“How amazing it is to be a dumb, hysterical screaming teenage girl. How amazing to go to a gig thinking of nothing but how loud you will shout; how hard you will dance; how much you will sweat; how tightly you will hug your friends, as your favourite song plays.” — Caitlin Moran, How To Be Famous
More than the music, I went to Harry Styles’s concert because I wanted to scream. I wanted my voice to crack and I wanted mascara to bleed black down my cheeks. This was the place to do it. Thousands of other girls jammed into Accor Stadium, wound up in the same knots of hysteria as me. After weeks of giddy suspense, we would all be together, crying out in a great caterwauling chorus. I craved this more than anything. The truth is, I was feeling old, which I realise is an insufferable thing for a 25-year-old to write. The lines around my eyes appeared more fixed, my cousin had begun taking jabs at my age by smirking at my TikTok habits. I am no longer the youngest person in the room, the cells in my body are now dying faster than they are forming.
Subconsciously, Styles exists for me as a kind of personal DeLorean. The last time I saw him was during One Direction’s On the Road tour at Allianz Stadium in February 2015. I was 17, and six months away from finishing high school. This was also right before Zayn left the band – the halcyon days for the fandom and in some ways, I thought, for me too. To this day, what unifies my lovesick school cohort is After, the sexually charged fanfiction in which Harry Styles is the unknowing lead. Eventually it would be made into a so-bad-it’s-good film series, but before that happened, we religiously devoured each chapter as it was updated on Wattpad. I doubt our conversations would’ve passed the Bechdel test, but it was a feeling of sisterhood that, having spent my teens in an all-girls high school, I regularly miss. As if to tap into this version of myself, I turned up to the concert hungry and wobbly with anticipation.
From my short career as a fan girl, I’ve learned that the fever is infectious. No one can stand in a frenetic arena filled with 80,000 people and not go a little insane. It’s the reason fathers trail after their tween daughters in watermelon onesies and matching metallic pink cowboy hats. It’s why I locked eyes with a woman double my age in tears as Satellite played and found my own cheeks were wet. Most people will tell you fangirling is nonsensical. I’ll be the first to admit it. It will bring you neither fortune nor fame. It encourages you to spend your time and money in ways that, for the most part, are unproductive. But here’s the thing those people forget: it’s fun to cave into the delirium of it all. To do something simply for the thrill of doing it. To daydream and create elaborate alternate realities because you can. And to do it side-by-side with others is the sweet glaze on top. For most teenagers, music is a way to vicariously access the world. It informs their understanding of what it’s like to truly love something, or at least the idea of something, before they get to step out and experience it for themselves. Fangirling is a chance to get jacked up on the freedom the fantasy offers. It’s the years of story-building in lockdown. It’s being at once gauche and shameless. It’s meticulous organising; months of fretting over your concert outfit and what lyrics you’ll emphasise and why. It’s creating fan systems that arena security refuse to recognise and lining up for hours in the sweltering heat anyway. It’s buying all the feather boas in a 50km radius. It’s making national headlines for breaking into an apartment just to secure a pair of unwashed red Calvin Klein trunks. Maybe it’s simply the choice to give yourself over to a band completely, even if you’re disparaged for it – sometimes by the band itself.
Over the last decade, public opinion has shifted. We’re more willing to recognise the ways young fans are the life force of music; the vibrating, sweaty nucleus of pop culture. We all know about Beatlemania. About Elvis and the fainting girls. You may have heard of the 16-year-old Texan girl who screamed so hard at a One Direction concert in 2017, her lungs collapsed. It was a medical anomaly that baffled doctors and warranted a mention in an issue of the Journal of Emergency Medicine. It’s like Caitlin Moran said, “bands need to be screamed at”. You’re not going to draw that response from a bunch of vinyl-collecting men standing silently at the back of a gig.
After five years in One Direction, and now a solo artist, Styles is a seasoned showman. His stage chatter dances between cheeky and earnest, he’s orchestrated more coming-out announcements than Oprah, and his top-to-tail Gucci wardrobe is tiers above the indie sleaze of his boyband years. He’s evolved, and he even has the Album of the Year Grammy to prove it. Yet, Styles has achieved all of this without shedding the young audience who jumped on his bandwagon in the first place.
In an interview with Rolling Stone in 2017, Harry Styles defended his young fanbase, saying “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?” He rationalised. “Teenage-girl fans – they don’t lie. If they like you, they’re there. They don’t act too cool. They like you and they tell you. Which is sick.” For the most part, we’ve dropped the cynicism that would brand teenage fans as easily-mislead victims of the marketing machine; as cash cows decked out in merchandise, wearing their hearts quite literally on their sleeve; as frivolous schoolgirls whose ability to discern good music will kick in right when they encounter Radiohead or existentialism – whichever arrives first. But to be a fan is complicated. I read that fandom is a portmanteau of fan and kingdom, which inevitably means there’s a hierarchy; the ruler and the ruled. The majority of the time, being a fan girl is a quiet vocation, the genuflect of a pilgrim, a candle lit in prayer. You never get to interact directly with the ruler. Not without elaborate scheming and some very good luck, anyway. But you do spend hours in volleying conversation with other loyal subjects. And social media has altered fandoms irrevocably.
If you want something done, ask a Barb, the Navy, BLINKs or Little Monsters. No one can mobilise quicker. Teenage fans are potent in their multitudes and that effervescent energy can pressurise into something noxious, fast. They can be possessive, inserting themselves into the intimate lives of their idols and dragging any romantic suitors through virtual hell. Few cases illustrate this better than Hailey Bieber and her husband’s dogged Beliebers. Meanwhile, Donald Glover and Janine Nabers recently mined parasocial relationships in all their intensity for Swarm, a series loosely based off Beyoncé and the Beyhive.
In that same article with Rolling Stone, Harry Styles continued (in what I imagine to be set to an orchestra crescendo of swooning strings), “How can you say young girls don’t get it? They’re our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going.” Overkill, maybe. After decades of treating young fanbases as pop culture’s punching bags, there’s a tendency to overcorrect. Teenage fans don’t need to be held to heavenly heights. They just want to be treated as people with worthwhile tastes. A lot of people enter fandoms at a time when their lives are dictated by the movements of others. At the deepest point of my obsession with One Direction, I was a 14-year-old virgin who couldn’t drive, waiting for my world to open up. Pop music is a means to inhabit the full spectrum of human emotions in a way that is safe, designed to accommodate the lives of teenagers. It’s a flag to raise on the construction site of your identity, at an age where who you are is less likely to be taken seriously. Now that life has grown so serious, all I want is to be atop that mountain again, moments from leaping off, right before any decision really stuck and who you are was just as malleable as the pop artists in your ears. Just after Harry Styles performed in Sydney, my friend Rosemary told me how she witnessed a girl we both went to school with, who is now a staid, sensible teacher, collapse to the floor right as the singer walked onstage. Of course, we must age and objectively, time is moving forward, but isn’t it funny how with a familiar lyric and a crowd of howling girls, it can be 2015 all over again.
