some fans feeling a bit burned.
I realize that artists are under an incredible amount of pressure to sustain and build on any kind of success they’ve managed to achieve. And not every artist wants the attention that comes with their fame — some of them might just be trying to right-size their career! But anyone not working at the top of the industry is working for scraps these days and that sucks. At the same time though, there’s got to be a balance struck between art, fan service and exploitation.
Back at Massey Hall, Dessner, whose pre-social media fame benefitted from old-school word of mouth rather than likes and retweets, weathered his own experience with fan misbehavior just fine. After answering a couple of these queries failed to quell the hecklers, Dessner demurred in a typical Steven Wright deadpan.
“Maybe questions was a bad idea.”
Kool Kids Self-promotion Club
Everyone, tell my mom I was on the CBC! Well, online-only CBC Music at least…
The folks over at the Polaris Music Prize very kindly asked me to stump for the just-shortlisted Alvvays album Blue Rev. You can hear me singing the praises of that wonderful record here. I come in around the 8:15 mark.
Spoiler alert: the ultra-awesome Debby Friday won this year’s award.
I also reviewed the new Chappell Roan and yeule records for Exclaim!
yeule: “softscars is a record about self-acceptance and the rocky road that's forever under construction that leads there. It's a process that's taken its toll on yeule, but, as the name suggests, the wounds are starting to heal.”
Chappell Roan: “Using Chappell Roan as her left-coast alter-ego, she expresses the joy, heartbreak and guilt she's experienced as she shakes off her religious upbringing and builds a less inhibited life in California.”
Kool Kids Music Recommendation Club
Vikki Minor has been around for a minute. The Saskatchewan-born, Toronto-based singer — real name Ava Janzen — did some acting and previously performed as Velours before discovering there was already another artist using that moniker. A riff on the name of Janeane Garofalo’s Reality Bites character, Minor has been working with Bif Naked/Carly Rae Jepsen collaborator Ryan Stewart, as showcased on“Flowers in a Wasteland,” which she dropped last fall. The Bif Naked connection tracks; “Flowers” has the same kind of big, crunchy guitar-driven chorus that powers so many of her own songs.
Samantha Urbani just dropped her debut solo album, Showing Up. But the musician, filmmaker and former member of Brooklyn band Friends has been showing up, releasing music for over a dozen years. You’ve probably even heard some of it. After Friends broke up, she contributed vocals to many of the tracks on Cupid Deluxe, Dev Hynes’ breakthrough as Blood Orange. She’s also worked with Hunx and His Punx and Twin Shadow, among many others, and dropped a smattering of singles and EPs along the way. “More than a Feeling,” the video for which Urbani directed, is about getting too deep with someone who can’t be bothered to wade in past their knees. The minimalist R&B vibe reminds me a bit of the first Haim record, which is always a good thing.
How Will Anderson went from Vancouver DIY noise-pop crew Weed to forming Brooklyn-based buzz band Hotline TNT remains a bit of a mystery to me. But I’m super stoked for their upcoming album Cartwheel, out in November on Jack White’s Third Man Records. The record’s second single “I Thought You’d Change” is my favourite thing they’ve done so far. There’s a hazy shoegaze quality to a lot of Hotline TNT’s music, but Anderson’s pop sensibilities really come out on this one, putting the hooks and melody front and centre.
There’s a slo-mo quality to Rachel Bobbitt’s music that makes her hard to pin down. The Nova Scotia-born, Toronto-based artist is nominally a singer-songwriter, but there’s a lot more oomph to her music — both emotionally and physically — than that tag would suggest. “Two Bit,” the lead-off track on her new EP The Half We Still Have, is the perfect example of this, a weighty song that leaves you in tears while simultaneously punching the sky in triumph. It’s a quality that runs throughout the EP and that sees Bobbitt, who cut her teeth performing covers on Vine, making waves.
Broods were among the slew of 2010s indie-leaning electronic pop acts that never really managed to move beyond the small-to-medium sized-font area of festival posters. I’m sure they had their fans! Anyway, singer Georgia Nott has now ventured out on her own as Georgia Gets By. Nott recently dropped the great So Free So Lonely EP on Luminelle Recordings. At just four songs it’s hard to pick a favourite, but I’m going with “Happiness is an 8 Ball.” Below is a video of Nott brushing her teeth.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
Hit up koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.com for questions, criticisms and submissions.
Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?
This reminds me of a piece I wrote about musicians swearing at their fans.
Anyway, I'm a music writer myself. Let's subscribe to each other's newsletters.