Because “following pop music” became my hobby when I was in and out of the hospital in 2022 and 2023, I spend more time than I should reading pop music forums.1 As far as these places go, all you really need to know is… well, you don’t really need to know anything, but the culture is constant trash talk and ragebaiting, obsessing over chart performance, decrying others for obsessing over chart performance, and so on. It’s the an atmosphere that’s fun—which is why I always end up back at one of these places when I’m procrastinating—until something shifts and it becomes clear that some people are actually very angry about pop music all the time.
Sometimes, upon contact with online pop fandom, people will say something like, the problem with this stuff, in particular its obsession with chart positions and records, is that it’s really misplaced sports fandom. To the extent that is true, you can tell it’s true because sports fans love whining. You whine about the refs, you whine about your team, you whine about the other team, you whine about people you’re imagining in your head who are judging you for loving sports, whatever.
Pop music fans also love whining:
Did a song hit number one but you feel like some people don’t care and don’t like the song anyway? Whine about it.
Did a song not hit number one and you feel like that’s a cosmic injustice? Whine about it.
Does somebody exist who is not your fave? Whine about it.
Did somebody get a nice review? Whine about it.
Did somebody get a bad review? Whine about it.
But I also don’t want to rag on sports and pop music too much, because people who love “literary fiction” also act like this. I’ve been watching this one new release, Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors, get the occasional mixed review, and invariably there’s this strange angry spasm of people saying that the critics are obviously jealous, or are basically unable to read, and so can’t appreciate that Williams is one of the only people out there who can write. Maybe that’s true; I haven’t read the book. I already have a different book called The Vivisector on my to-read list and I personally feel that’s the number of books with that title (plus or minus a letter) one to-read list can hold. I just think it’s weird to watch people act about novels the way I watched people act about The Dark Knight Rises losing its perfect Rotten Tomatoes score.
I don’t actually mind when artists snap back at critics. That behavior falls under the rule “everybody gets to say their piece,” and in any case, artists have something at stake. It might not be smart, but it’s not something I feel compelled to finger-wag about. It’s the endless whining from fans that really gets to me. There isn’t really a point in singling out any fandom for this behavior because focusing on one fandom causes you to miss the entire ecosystem of whining within which any particular annoying group operates.2 And it’s like, what’s even the point? Who is supposed to come down with a gavel and declare some group most wronged fandom?
Of course, none of this is a “real problem” when it comes to pop music because you can solve it pretty easily by closing a tab and doing anything else. And as I am trained to assume that what I dislike in others I dislike in myself, I can only conclude that also I personally am on a never-ending streak of whining, maybe even a world-historical whining champion, but unrecognized as such because if I were recognized what would I have to whine about, etc.
On the other hand, there is something about it that smacks of a “real problem” when it becomes clear that the online fandom world is gamed by accruing fake fans and then picking fake fights. If this kind of Potemkin beefing works for pop music, people are going to try to replicate that success in other spheres of life where “winning” actually matters. And that is where I feel like a problem begins to emerge that is not only about how I spend my time online—though it is also about how I spend my time online, don’t get me wrong. It’s just kind of inescapable how lucrative people’s negative emotions are—spite, envy—and how bad that is for all of us. But what does one do, other than wake up each day determined to whine no more?
I don’t mean places like r/popheads, but like… forums with their own websites. OK, I mean ATRL.
That said right now it’s “Swifties” because they are unhappy that Olivia Rodrigo exists. I write this group as “Swifties” because the Venn diagram of people who listen to Taylor Swift and people who listen to Olivia Rodrigo probably looks like this:
i’d like for you and i to be wayne and garth of the pop world nodding and politely discussing things going on while everyone else whines.
This is hitting on a real problem that you are right to worry will continue to expand. I don't like it. Trying to cut my whining to zero but turns out that is hard.