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There is no greater cultural crime a young girl can commit than loving pop music without apology. Forever marginalized as the screaming, crying Beatlemaniac, Directioner, or Swiftie, teen girl fandom in 2015 is more powerful and worthy of our respect than ever. Blogs, fan forums, and other online communities are havens for fans to dissect every tweet and performance their idols offer up, and these spaces are often ruled by teen girls. They worship collectively, exalt in mutual understanding, and celebrate both the bands they adore and one another. In fan-dominated spaces, teen girls are the ultimate authorities.
But their power has an expiration date, because pop artists earn respect only when they stop appealing to a teen demographic. Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé are two of the most prominent faces of this, prancing proof of the idea that there’s a legitimacy and longevity awaiting pop artists when they trade their Teen Choice Awards for Grammys. It's an idea that is now so prevalent that we’ve begun predicting who, in new pop groups, will be the one to "pull a Timberlake" and leave the group behind for respectable success. The boy bands and girl groups—not to mention their passionate supporters—that made these artists famous are seemingly only of value when they act as stepping stones to the next, better group of appreciative listeners. Drop the chaste pop songs about unrequited love and hand-holding, they’re taught, and they’ll move on to the right kind of fans: adults, men. That is how one becomes an artist, right?
It’s great that Taylor Swift’s fifth album, 1989, unleashed her upon a new, unsuspecting audience, that it proved so popular with previously Swift-averse adult listeners and provided "SNL" with fodder about the identity crisis serious music listeners experienced when they caught themselves enjoying it after years of dismissing her output. But the girls who’ve spent a decade hanging off Swift’s every word, charting her emotional growth and lyrical progression in McSweeney’s and zines and Tumblr blogs weren’t waiting for that approval. They didn’t need permission from a critic’s begrudgingly positive review of the album to start taking Taylor seriously; they’ve done so from the start.
Pop music is fundamentally about the fans, and when we say things like "fame begets fawning praise" we’re missing a big addendum: it does, except when young female fanbases are the ones stoking the ascent. When fame is girded by a swelling teenage, female fanbase immediately, that celebrity becomes false, temporary, and unearned. We’re always grappling for a reason to disregard the value of a popular—and populist—product because blindly embracing it means the market research and Simon Cowell-eque figures behind it have duped us again. The presence of teen girls offers up a handy barometer: if they like something you can be rest assured it’s not worth a serious listener’s ear.
A year before they toured in support of the Rolling Stones, the funk-influenced Manchester pop band the 1975 weren’t even filling pubs in their hometown. And while eventual and important blessings from gatekeepers like Zane Lowe and the Guardian propelled them beyond the minor leagues, it wasn’t critical co-signs that sold out their shows at the Royal Albert Hall in a span of minutes. It was the band’s dedicated legion of young female fans that carried the 1975 from local also-rans to festival mainstays, with more sold out international tours under their belt than they have albums to their name.
Despite the passion and dedication of his band’s supporters, the 1975 frontman Matthew Healy treads carefully when addressing the matter of their mercurial rise, and just who it is that made them. "What qualifies a boy band, though? If it’s hysteria and a female-led population of fans and being surrounded in hotels by those fans and doing sell-out shows, then we’re a boy band," he said last year. He’s since distanced his band from that designation; female fans are seen as less legitimate, so their adoration is an instant credibility-killer.
The crux of teen-girl illegitimacy is the assumption that they are incapable of the critical thinking their older, male counterparts display when it comes to their favourite bands. But this assumption is doing them a true disservice.
Earlier this year, One Direction fans banded together to shine a spotlight on "No Control", a track from the band’s 2014 album Four that they felt deserved more attention than the sugary singles they’d been offered so far. "Instead of songs that showed the maturity and growth in the sound of 1D, we got 'Steal My Girl' and 'Night Changes'," says Lynn Martineau, one of three fans credited with launching "Project: No Control" on Thunderclap, a flash-mob style "crowdspeaking platform" designed to cluster and amplify campaign messages across social media. "They are both great songs, but they are formulaic and sound exactly like the ‘boy band pop songs’ that 1D has always released."
The fans wanted more, and when 1DHQ announced no further singles would be released following Zayn Malik’s departure in April, they decided to take matters into their own hands. And it paid off.
"Project: No Control is the fifth-largest Thunderclap campaign in history, and the only one [in the top five] that did not have a major celebrity or sponsor supporting it," Lynn says, before rattling off some impressive stats. "The original objective was to have 500 supporters, then it became getting the song added to the set list." PNC boasted 34,449 unique supporters after six days, and One Direction performed "No Control" for the first time ever in June, during a concert in Brussels. Earlier this month, Lynn saw it live when the band’s current On the Road Again world tour brought them to Baltimore.
In May, Billboard reported the track "picked up 1 million U.S. streams in the week ending May 17 […] while its sales rose by a mighty 1,674 percent to 5,000 downloads." The band discussed PNC at the Billboard Awards and during their appearance on "The Late Late Show". Last week, "No Control" earned the band a Teen Choice Award for Best Party Song. All this because a passionate, predominantly female fanbase was savvy enough to identify a) that the band’s critical reputation would not change on its own, and b) the amplification required to chart a new track.
They didn’t just want to consume the band’s music; they wanted to control what was on the menu. "Fans started gifting the song on iTunes, and tweeting about the song constantly. They came up with lists of radio stations to call and tweet," Lynn explains. They Shazam’ed it and racked up plays on Spotify, seeing it rise 1,348 places up the iTunes Song Chart is just two days. Nick Grimshaw, host of BBC Radio 1’s Breakfast Show, called the effort, "like punk all over again; DIY releases." All this because a London university student named Anna mused, to her coven of Tumblr followers, about how great it would be for the fandom to unify around a central goal, in a now-legendary post that, tellingly, was tagged #sorry it’s just a silly idea it would be nice thought [sic]
"By brushing these girls aside and laughing at how stupid whatever they like is, we tell these young women that their interests are less important than what men like," Sandra Song wrote on The Pitch earlier this year, "That their feelings somehow become discredited and are not 'real' by virtue of who is having them."
The broadstroke opinion of fangirls is that they’re vapid consumers, eager to gobble up whatever scraps a band of dreamy haircuts will toss their way. They’re actively challenging that perception on their own terms, but they’re doing so in their enclosed spheres, far from the white noise of the world assuming they don’t—or can’t—appreciate music for the "right" reasons. In these safe communities, their tastes aren’t ironic or irrelevant, and they don’t earn credibility points for deigning to give a pop act the time of day.
"We’re all in on the secret," critic Hazel Cills once wrote about Lana Del Rey, "The idea that pop stars don’t have teams behind them, that they’re the sole authors of their music, that nobody is styling them—those are sort of antiquated notions in 2015."
The fans know what’s going on behind the scenes of their favorite artist, just as they know how they’re perceived. But what you won’t learn unless you pay close attention, is that they can critically engage with the what "Girl Almighty" says about them just as readily as they can squeal over Niall Horan’s adorable face and that moment in "Better Than Words" when he goes PG-13. Assuming they’re buying records, going to shows, crafting elaborate universes in the fan fiction they write, and cultivating inclusive conversations to do just one of those things doesn’t give them nearly the level of credit they’ve shown they deserve.