My Love Letter to Today’s Fangirl
My grandmother fangirled for Frank Sinatra. My mother fangirled for Elvis Presley. My best friend/pseudo mom fangirled for the Beatles. I’ve fangirled for the Bay City Rollers, Shawn Cassidy, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, Roger Daltrey, Jim Morrison, Morrissey, Sting, Robert Smith, Michael Hutchence, Joe Strummer and Damon Albarn.
I have to be perfectly honest, I’m incredibly envious of today’s fangirl. She has such incredible access. When I was really little we only had Teen Beat magazine, those were very desperate early years. With MTV in 1981 and VHS things became slightly easier. I must have watched some bootleg VHS tape of The Police in Japan 756,321 times. I held my cassette tape recorder up to the tv to record the sound so I could listen to it. Sad. But, see….that’s all there was. There was no internet. Can you fangirls of today even imagine? No google alerts, no forums, no flickr, no youtube, no livejournal, no itunes, no tumblr. If you had told a 15 year old me I could “follow” my favorite musician and send him messages that he may even respond to I would have shit inside my neon pink leggings and thrown up on my lace-up black combat boots. We had “fan clubs.” I’m sure my daughters don’t even know what a “fan club” is. I remember writing Keith Richards a Christmas card asking him for his autograph that I sent to the record company. Seriously? You wanted a bootleg? In the States, we used to have to go to these “conventions.” My first convention was in middle school and it was a Beatles/Stones convention. In high school we’d go to these Smiths conventions. It was the only way to get bootlegs. They had buttons, too. (You had to have buttons for your jean jacket. It was an absolute must.) My history teacher in high school wanted to know why I had a button for a warplane (the B-52s.) It was easier when I lived in England, you could get almost anything at Camden Market and you might even run into someone. I saw Robert Smith there. We met our idols but there may or may not have been photos; there were no smartphones. Even as late as 2000 when I met and had lunch with Damon Albarn. No one’s phone had a camera. I can’t believe I have no photographic evidence of the most important moment of my life besides my wedding and the birth of my children. It’s like Rose talking about Jack in Titanic, “I don’t even have a picture of him, he exists only in my memory.”
Fangirls today have it made. You have a social network. You become friends with each other. You can communicate with each other in real time. I had pen pals. It took weeks to write a letter, send it and get a response. If I could have had conversations in real time with other Clash fans in high school I wouldn’t have been nearly as depressed. I would have drunk half the amount of bad white wine and Miller Lite. You guys can hate everyone in your area code and have tons of friends all over the world who understand you, who “get” you, who you can turn to when everything else is shit. You know so much more than we did. Your world is so much smaller, in the best way, than ours was.
So to all you fangirls of today I say, I love you all. You are me all those years ago. Stay true to who you are, to what you love, to what means something to you. Don’t listen to others who think you’re “weird” or put you down because they’re into something else. Who cares if the music you like is older or the guys you’re into are older. I still love Mick and he’s, like, 97 now. Fuck it. Who cares. Someday you’ll be moms and you can teach your kids what’s great. My girls know all the words to “Sunday Sunday.” Yeah, they like Justin Bieber too but at least I can put my head on my pillow at night safe in the knowledge they have a fucking clue. So carry that fangirl flag and wave it proudly. Thank you for letting me into your world via your blogs. It makes me happy and keeps me young. You guys rock. <3
(via caravanslost)
