fan behavior: an essay by artbully
The scariest thing I’ve ever encountered is a fan.
When I first started making music, I was so excited and nervous about sharing my gift. How would people receive me — a regular girl – as a rapper? I didn’t think I looked like a rapper. How do rappers even look?
But it was 2020 and anything was possible while we were at the house! I was making songs in my friend's spare room with the mic sitting in a water bottle that I had cut open. Staying up late, looking up type beats on YouTube, and constantly getting interrupted by the ads that played on the free software we were recording on. My friends (and the occasional stranger I played a song for) said I was good though, so I wanted to challenge myself to give it a proper go.
A year later I moved back home to Memphis, motivated to give music an honest try. I booked some sessions at the only studio I knew, recorded some songs that I really loved, even performed two songs at an event my friend put together, but for those first 6 months I didn’t do much but go to work and go home. It wasn’t until I met someone on New Years Eve who had an artist drop out of a show that I heard the little voice in my head, “This is it! This is your chance!”
The next day I was performing at the former Studio 901 (RIP), and something really cool happened: People were actually fucking with it. Like, trying to say the words back to me and everything! After I finished, three or four people walked up to me, told me I did really well, and said five magic words: you have a new fan. Wow. Could’ve sent me straight to the moon. New fan? You mean my first fan!
I was so hype, I walked to my car to try and process what I was feeling. I wrote a song called “fit right in” that ended up being on my first project, which I would release later that year and name “A Bully is Born”. It was me affirming to myself that I was right where I belonged. When you hear it, I hope you laugh a little at how high that moment really had me (cause nobody popped a bottle for me, but it felt like it!!). A few years later, I would sit in my car and write a different song called “In Flight” and put it on an album called “How to Shine in the Rain”. That song and that album were the way I chose to process something much darker: the scary part of having fans.
“The higher you climb, the harder you fall” is the first thing that comes to mind when I think about fans. Also, the phrase: “there’s a thin line between love and hate”.
Growing up, I never quite understood that thin line junt. If you love someone, how could you also hate them? Why would you want to hurt someone you like?
See, nothing really bad ever happened to me before I had fans.
I’ve gone through divorce and that sucked, but never had someone just decided to hurt me for no real reason. The average person who meets me would describe me as a ball of sunshine, so what series of events would even lead to something like that? Why would anyone lie about ME?
Eventually I would meet with two different therapists to deal with the after-effects of fandom, and they both were surprised about how sheltered I seemed to have been from the mean things people do to each other. Both of them told me in so many words that I was lucky to just now be seeing this side of the world.
We watch people spread lies in movies, and we see lies being exposed in random social circles. It’s not unheard of. I just never thought I’d be interesting enough to lie about? I don’t know, but clearly I was wrong.
It didn’t take long. A few months after I started performing, I learned that sometimes fans have a bad vibe. Sometimes they DM you too much or give you compliments that don’t sit right. They say how much what you’re doing means to them, but in a “I could just eat you, and maybe I will” kind of way. They make every attempt at closeness: asking to hang out, replying to your Instagram stories, and sometimes giving you little gifts. And when you’re a new artist, you feel really honored by all of that. You want to show people that you appreciate them, so you engage even when that little voice in your head is warning you to stay wary. Personally, I’ve always had a thing about not wanting to be a “mean girl”, so I just faked a smile and kept it pushing. These are my fans after all! They deserve my time and my gratitude, and I wanted them to feel that from me.
What qualifies someone as a fan? Simply put it’s anyone who has called themselves one, but I felt this especially for the ones who came to my shows, streamed my music, and made a point to tell me they were rooting for me. All of that meant the world to me.
By 2023, I had more than a few fans. My instagram page went from like 50 friends to 1500 fans who heard my music somewhere and wanted to follow along on my journey. It seemed like everyone I met thought I had something special, and that was really the coolest feeling in the world. I wanted to be friends with all of these people, and I started accepting invitations to hang out from just about anyone. Music was opening up my world, and that’s not something everyone gets to experience.
One group of people though, I knew better. They were artists like me, but they seemed to have a bad reputation. I was introduced to them because one of them asked me for a feature, and before I knew it I was spending time with them all the time and making plans to work together. I cared about them to the point that when they told me one night at the studio that they were struggling, I went the next day to buy groceries and drop them off. One person in particular, rooted for me SO much and told me she was my number one fan. I invited her out a few times, and thought to myself, “Wow. How blessed am I to have people around me who see me in such a high light”. I found out she was sleeping in her car and went out of my way to help. She wasn’t in my house, so what could go wrong?
When she told me she wanted more from our friendship (which I also thought was weird because we didn’t know each other very well), I went with it. Mane… I was such a silly girl. Believing all the love around me was one of the best things that had ever happened to me.
Well, it wasn’t. I was almost immediately blind sided by what felt like the plot of a bad movie. She was spreading lies about me.
Things that were easily disproved, and that I reluctantly but inevitably had to disprove. I had never been in any drama before, and all I could think was, “Girl I’m gone sue you!”. Imagine my surprise when the police wouldn’t take my report (apparently lying isn’t a crime???), and the three lawyers I met with told me you can’t sue for defamation in Tennessee if you haven’t lost any money behind it. This was all very frustrating because when someone drags you into a fight, you either fight back or just lay there and take it. No matter which one you choose, you never can go back to the version of you that had never been in a fight before. This is your story now, and you have to deal with it.
However this wasn’t the worst of it, or what sent me to therapy. It was the strange phenomenon known as the dog pile. People who weren’t connected to the situation were suddenly inserting themselves. The original lie had become something totally different, and now I was everything but a child of God.
Want to know the craziest part of it? Every single person who did that: they were all fans. Each one was someone who had been rooting for me, and most were people who had been around me in person. Embraced me and clapped for me.
People who had spent almost two years wishing me well, these same people were now making up situations that placed them inside the drama as well. Others who had definitive proof that these were lies decided not to say anything, even when I asked them to. I may not have been a fighter, but I was never passive aggressive. I went to all of these folks to ask: Why? Why are you doing this? What did I do to you? Each person basically laughed in my face or played confused, and then went back out into the world to spread even more lies.
That was years ago, but the lies still come back every now and again. Different wording. Different storyline. At this point in my life I’ve accepted that if I ever win a Grammy, the road will be paved with versions of me that I had to lose to survive these battles.
I always describe fandom and its effects as something that happens to you, usually against your will. You can’t control how people will react to you when you put yourself out there. Maybe they’ll see themselves in you, feel heard. Maybe they’ll want to be like you and use your story as motivation. Maybe they’ll decide they hate you, want to see you fall. In any case, you can’t do anything about it. No amount of buying groceries or hanging out or showing love can protect you from this.
Nowadays I’ve learned to be selective with who I spend time with. I don’t open most DMs, and I usually don’t speak to people after I perform. We hear about parasocial relationships and Stans. We hear crazy stories about women saying they’re pregnant by Drake that he’s never met. The news tells us someone showed up outside Rihanna’s house to shoot her that has never spoken to her. But as artists without any notoriety, you never think about something crazy like that happening to you.
I’m proud of how I’ve responded to it, for the most part. I eventually took down the diss tracks because it doesn’t do anything for me to keep them up. All the text exchanges and pictures I posted on my story have faded away. All the messages from people replying saying I wasn’t the first person any of these people lied about are now scrolls and scrolls away in my DMs. But as long as I continue making music, I’ll probably always have a few fans. That’s honestly scary to think about, but I accept that and everything that comes with it because the alternative is not making music. Not doing that.
I ended “How to Shine in the Rain” with a song called “I made this with you in mind”. It’s a love letter to my fans that I wrote before all the rain happened, but I released it as a reminder to myself. Love is more powerful than hate. It just has to be.