What does a star need? A great lawyer, a good publicist, a silent plastic surgeon on speed dial \u2013 and fans, lots of them. Since the rise of OnlyFans, the word \u2018fans\u2019 has gained unpleasant associations but it was originally a 19th-century baseball term to describe the most ardent spectators \u2013 though its provenance was far earlier, from the Latin \u2018fanaticus\u2019, meaning insanely but divinely inspired.<\/p>\n
I thought of this on reading that the new Michael Jackson film has had the highest-grossing opening weekend for a biopic of all time. It\u2019s fair to say that the fans will have made this happen: it\u2019s not really the kind of flick someone casually picks after perusing the options. (\u2018Darling, do you fancy The Mummy, The Devil Wears Prada 2 or a slavish whitewashing of a man accused of the most gruesome sexual assaults on children?\u2019) The accusations against Jackson \u2013 of which he was acquitted, though the pay-offs to the families of the children are believed to have run into the tens of millions of dollars \u2013 were so horrible that I doubt many people are on the fence. His fans, however, must be the most fanatical around, as was in evidence when three Michael Jackson fan clubs used the French defamation laws which make it an offence to sully the image of a dead person in order to sue two of his alleged victims after they appeared in the 2019 documentary Leaving Neverland. The lawyer who acted for them, Emmanuel Ludot, previously sued Jackson\u2019s doctor, Conrad Murray, for the pain he had supposedly caused fans by giving Jackson the drugs that allegedly killed him.<\/p>\n
Would any of today\u2019s singing stars inspire the same beyond-death fanaticism? Two of them have recently made statements which appear to differ in their attitudes to the many-mawed monster that can either lick you all over or chew you up and spit you out. At the UK premiere of her new concert film, Billie Eilish burbled: \u2018I just love everything that has to do with the fans\u2026 I feel like the connection that I have with the fans is what it\u2019s all about for me, and the only reason I am interested in touring at all, and it\u2019s what I enjoy so much about performing. They are as important as me in the movie, if not more so to me, so I feel really grateful.\u2019<\/p>\n
As important as her! One wonders how she\u2019d react if those same fans asked for a cut of the film\u2019s takings, or wandered into the grounds of her $3 million Los Angeles mansion. But she at least appears to appreciate that those people pay her wages, so it\u2019s just good business to butter them up a bit.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Taylor Swift \u2013 whose relationship with her fans was so hands-on in 2014 that she had 89 of them round to her house and entertained them for a solid six hours by playing her new album, offering around \u2018homemade\u2019 cookies and parading her parents \u2013 has used the dread \u2018w\u2019 word of her adorers: weird. Speaking to the New York Times, she said: \u2018There\u2019s corners of my fan base who are going to take things to a really extreme place. There\u2019s nothing I can do about that\u2026 You have to hold tight to your perception of your art, and your relationship with it. Then you just kind of have to be like, there it goes, I hope you like it. If you don\u2019t\u2026 then I was doing it for me anyway.\u2019 Having never particularly enjoyed any of Ms Swift\u2019s platters myself, it has come as a great relief to learn that she never particularly wanted me to.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a very different attitude from the cookie-proffering parties she employed on her way up, and it displays the tinge of contempt for the masses which often goes with great success in showbusiness. Demi Moore allegedly said to Tina Brown at a launch party, as onlookers peered across the velvet ropes into the VIP enclosure, \u2018Can you imagine how you and I look to those people over there?\u2019 To be fair, the famous see the worst side of people. If male, they will be inundated with offers of sex from women who only fancy them because they\u2019re famous; if female, they will be bothered by men who will send them deranged mail and stalk them. It\u2019s easy to overdramatise the threat from what Liz Hurley called \u2018civilians\u2019 and mistake the crazies for the masses. But all that attention from strangers was what they wanted. People who are famous have generally pursued fame ferociously.<\/p>\n
Once someone is a fan, they\u2019ll generally stay that way, even if the object of their affections does something outrageously offensive (see: Kanye West). Only a personal meeting with an idol who behaves badly will sever the bond: \u2018Get away, dear \u2013 I don\u2019t need you any more,\u2019 a silent film star told a fan after she retired. One of the funniest aspects of fandom is when an artist has a hissy fit about having a fan they don\u2019t want, as when in 2006 David Cameron said he liked The Smiths on Desert Island Discs. Four years later, Johnny Marr huffed on Twitter: \u2018Stop saying that you like the Smiths, no you don\u2019t \u2013 I forbid you to like it.\u2019<\/p>\n
\nAll that attention from strangers was what they wanted. Famous people have generally pursued fame<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
It\u2019s a funny old business, fandom \u2013 and getting funnier by the day. We return to OnlyFans, which started out as a pornography platform but has now attracted the famous, as they finally give their fans what they really, really want. So Lily Allen sells snaps of her feet, Kate Nash pictures of her bum and Kerry Katona a whole lot more. This is the purest distillation of the fan experience, which is why there\u2019s so little dignity in it. It\u2019s basically the digital equivalent of a tatty cardboard sign that says \u201850p a look\u2019.<\/p>\n
But whatever the offer, there will always be plenty of takers. As the heaving cinemas and Michael Jackson\u2019s estate can confirm, this strange, sad, one-sided love affair is stronger even than death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What does a star need? A great lawyer, a good publicist, a silent plastic surgeon on speed dial…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":943748,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3940],"tags":[4080,4781,77,31706,8733,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-943747","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-celebrity","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-michael-jackson","12":"tag-taylor-swift","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116533227012939841","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/943748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}