HEDI SLIMANE: FANS JON SAVAGE “I’m afraid to wake up each morning. I can’t believe all this has happened to me. I just hope it all lasts.” Elvis Presley, New Musical Express—September 7, 1956 On the 12th of October 1943, Frank Sinatra opened his third sea- The fan is central to the momentum of youth culture. She or he This can take many forms, but at its heart is an exquisite contra- profane, they’re vulgar, and they’ve taken over the world. It’s as imagined or otherwise, that the fan can become, in this case in like yesterday’s scraps. At the same time, once the performer son at New York’s Paramount Theatre. It was Columbus Day, a provides the raw energy that, fixed upon one point, gives the diction: the fan exalts the star because she or he is at once both if they’d founded a new religion. They’re completely anti-Christ. his own twisted way, a star himself—emblazoned on newsstands becomes abstracted into celebrity, then his or her life becomes a school holiday, and the fans were out in force. Weegee was performer the power that is then radiated back at the fan. Both divine—if not superhuman—and extremely ordinary: the boy or I mean, I’m anti-Christ as well, but they’re so anti-Christ they worldwide. (This particular notoriety, of the thrill-killing criminal, public soap opera, with every aspect of appearance, drug con- there, capturing the scene for the New York Daily News: “Oh! Oh! performers and fans then act as a kind of mirror for each other’s girl next door. Bruce Bliven observed this about Sinatra: “He shock me.” had already been explored by Leopold and Loeb, Charles sumption, etc. picked over in minute detail by magazines, Frankie … The line in front of the Paramount Theater on Broadway fantasies and projections, a living embodiment of who they could earns a million a year, and yet he talks their language; he is just As the Beatles’ PR, Taylor observed fan mania up close: “In Starkweather, and Charles Whitman—the August 1966 Texas paparazzi, bloggers, fans with their camera phones. starts forming at midnight. By four in the morning there are over be or—in the case of the performer—who they once were. Like a kid from Hoboken who got the breaks. In everything he says Australia, each time we’d arrive at an airport, it was as if the Sniper, among others.) As global capitalism enters a new phase—further away from five hundred girls … they wear bobby sox (of course), bow ties satellites around a planet, they oscillate around each other until and does, he aligns himself with the youngsters and against the Messiah had landed. The routes were lined solid, cripples threw For, during the 1970s, the star became the celebrity. This is a the time when mass culture was generous, of the people and by (the same as Frankie wears), and photos of Sinatra pinned to some cosmic event throws this delicate balance out of kilter. adult world. It is always ‘we’ and never ‘you.’” away their sticks, sick people rushed up to the car as if a touch quite different condition, which is not necessarily based on the people—then the position of the fan becomes more problem- their dresses.” There is a fantastic photograph of Sinatra in the mid 1940s Fan worship is first expressed by the buying of records, of from one of the boys would make them well again … it was as if achievement, and is intimately connected with the rise of the atic, bearing out Debord’s curses. Today, girls scream at other By eight in the morning there was a huge milling mob: “A big that illustrates this exchange. The setting is a long, luxurious hall concert tickets, of merchandising and memorabilia: the basic some savior had arrived.” In August 1966, there was the back- media industry predicted by Debord in 1967’s The Society of the girls—Kate Nash, Amy Winehouse, Girls Aloud—in celebration of blow-up picture of Sinatra in front of the theatre is marked red with chandeliers and ornate doors. It is full of embryonic teenag- commerce of youth culture. It can then expand into public mani- lash, when after John Lennon was reported as saying “Christianity Spectacle, paragraph 193: “In the second half of this—twenti- a “girlpower” not reflected in institutions or in everyday life. A with lipstick impressions of kisses, endearing messages of love, ers, almost all women, all of whom are craning to get a full view festations—the screaming mobs of young women that have is dead,” evangelists and the Ku Klux Klan threatened the eth—century culture will become the driving force of the American myriad of fan groupings exist in the virtual reality of networking and even telephone numbers. The theatre is soon filled. The of the young, lone, almost frail figure that faces them. The photo marked shows by Sinatra, Presley, the Beatles, the Bay City Beatles and burnt their records. economy, so assuming the role of the automobile industry in the sites and blogs, abstract societies chasing entities already show starts with the feature (Our Hearts Were Young and Gay). is from Sinatra’s POV: we feel the intensity of the performance in Rollers, and all those who have followed. Or the taking up of On the other side of the equation, the impact of sudden, and first half, or that of the railroads in the late nineteenth century.” abstracted, reification squared. This is the most heckled movie of all times ... not that it’s a bad the intense gaze that every single one of the audience—at least musical instruments by those young men (and women) who unreckoned, divinity on the only-too-human star is almost always The new media economy was primed for worldwide coloniza- Today’s cautionary tale is that of Britney Spears, sexualized movie ... just the opposite ... but the girls simply didn’t come to one hundred people in shot—are directing towards the face that decide that they, too, want some of that stardust. There is also devastating. In September 1956, Elvis Presley gave thanks to “all tion. “Celebrities,” wrote Debord in paragraph 60, “embody vari- child star who, growing up in public, has her breakdown paraded see that ... as far as they are concerned they could be showing we cannot see. the deeper identification of the wanna-bees who scan the star’s my faithful teenage fans,” while speaking of the cost: “I can’t ous styles of life and various views of society which anyone is in the media. (She then makes a great album about her plight, lantern slides of the screen.” The etymology of the word “fan” is confused, but it first wardrobe and re-present the divine garment in an everyday seem to relax ever, and I have a terrible time falling to sleep at supposedly free to embrace and pursue in a global manner. Blackout, which does nothing to relieve the pressure.) The delight “Then the great moment arrives. Sinatra appears on the appeared in America in the late 1880s to denote a passionate context. night. At the most, I usually get two or three hours of broken Themselves incarnations of the inaccessible results of social labor, shown at her downfall is more acute than any pleasure shown at stage ... hysterical shouts of Frankie ... Frankie ... you’ve heard follower of a baseball team. It seems to have been an abbrevia- Then there are the collectors of holy relics, torn clothes, hair sleep.” But, this being pop and the 1950s, Elvis ends on an affir- they mimic by-products of that labor, and project these above her zenith of fame and popularity. At the same time, her image is the squeals on the radio when he sings ... multiply that by about tion of the term “to fancy,” which had a stronger connotation clippings etc. In December 1956, the experienced Hollywood mation: “Everything is going so fine for me that I can’t believe it’s labor so that they appear as its goal. The by-products in ques- shown around the world—for emulation or condemnation, who a thousand times and you get an idea of the deafening noise ... than it does now, meaning to like something intensely. Baseball screenwriter Hal Kanter went to an Elvis Presley show in not a dream. And, if it is, I hope I never wake up.” tion are power and leisure—the power to decide and the leisure cares anymore?—an index of the Western “decadence” so exco- as there is no radio control man to keep the noise within ear as a spectacle was an early product of the American experi- Shreveport to gather material for the film that would eventually The star is torn apart by the twinned furies of self-doubt (“Do to consume which are the alpha and omega of a process that is riated by jihadists, who are, after all, fanatics of a different hue. level. Sinatra does a few numbers and leaves the stage hur- ment: an urbanized consumer society, based around mass pro- become Loving You. He went to scoff, but couldn’t believe his I really deserve this?”) and self-aggrandizement (“I AM god”). never questioned.” As an expression of the perpetual adolescence that is the riedly.” But that wasn’t the end of it: “A big mob is waiting at the duction, that would be the seed bed of twentieth century popular eyes: “I saw a young girl open her purse and take out a Kleenex, The result is an almost unbearable tension that is worsened by This exponential expansion and acceleration of information hallmark of American culture, fandom is a transitional stage that stage entrance … he dares not leave … so he’s marooned inside culture.