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“For me and a lot of people I knew, a lot of it stemmed from us being very lonely, very depressed and anxious being like, ‘I’m going to forget what I’m going through at the moment and I’m going to focus on this celebrity,’” she said. 

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“For me and a lot of people I knew, a lot of it stemmed from us being very lonely, very depressed and anxious being like, ‘I’m going to forget what I’m going through at the moment and I’m going to focus on this celebrity,’” she said. 

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On social media this year, the stan was ascendant, fueling commercial competition, trolling and other arcane battles. How did we get here?

Superfans' antics reached the mainstream this year, but have operated at a constant hum since the internet helped turn pop music loyalty into a 24-hours-a-day job. Credit... Son of Alan/Folio Art

Benjamin Cordero, a high school student from western New York, has a thing for pop divas, but especially Lady Gaga.

Previously a casual fan of whatever was on the radio, Cordero was converted when the singer performed during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2017, and in the bountiful time since - which included "A Star Is Born" - his devotion has only grown.

Earlier this year, as Lady Gaga prepared to release her latest album, "Chromatica," Cordero joined Twitter, the current hub of pop superfandom, where he dedicated his account to all things Gaga. He tweeted thousands of times during the pandemic, often in dense lingo and inside jokes, along with hundreds of his fellow travelers, known as Little Monsters - internet friends whom he calls his "mutuals."

But these days, in these circles, joy and community are rarely enough. There are also battles to be waged and scores to be settled with rival groups or critics. And for Cordero, that meant trolling Ariana Grande fans.

In October, with "Chromatica" having registered as a modest hit, Grande's own new album, "Positions," leaked online before its official release. Cordero, who liked Grande well enough but found her new music to be lacking, shared a link to the unreleased songs, much to the consternation of Grande fans, who worried that the bootlegged versions would damage the singer's commercial prospects.

Taking on the role of volunteer internet detectives, Grande fans proceeded to spend days playing Whac-a-Mole by flagging links to the unauthorized album as they proliferated across the internet. But Cordero, bored and sensing their agita, decided to bait them even further by tweeting - falsely - that he'd subsequently been fined $150,000 by Grande's label for his role in spreading the leak. "is there any way I can get out of this," he wrote. "I'm so scared." He even shared a picture of himself crying.

"They were rejoicing," Cordero recalled giddily of the Grande fans he'd fooled, who spread the word far and wide that the leaker - a Gaga lover, no less - was being punished. "Sorry but I feel no sympathy," one Grande supporter wrote on Reddit. "Charge him, put him in jail. you can't leak an album by the world's biggest pop star and expect no consequences."

This was pop fandom in 2020: competitive, arcane, sales-obsessed, sometimes pointless, chaotic, adversarial, amusing and a little frightening - all happening almost entirely online. While music has long been intertwined with internet communities and the rise of social networks, a growing faction of the most vocal and dedicated pop enthusiasts have embraced the term "stan" - taken from the 20-year-old Eminem song about a superfan turned homicidal stalker - and are redefining what it means to love an artist.

On what is known as Stan Twitter - and its offshoots on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr and various message boards - these devotees compare No. 1s and streaming statistics like sports fans do batting averages, championship wins and shooting percentages. They pledge allegiance to their favorites like the most rabid political partisans or religious followers. They organize to win awards show polls, boost sales and raise money like grass roots activists. And they band together to pester - or harass, and even dox - those who may dare to slight the stars they have chosen to align themselves with.

"These people don't even know who we are, but we spend countless days and months defending them from some stranger on the internet," said Cordero, who later revealed his Grande prank, gaining nothing but the ability to revel in the backlash.

"When someone says something about Lady Gaga that's negative, a little bit of yourself inside is hurt," he explained of his own loyalty. "You see yourself in your favorite artists - you associate with them, whether it's just the music or it's their personality. So when someone insults your favorite artist, you take that as a personal insult, and then you find yourself spending hours trying to convince someone in China that 'Born This Way' was her best album."

"It's definitely a playing field to us," Cordero said. "We throw them in the ring, they battle it out, we cheer them on."

This year - one in which so much of everyday life was confined to virtual spaces because of the coronavirus - such antics garnered mainstream attention when fans of the K-pop group BTS targeted President Trump (and donated to Black Lives Matter) or when Taylor Swift supporters spit venom at those critics who thought her new album was anything less than perfect. Recently, NBC was forced to apologize after fans of Selena Gomez revolted in reaction to an off-color joke about the singer in a reboot of "Saved by the Bell."

But these battles also occurred at a near-constant clip on a smaller scale, in large part because of the incentives of the platforms where we now gather.

In the past, "the media that we had didn't facilitate these huge public spaces where attention is a commodity," said Nancy Baym, an author and researcher who has studied fan behavior online since the 1990s. "There's been this very long process of fans gaining cultural attention, gaining influence, and recognition of how to wield that influence, and now we're seeing it more because media are at a point where it's really putting it out there in front of us."

Before destinations like Twitter, YouTube and Spotify - where numbers and what's trending are central to the interface - there were self-selecting mailing lists, bulletin boards, Usenet news groups, fan sites and official URLs, where Grateful Dead or Prince fans could gather to digitize lyrics, sell tickets or trade tapes.

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The availability of analytics, including sales figures and chart positions, has helped transform fandom into something quantifiable. Credit... Son of Alan/Folio Art

"It was more about the community within - connecting with other fans of the same artist - and wasn't as competitive," Baym said. "In some ways it was competitive, but it was more, 'How many times have you seen them live?'"

In the early 2000s, Myspace in many ways marked a turning point, presaging an era of social media in which fans could connect directly with artists in a way they hadn't before, causing some people to become more hostile, abusive or entitled, Baym said. At the same time, "American Idol" pitted fandoms against one another in the form of a popular vote, and what were once more insular conversations among enthusiasts began oozing outward.

Matthew James, 22, who started the nostalgic blog Pop Culture Died in 2009 when he was 15, recalled when music forums like ATRL or LiveJournal communities like Oh No They Didn't! were a temporary escape. "You would log in after your day at school or work, and you had that small window of time on the internet," he said. "Even 10 years ago, it was still confined to these corners - you could really distance yourself very easily. Now that is not possible since everything has been moved from separate websites to these centralized social media platforms."

"With iPhones and everything, we've seen that small window of time you could be a fan turn into 24/7," James added. "People never log off."

Paul Booth, a professor of media studies at DePaul University, researches how people use popular culture for emotional support and pleasure. In an interview, he noted that in the last decade, "It's gone from a general understanding that there are people out there that call themselves fans, but we don't really know who they are or what they do to, 'I'm a fan, you're a fan, everyone's a fan.' It's absolutely become everyday discussion."

"Before, those people existed, but they were meeting in the basement yelling at each other," he said. "Now they're meeting on Twitter and yelling at each other, and everyone can see it."

While early stereotypes about fanatics focused on possessed, shrieking teeny-boppers or stalkers and killers, from Mark David Chapman to "Misery" and Yolanda Saldivar, fans were taken more seriously as a subculture in the late 1990s and 2000s, when they were seen as creators themselves, spawning zines, fan fiction and YouTube montages.

But with the rise of internet-first congregations like Beyoncé's BeyHive, Justin Bieber's Beliebers and Nicki Minaj's Barbz in the 2010s, an evangelical fervor became a prerequisite and the word "stan," used as both a noun and a verb, continued to gain prominence and even positive connotations.

"It's a reclamation of the negative term as a badge of honor - 'I am a stan because I feel so much for this artist,'" Booth said.

As the politicization of the internet ratcheted up after Gamergate in 2014, fan groups increasingly adopted the tactics of troll armies from 4chan and Reddit, working in large anonymous groups - often behind celebrity avatars that broadcast fealty - to bend online conversation to their will. And unlike admirers of "Star Wars" or Marvel properties, which are more sprawling narrative fandoms, music fans - like supporters of Bernie Sanders or President Trump - are often investing in a single individual, making things even more personal.

"It all boils down to emotions, which is something we don't take seriously enough in our culture," Booth said. "When people are passionate about something to the point that they're identifying with it, and it becomes part of who they are - whether it's a political party, a political person or celebrity - they're going to fight."

They're also going to buy. As artists have come to recognize their direct influence over swaths of their online public - sometimes siccing them on detractors, or at least failing to call them off - they have also come to rely on their constant consumption, especially in the streaming era.

"You might have a local" - stan slang for a casual fan - "buy a record," said Cordero, the Lady Gaga loyalist. "But a person on Stan Twitter probably bought that record 10 times, streamed a song on three separate playlists and racked up hundreds and hundreds of plays."

He added: "It's basically promotion, free labor - we're practically chained against the wall with our phones." (Lady Gaga recently advertised "Chromatica"-branded cookies as an "Oreo Stan Club.")

In addition to fueling a merchandise boom, these pop fans have taken it upon themselves to learn the rules governing the Billboard charts and the streaming platforms that provide their data, hoping to maximize commercial impact for bragging rights.

"Shall we tighten up our muscles and get ready for a long march?" asks the "Ultimate ARMY Streaming Guide" posted to one fan site for BTS, whose faithful call themselves Army. Tips include to avoid bulk buying ("there is usually a purchase limit or it will count as one purchase only"); to compile playlists instead of looping tracks ("it will appear as a bot"); and to not put the songs on mute ("Don't worry, you can plug in earphones if you're planning to stream the whole day!").

The guide was written by a BTS fan named Avi, who is 26 and lives in Jakarta, Indonesia. She went "down the rabbit hole" after seeing the boy band perform at the American Music Awards in 2017, she said, and found community in the fandom. In addition to gathering online, Avi and her fellow BTS fans like to get together in person to celebrate the members' birthdays from afar, buying them a cake, posing for pictures and making charitable donations in their name.

"I've never seen anyone insincere when it comes to BTS," Avi said in an interview. "No one is forcing us to do anything. It feels like we're promoting BTS, but we are also promoting our own voices, our own struggles, our own hope for a better world."

By running up the group's numbers, landing them atop various charts and trending-topic lists, the fans hope to inspire curiosity in others to check out BTS and take in the group's messages of self-love. "I think of it as my own voice," Avi said. "What I do for BTS, it's not for them. I'm doing it with them."

But some see these relationships between fans and idols as parasocial ones - largely one-sided interactions with mass-media figures that masquerade as friendship - and worry about the long-term mental health effects of such devotion.

Haaniyah Angus, a writer and former teenage stan who has written about her experiences in the subculture, noted that standom was "very heavily dependent on capitalism and buying" in a way that convinced consumers, on behalf of "really rich people," that "their win is your win."

"For me and a lot of people I knew, a lot of it stemmed from us being very lonely, very depressed and anxious being like, 'I'm going to forget what I'm going through at the moment and I'm going to focus on this celebrity,'" she said.

This dynamic often served to stamp out dissent within the ranks, which was once seen as a crucial component of fandom.

"I don't think that toxic fandom is synonymous with stan culture," said Booth, the fan studies researcher. "But I think one of the dangers of stan culture - that is, the danger of a group of fans who are so passionate about something that they'll shut down negative comments - is that it can often shut down much-needed conversations where our media and celebrities let us down."

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How Pop Music Fandom Became Sports, Politics, Religion and All-Out War

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On social media this year, the stan was ascendant, fueling commercial competition, trolling and other arcane battles. How did we get here? Benjamin Cordero, a high school student from western New York, has a thing for pop divas, but especially Lady Gaga.

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How a tweet about Ariana Grande made me realize the extent of harm this subculture has done.

The way in which pop culture is consumed in the 2010s is unlike anything else we have witnessed since the dawn of pop culture itself. Social media has created a hyperreality wherein the distance between regular individuals and their idols is slowly shortening, or at least appearing to. This is most obviously seen within 'stan Twitter', a section of Twitter dedicated to celebrities even to the most harmful lengths.

I want to make myself clear here : I don't hate stans or stan Twitter. Throughout my teenage years, I was part of this subculture in various ways, whether it be K-Pop, One Direction, Justin Bieber, 5SOS and - ironically enough - Ariana Grande. Through 'standoms' I was able to meet people and make friends in a way I couldn't in real life. I felt as if I were part of a community, that I finally belonged. But, as I got older, I realized the obsession I had wasn't healthy, and that's why I worry about the direction that many young people seem to be heading in. Their dedication to strangers in order to boost their own self-esteem feels almost like a car crash ready to happen and, for some, it already has.

But, though this is undoubtedly a phenomenon of the social media era, in order to understand what stan Twitter is and its origin, we need to travel back to a time before Twitter even existed.

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Why The Normalization of Stan Culture is Unhealthy

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The way in which pop culture is consumed in the 2010s is unlike anything else we have witnessed since the dawn of pop culture itself. Social media has created a hyperreality wherein the distance between regular individuals and their idols is slowly shortening, or at least appearing to.

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With the comeback date around the corner, shall we tighten up our muscles and get ready for a long march? After breaking major records with Dynamite, BTS is going to have their biggest comeback ever. With that being said, ARMY Magazine is here to guide you in properly streaming and buying BTS' songs and albums. In trying to make it as detailed and compact as possible, we'll guide you through the most popular streaming platforms: Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube. Check them out!

Buying songs separately (especially the title track) on multiple platforms is highly recommended as it helps BTS secure their position on the charts. With goals for Billboard Hot 100 and Billboard 200, you can buy from Amazon Music, iTunes, Tidal, and BTS US Store. Avoid bulk buying, as there is usually a purchase limit or it will count as one purchase only. With streaming, some platforms considered for charts are Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, Amazon Music, Google Play, Pandora, Deezer, and Tidal. Please note that streams from paid subscription platforms count more than free accounts. Don't have the money? on Twitter organizes donations for you to buy BTS' songs.

Your stream won't count as a unique listener if you put the song on loop (it'll only get counted once). Instead, create a new playlist, add the song as many times as you like, BUT also add other songs from other albums (members' mixtapes, B-sides, even non-BTS songs) and update the playlist periodically. If not, it will appear as a bot. Also, avoid muting the streaming platforms and your devices. Don't worry, you can plug in earphones if you're planning to stream the whole day! Last but not least, try to spread BTS' messages and music. Request the song on your local radio, share the links on social media, and recommend the song to your family, friends, and even co-workers. It's always time to become an ARMY.

Please note that you need to buy the album AND each song separately, if possible, on the iTunes Store. You can purchase on different iTunes accounts, but make sure to use one device PER account. After securing your purchase, don't forget to delete the song from the Library before streaming it on Apple Music. Only songs played from a paid or free trial Apple Music subscription are counted (there should be a plus sign (+) next to the song when you stream). It's encouraged to create a playlist. Adding a photo and description is optional, but recommended to attract more people.

Not an iOS user but want to buy and stream from iTunes and Apple Music? Worry not, you can download iTunes on your computer and Apple Music is available on Play Store!

Spotify is one of the largest, globally well-known music streaming services. Though streaming from a premium account is highly suggested, you can still stream from a free account.

Tips for streaming on Spotify:

1. Create your own playlist or listen from a big, curated playlist (e.g Global Top 50). If you stream from your own playlist, add songs that are not listed under BTS (if you prefer to listen only to BTS, you can add songs produced by individual members) to avoid bot-like behavior.

2. Premium users can interact with the app by pausing or skipping songs.

3. Offline streams are counted as valid streams.

4. If you already stream with paid accounts on other platforms, you can stream with a free account on Spotify.

As one of the biggest video streaming platforms, YouTube has its own trending list which will help BTS reach bigger audiences. Streams from YouTube also count for the Billboard charts, so let's learn how to do it right:

1. ALWAYS sign in to an account before streaming, otherwise your view will not be counted.

2. Search for the preferred song in the search bar. By manually searching the song, you will appear as a unique listener!

3. Play the entire music video at normal speed, with at least 480P quality and 50% volume. Avoid pausing and fast-forwarding the video.

4. Do not reload the page, use multiple tabs or incognito mode to stream the MV, or delete your watch history. Watch 2-3 other videos in between (official videos provided by Big Hit such as official lyrics, dance practice, and Bangtan Bomb videos are considered for Billboard charts). If streaming on multiple devices, please use different accounts.

5. Unlike other streaming platforms, it's best not to stream with playlists for the first 24 hours of the release.

6. Don't forget to leave nice, relevant comments.

Comeback season is always exciting, so please make sure to have fun while streaming and buying BTS' songs and albums. Don't stress yourself, stay focused, and let's bring BTS to the top together! ARMY, 보라해~

ARMY Magazine does not own any of the photos/videos shared in our blog. No copyright infringement intended.

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Let's Bring BTS to the Top- An Ultimate ARMY Streaming Guide

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ARMY, assemble! With the comeback date around the corner, shall we tighten up our muscles and get ready for a long march? After breaking major records with Dynamite, BTS is going to have their biggest comeback ever.

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JOIN FOR THE LATEST FAN NEWS.

We have reached the first 1,000 entrants to receive the Lady Gaga Themed OREO Cookies, but there's more.

Sign up for the Lady Gaga x OREO Stan Club today to receive the latest breaking news surrounding the Chromatica-inspired collaboration including drop dates for the cookie and Lady Gaga OREO grams as well as chances to win in the Sing it with OREO promotion.

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We have reached the first 1,000 entrants to receive the Lady Gaga Themed OREO Cookies, but there's more. Sign up for the Lady Gaga x OREO Stan Club today to receive the latest breaking news surrounding the Chromatica-inspired collaboration including drop dates for the cookie and Lady Gaga OREO grams as well as chances to win in the Sing it with OREO promotion.

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On 31 March 1995, at the age of 23, Selena Quintanilla-Perez, a rising Latino superstar, was murdered by her fan club manager in a Corpus Christi motel in Texas.

Her death was met with widespread shock and disbelief by her fans. In 1993, Selena, as she was known, won a Grammy for her album Selena Live and was widely expected to break through into the US mainstream.

Chris Perez, her husband and band member, describes the day his wife was shot by Yolanda Saldivar who was suspected of stealing from her boss.

Ms Saldivar was convicted of murder and is serving a life sentence.
Witness Produced by Mike Lanchin and Directed by Claire Tailyour Interview filmed by Rebecca Flores is a World Service radio programme of the stories of our times told by the people who were there.

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On 31 March 1995, at the age of 23, Selena Quintanilla-Perez, a rising Latino superstar, was murdered by her fan club manager in a Corpus Christi motel in Texas. Her death was met with widespread shock and disbelief by her fans.

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Credit... The New York Times Archives

LET ME TAKE YOU DOWN Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon. By Jack Jones. Illustrated. 281 pp. New York: Villard Books.

IF ever there was a Nowhere Man, it was Mark David Chapman. Traumatized by a tyrannical father, he received assurances all the while from his mother that he was destined for greatness, and he wandered fitfully through adolescence looking for an arena in which to fulfill that grandiose prophecy.

He became a Beatles fan, an acid freak, a born-again Christian and finally a volunteer working to relocate Vietnamese boat people. However, as the last of these identities fell apart, Mr. Chapman at the age of 25 began a free fall into anonymity -- a condition he could not bear. Quitting his job as a security guard, he laid siege to the Dakota, the Manhattan home of John Lennon. On the night of Dec. 8, 1980, he intercepted Lennon as the former Beatle was getting out of a limousine and shot him four times in the back.

"I was an acute nobody," Mr. Chapman told authorities after his arrest. "I had to usurp someone else's importance, someone else's success. I was 'Mr. Nobody' until I killed the biggest Somebody on earth."

"Let Me Take You Down" is the product of interviews with Mr. Chapman conducted over the course of five years by Jack Jones, a reporter and columnist for The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. Lennon enthusiasts can read this book in good conscience, we are assured, because the murderer received no money. As a practical matter, however, there is little new material here that might appeal to the dead idol's fans, only seemingly irrelevant ruminations on Lennon's character by friends and biographers. Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, did not personally cooperate with the author but authorized a friend to speak on her behalf.

The book may be of considerably more interest to students of abnormal psychology, particularly those attempting to chart the new and disturbing phenomenon of celebrity stalking. Why did Mr. Chapman target John Lennon, a man he had once worshiped? Psychiatrists who interviewed him following the murder characterized him variously as sociopathic, schizophrenic and suffering from delusions of grandiosity. He was curiously susceptible to the influence of fiction, notably J. D. Salinger's novel "The Catcher in the Rye." Styling himself the Holden Caulfield of his generation, Mr. Jones writes, Mr. Chapman believed it was his mission to protect children and other innocents from "phonies." (A "phony," by Mr. Chapman's definition, seems to have been anyone more successful than himself.) When he chanced upon a book from the library that described Lennon's lavish life style, Mr. Chapman reportedly saw in it a betrayal of the rock star's lofty principles.

"LET Me Take You Down" gives us some idea of how celebrity stalkers regard their victims. "These people aren't real," Mr. Chapman said. "They don't flush toilets. They don't have bad days." Mr. Jones identifies the personalities who are most likely to be targeted: those who seem the most approachable. Lennon had actually stopped for a brief chat with Mr. Chapman outside the Dakota on the day before the murder.

Mr. Jones raises provocative questions about a society that cannot distinguish greatness from fame, or celebrity from notoriety. Does pop culture give rise to a "modern dementia" in which celebrities become a "projective screen" for insanity? One could write a book on this topic alone.

Unfortunately, the author's analysis consists largely of quotations from social commentators, psychologists and other talking heads. These are dispersed haphazardly amid a welter of undigested material from police reports, transcripts of Mr. Chapman's conversations and samples of his prison mail.

The author seems to be laboring under the misapprehension, common to those who spend years immersed in a subject, that every detail is fascinating. The killing of John Lennon was not, as Mr. Jones contends, "an assassination that virtually stopped the world." Mark David Chapman is not John Wilkes Booth. As a post-mortem of a celebrity stalking, "Let Me Take You Down" is peppered with potentially useful information. In the end, however, it gives us more than we would ever care to know about a notorious nobody.

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LET ME TAKE YOU DOWN Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon. By Jack Jones. Illustrated. 281 pp. New York: Villard Books. IF ever there was a Nowhere Man, it was Mark David Chapman.

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where it came from:

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On social media this year, the stan was ascendant, fueling commercial competition, trolling and other arcane battles. How did we get here?

Superfans' antics reached the mainstream this year, but have operated at a constant hum since the internet helped turn pop music loyalty into a 24-hours-a-day job. Credit... Son of Alan/Folio Art

Benjamin Cordero, a high school student from western New York, has a thing for pop divas, but especially Lady Gaga.

Previously a casual fan of whatever was on the radio, Cordero was converted when the singer performed during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2017, and in the bountiful time since - which included "A Star Is Born" - his devotion has only grown.

Earlier this year, as Lady Gaga prepared to release her latest album, "Chromatica," Cordero joined Twitter, the current hub of pop superfandom, where he dedicated his account to all things Gaga. He tweeted thousands of times during the pandemic, often in dense lingo and inside jokes, along with hundreds of his fellow travelers, known as Little Monsters - internet friends whom he calls his "mutuals."

But these days, in these circles, joy and community are rarely enough. There are also battles to be waged and scores to be settled with rival groups or critics. And for Cordero, that meant trolling Ariana Grande fans.

In October, with "Chromatica" having registered as a modest hit, Grande's own new album, "Positions," leaked online before its official release. Cordero, who liked Grande well enough but found her new music to be lacking, shared a link to the unreleased songs, much to the consternation of Grande fans, who worried that the bootlegged versions would damage the singer's commercial prospects.

Taking on the role of volunteer internet detectives, Grande fans proceeded to spend days playing Whac-a-Mole by flagging links to the unauthorized album as they proliferated across the internet. But Cordero, bored and sensing their agita, decided to bait them even further by tweeting - falsely - that he'd subsequently been fined $150,000 by Grande's label for his role in spreading the leak. "is there any way I can get out of this," he wrote. "I'm so scared." He even shared a picture of himself crying.

"They were rejoicing," Cordero recalled giddily of the Grande fans he'd fooled, who spread the word far and wide that the leaker - a Gaga lover, no less - was being punished. "Sorry but I feel no sympathy," one Grande supporter wrote on Reddit. "Charge him, put him in jail. you can't leak an album by the world's biggest pop star and expect no consequences."

This was pop fandom in 2020: competitive, arcane, sales-obsessed, sometimes pointless, chaotic, adversarial, amusing and a little frightening - all happening almost entirely online. While music has long been intertwined with internet communities and the rise of social networks, a growing faction of the most vocal and dedicated pop enthusiasts have embraced the term "stan" - taken from the 20-year-old Eminem song about a superfan turned homicidal stalker - and are redefining what it means to love an artist.

On what is known as Stan Twitter - and its offshoots on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Tumblr and various message boards - these devotees compare No. 1s and streaming statistics like sports fans do batting averages, championship wins and shooting percentages. They pledge allegiance to their favorites like the most rabid political partisans or religious followers. They organize to win awards show polls, boost sales and raise money like grass roots activists. And they band together to pester - or harass, and even dox - those who may dare to slight the stars they have chosen to align themselves with.

"These people don't even know who we are, but we spend countless days and months defending them from some stranger on the internet," said Cordero, who later revealed his Grande prank, gaining nothing but the ability to revel in the backlash.

"When someone says something about Lady Gaga that's negative, a little bit of yourself inside is hurt," he explained of his own loyalty. "You see yourself in your favorite artists - you associate with them, whether it's just the music or it's their personality. So when someone insults your favorite artist, you take that as a personal insult, and then you find yourself spending hours trying to convince someone in China that 'Born This Way' was her best album."

"It's definitely a playing field to us," Cordero said. "We throw them in the ring, they battle it out, we cheer them on."

This year - one in which so much of everyday life was confined to virtual spaces because of the coronavirus - such antics garnered mainstream attention when fans of the K-pop group BTS targeted President Trump (and donated to Black Lives Matter) or when Taylor Swift supporters spit venom at those critics who thought her new album was anything less than perfect. Recently, NBC was forced to apologize after fans of Selena Gomez revolted in reaction to an off-color joke about the singer in a reboot of "Saved by the Bell."

But these battles also occurred at a near-constant clip on a smaller scale, in large part because of the incentives of the platforms where we now gather.

In the past, "the media that we had didn't facilitate these huge public spaces where attention is a commodity," said Nancy Baym, an author and researcher who has studied fan behavior online since the 1990s. "There's been this very long process of fans gaining cultural attention, gaining influence, and recognition of how to wield that influence, and now we're seeing it more because media are at a point where it's really putting it out there in front of us."

Before destinations like Twitter, YouTube and Spotify - where numbers and what's trending are central to the interface - there were self-selecting mailing lists, bulletin boards, Usenet news groups, fan sites and official URLs, where Grateful Dead or Prince fans could gather to digitize lyrics, sell tickets or trade tapes.

Image

The availability of analytics, including sales figures and chart positions, has helped transform fandom into something quantifiable. Credit... Son of Alan/Folio Art

"It was more about the community within - connecting with other fans of the same artist - and wasn't as competitive," Baym said. "In some ways it was competitive, but it was more, 'How many times have you seen them live?'"

In the early 2000s, Myspace in many ways marked a turning point, presaging an era of social media in which fans could connect directly with artists in a way they hadn't before, causing some people to become more hostile, abusive or entitled, Baym said. At the same time, "American Idol" pitted fandoms against one another in the form of a popular vote, and what were once more insular conversations among enthusiasts began oozing outward.

Matthew James, 22, who started the nostalgic blog Pop Culture Died in 2009 when he was 15, recalled when music forums like ATRL or LiveJournal communities like Oh No They Didn't! were a temporary escape. "You would log in after your day at school or work, and you had that small window of time on the internet," he said. "Even 10 years ago, it was still confined to these corners - you could really distance yourself very easily. Now that is not possible since everything has been moved from separate websites to these centralized social media platforms."

"With iPhones and everything, we've seen that small window of time you could be a fan turn into 24/7," James added. "People never log off."

Paul Booth, a professor of media studies at DePaul University, researches how people use popular culture for emotional support and pleasure. In an interview, he noted that in the last decade, "It's gone from a general understanding that there are people out there that call themselves fans, but we don't really know who they are or what they do to, 'I'm a fan, you're a fan, everyone's a fan.' It's absolutely become everyday discussion."

"Before, those people existed, but they were meeting in the basement yelling at each other," he said. "Now they're meeting on Twitter and yelling at each other, and everyone can see it."

While early stereotypes about fanatics focused on possessed, shrieking teeny-boppers or stalkers and killers, from Mark David Chapman to "Misery" and Yolanda Saldivar, fans were taken more seriously as a subculture in the late 1990s and 2000s, when they were seen as creators themselves, spawning zines, fan fiction and YouTube montages.

But with the rise of internet-first congregations like Beyoncé's BeyHive, Justin Bieber's Beliebers and Nicki Minaj's Barbz in the 2010s, an evangelical fervor became a prerequisite and the word "stan," used as both a noun and a verb, continued to gain prominence and even positive connotations.

"It's a reclamation of the negative term as a badge of honor - 'I am a stan because I feel so much for this artist,'" Booth said.

As the politicization of the internet ratcheted up after Gamergate in 2014, fan groups increasingly adopted the tactics of troll armies from 4chan and Reddit, working in large anonymous groups - often behind celebrity avatars that broadcast fealty - to bend online conversation to their will. And unlike admirers of "Star Wars" or Marvel properties, which are more sprawling narrative fandoms, music fans - like supporters of Bernie Sanders or President Trump - are often investing in a single individual, making things even more personal.

"It all boils down to emotions, which is something we don't take seriously enough in our culture," Booth said. "When people are passionate about something to the point that they're identifying with it, and it becomes part of who they are - whether it's a political party, a political person or celebrity - they're going to fight."

They're also going to buy. As artists have come to recognize their direct influence over swaths of their online public - sometimes siccing them on detractors, or at least failing to call them off - they have also come to rely on their constant consumption, especially in the streaming era.

"You might have a local" - stan slang for a casual fan - "buy a record," said Cordero, the Lady Gaga loyalist. "But a person on Stan Twitter probably bought that record 10 times, streamed a song on three separate playlists and racked up hundreds and hundreds of plays."

He added: "It's basically promotion, free labor - we're practically chained against the wall with our phones." (Lady Gaga recently advertised "Chromatica"-branded cookies as an "Oreo Stan Club.")

In addition to fueling a merchandise boom, these pop fans have taken it upon themselves to learn the rules governing the Billboard charts and the streaming platforms that provide their data, hoping to maximize commercial impact for bragging rights.

"Shall we tighten up our muscles and get ready for a long march?" asks the "Ultimate ARMY Streaming Guide" posted to one fan site for BTS, whose faithful call themselves Army. Tips include to avoid bulk buying ("there is usually a purchase limit or it will count as one purchase only"); to compile playlists instead of looping tracks ("it will appear as a bot"); and to not put the songs on mute ("Don't worry, you can plug in earphones if you're planning to stream the whole day!").

The guide was written by a BTS fan named Avi, who is 26 and lives in Jakarta, Indonesia. She went "down the rabbit hole" after seeing the boy band perform at the American Music Awards in 2017, she said, and found community in the fandom. In addition to gathering online, Avi and her fellow BTS fans like to get together in person to celebrate the members' birthdays from afar, buying them a cake, posing for pictures and making charitable donations in their name.

"I've never seen anyone insincere when it comes to BTS," Avi said in an interview. "No one is forcing us to do anything. It feels like we're promoting BTS, but we are also promoting our own voices, our own struggles, our own hope for a better world."

By running up the group's numbers, landing them atop various charts and trending-topic lists, the fans hope to inspire curiosity in others to check out BTS and take in the group's messages of self-love. "I think of it as my own voice," Avi said. "What I do for BTS, it's not for them. I'm doing it with them."

But some see these relationships between fans and idols as parasocial ones - largely one-sided interactions with mass-media figures that masquerade as friendship - and worry about the long-term mental health effects of such devotion.

Haaniyah Angus, a writer and former teenage stan who has written about her experiences in the subculture, noted that standom was "very heavily dependent on capitalism and buying" in a way that convinced consumers, on behalf of "really rich people," that "their win is your win."

"For me and a lot of people I knew, a lot of it stemmed from us being very lonely, very depressed and anxious being like, 'I'm going to forget what I'm going through at the moment and I'm going to focus on this celebrity,'" she said.

This dynamic often served to stamp out dissent within the ranks, which was once seen as a crucial component of fandom.

"I don't think that toxic fandom is synonymous with stan culture," said Booth, the fan studies researcher. "But I think one of the dangers of stan culture - that is, the danger of a group of fans who are so passionate about something that they'll shut down negative comments - is that it can often shut down much-needed conversations where our media and celebrities let us down."

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How Pop Music Fandom Became Sports, Politics, Religion and All-Out War

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On social media this year, the stan was ascendant, fueling commercial competition, trolling and other arcane battles. How did we get here? Benjamin Cordero, a high school student from western New York, has a thing for pop divas, but especially Lady Gaga.

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A panel of experts says The Secret can improve all aspects of your life: relationships, money and even your weight!

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Late in the summer of 1968, Pope Paul VI came out forcefully against the birth-control pill, putting a moral crimp in the decade's libido. London, however, was still swinging strong, and the Beatles decided - perhaps as Communist lark rather than Christian tithing - that it was truly better to give than to receive. In the August 8, 1968, issue of the Village Voice, part-time theater critic Charles Marowitz reported that the world's most popular rock group was shuttering its Apple store (named for its record label) and giving away all of the shop's existing stock. One mother walked in with her two children "just to windowshop and walked out with new dresses, summer suits, and other assorted goodies." As she left, the mom said, "Give Ringo a big kiss for me." The Voice correspondent noted, though, that not everyone was happy. "In the past few days, I have heard the Beatles maligned more viciously than they ever were at the height of their controversial pop success. For they have been guilty, in certain people's eyes, of the worst sin imaginable - not weaning the young on drugs or spreading Buddhist cultishness, but subverting the principles of commerce.... The Beatles have repudiated the premise on which all business is firmly established: i.e., that you can't get something for nothing."

During that tumultuous decade, the pope wasn't the only one questioning the mores of the times. In the October 3, 1968, issue, Howard Smith reported in Scenes, his regular Voice column, that the other chart-topping group from across the pond was being vexed by their record label. "The Rolling Stones, the group with the sandpaper personalities, continues to scratch the smooth wherever it is found. Although their new album, 'Beggar's [sic] Banquet,' was completed months ago, it has still not been shipped to the stores. The Stones like the bathroom wall graffiti jacket design. Their record company says it's in bad taste and won't release it. Not even the $1 million advance sale has been enough to bridge this obscenity gap. Also turned down was Mick Jagger's suggestion that the album be sold in plain paper bags labeled 'unsuitable for children.' " (This almost two decades before Tipper Gore headed the Parents Music Resource Center's crusade to label recordings for adult content in a manner similar to that used for motion pictures. Jagger, who had attended the London School of Economics before the Stones rocket took off, was cannily aware that the forbidden always makes for a good sales pitch.)

Next came a turn on the censor's wheel for one of the Beatles, even as the bad-boy Stones were blinking in the face of their record company's skittishness. The November 7, 1968, Voice offered readers full-frontal nudity from the cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's album Two Virgins; the record company objected to the nudity, but had even more problems with the only thing Lennon wore - an odd pendant. In a deep caption, Smith spelled out what it was all about. Sort of. "Hereby hangs a very interesting tale of commercial censorship. The music (which is electronic) from John Lennon and Yoko Ono's film 'Two Virgins' was supposed to come out as a soundtrack album. But the Beatles' British and American record companies balked because of the jacket photo, in which Lennon has a very unusual pendant hung around his neck. He refused to explain its meaning, saying: 'If I give in on this and tell them, the next thing they'll be telling me what kind of glasses to wear.'" Smith further reported that comedian Bill Cosby - of all people - came to the rescue, directing his record company, Tetragrammaton, to help with distribution, witchy jewelry be damned. "Meanwhile," Smith concluded, "the handwriting on the bathroom wall has been erased by Decca Records: the Rolling Stones gave in, in this Year of the Great Album Cover Dispute." (The Lennon tale hung around into the 1990s, when Noel Gallagher, of Oasis, obtained the bauble for brother Liam. "I bought him a few presents in the 90s. I bought him a thing from an auction which was an Indian necklace thing that John Lennon wore when he went to see the Maharishi. It's worth a fortune - it was round the man's neck when he wrote 'Sexy Sadie' - so I sent it to [Liam] for Christmas and next time I saw him he had it on. He took it out the frame and the label saying 'worn by John Lennon.' I said, 'What are you doing? It's fuckin' memorabilia!' and he said, 'John Lennon wore it, I'm wearing it.' He's probably flushed it down the toilet by now. I don't know, haven't seen it since.")

Serendipitously - or perhaps not so much - in that same column Smith covered a Free Store on East 10th Street, which was having a much harder time with the locals on an even more expansive concept of giving than the Beatles did with their one-shot extravaganza: "The climax came one night last week when a group of cars and bikes reportedly pulled up and the store's windows were shattered by shotgun butts." Apparently, freedom, as the posthumously released Janis Joplin hit "Me and Bobby McGee" puts it, is indeed "just another word for having nothing left to lose."

Stones guitarist Keith Richard once said, "Funny year, '68, it's got a hole in it somewhere." In fact, two of the biggest albums of that (or any) year were released on ominous dates. First came The Beatles (more commonly known as the "White Album"), which hit the streets on November 22 - the five-year anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. That was followed by the Rolling Stones' Beggars Banquet, on December 6, a date that would soon have its own run-in with history. In the December 12 issue of the Village Voice, music critic Carman Moore approached the White Album from clashing perspectives in the Riffs column -"I've never met a Beatle: they may be assholes, counter-revolutionaries, and purple meanies. But they're always something more: the most complete music-making organization in the pop world and song writers whose corporate name is not out of place with those of the great classicalists. I don't know whether the original idea of doing virtually every popular music style since the '20s and putting those 30 cuts into a plain, white cover is actually pompous, larcenous, or what. I only know that they invade those fields and end up cutting the heavies in all but two or three of them (even Tiny Tim). The key to this mastery - the easy way to say it - is that while others break their necks inventing styles, the Beatles invent songs. Another way - also easy - is that they are obviously still respectful and excellent listeners to anybody else's thing, that something makes them keep improving, and that music is their natural religion and they would yell their voices into hamburger, put their deepest secrets on a PA system, or strip stitchless if music is involved (A pretty girl is like a melody)."

Moore, an African American, wrote for the paper about such gospel singers as James Cleveland and Shirley Caesar, and found that in "Sexy Sadie," Lennon sang "excellently with a black-style r&b ballad vibrato thrown in." Moore also praises "Revolution 9" as "a not-badly-formed avant-garde outing."

In that same Riffs column, rock critic Robert Somma sought language equal to the massive themes found on the Stones finally released Beggars Banquet (in a simple white cover with elegant script). "If rock has a royalty, then the Stones are king; if a hierarchy, they're the Pope; if an occupation, then they're the boss. 'Beggar's [sic] Banquet' asks you to sup first with the devil, and then with the rest of the damned, a cast of characters, strangely not unlike you and me." Somma goes on to list some of the players:

For Lucifer:
"I was there when Jesus Christ
had his moment of doubt and pain
made damn sure that Pilate
washed his hands and sealed his fate."

For the rejected lover:
"Your heart is like a diamond
you throw your pearls at swine
and as I watch you leavin
you pack my peace of mind"

For the gangster:
"Yes he really looks quite religious
he's been an outlaw all his life"

For the well-known common man:
"Raise your glass to the
hardworking people
let's drink to the uncounted heads."

It's more than passing odd that during such a flamboyant, hopeful, violent, brilliant, mad travail of a decade, these two seminal albums arrived under similarly spare cover, the Beatles' as bleached as bones, the Stones' a prim invitation to the apocalypse.

But then things got weirder.

Far, far away from any London recording studios, a rancid guru named Charles Manson was in California - that ragged edge of a continent where dreamers, madmen, tricksters, and geniuses pile up on themselves with nowhere else to go - busily convincing his flock that he was in psychic communication with the Beatles. Such songs from the White Album as "Blackbird," "Piggies," "Revolution 1" (and "9"), "Sexy Sadie," and, especially, "Helter Skelter," were, Manson informed the faithful, direct confirmation that his visions of a world cleansed of pigs and killjoys was nigh. A career criminal, Manson was prepping his followers for murder and mayhem, and the Beatles were providing the soundtrack.

Or not. Revisionist historians argue that prosecutors' claims of Manson planning the murders of Sharon Tate and her friends to launch a violent race war, which would leave him and his followers as rulers of the planet, are as ridiculous as they sound. Instead, these scholars of Manson's mind blame the Tate-LaBianca bloodbaths on drug deals gone very bad, crimes which were in turn covered up by the authorities to spare the reputations of Hollywood's decadent, wealthy, and socially powerful elite. Whatever the motive, Manson was undoubtedly a world-class con man, one who once pontificated to a courtroom audience, "I have killed no one and I have ordered no one to be killed. I may have implied on several different occasions to several different people that I may have been Jesus Christ, but I haven't decided yet what I am or who I am." Such musings were much too heavy for Lennon and McCartney's preternaturally catchy pop melodies to shoulder.

And besides, the Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" was more legitimately drenched in blood than anything the Beatles ever put on vinyl. While the band was recording the song, in early June 1968, Jagger sang the lyric, "I shouted out, 'Who killed Kennedy?'/When after all, it was you and me," in reference to the JFK murder. But the world would come to know the lines that made the final version: "I shouted out, 'Who killed the Kennedys?'/When, after all, it was you and me." The lyric change was only made public thanks to Jean-Luc Godard's film One Plus One (later retitled Sympathy for the Devil) - which featured the band revising and recording the song in a London studio. Even then, only close viewers noticed, as the musicians did numerous takes, that the lyric was changed from singular to plural after Robert F. Kennedy was gunned down by an assassin on June 5, in Los Angeles.

Additionally, "Sympathy" received undo credit, a year to the day after the album's release, for putting the final nail in the Sixties' coffin, when eighteen-year-old Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by Hells Angels as the Stones were performing the song at their calamitous Altamont concert, on December 6, 1969.

Or so the story went. Again, it took a filmed record to set the facts straight. On December 6, 1970, Gimme Shelter, the Maysles brothers' film of the Stones' 1969 tour, revealed, for those willing to watch, that Hunter had, in fact, been attacked during the buoyant strains of "Under My Thumb," not - as had been reported by media outlets around the world - during "Sympathy for the Devil."

Perhaps it's no surprise that Joan Didion called out this misshapen history in her 1979 collection of essays assaying California's dystopian paradise, by titling her book The White Album. As she informs us on the opening page, "I am talking here about a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself."

Didion had had a decade's hindsight to arrive at her revelation, so give Voice critic Somma credit for divining the majesty and malignity of the music that defined his moment. He knew there would be much more to come, writing, "Like any work of art one can describe as total, insular, comprehensive, self-explanatory, and multi-layered, the 'Banquet' needs more than a few words and will reveal itself, like a shrouded, necessary truth, with the passage of time."

This article from the Village Voice Archive was posted on December 14, 2018

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Beaten or Stoned? Was 1968 the Beginning of the End of the Sixties? | The Village Voice

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Late in the summer of 1968, Pope Paul VI came out forcefully against the birth-control pill, putting a moral crimp in the decade's libido. London, however, was still swinging strong, and the Beatles decided - perhaps as Communist lark rather than Christian tithing - that it was truly better to give than to receive.

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Credit... The New York Times Archives

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.

Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

''Ronald Reagan said it as Governor and as President, in his home in the White House, over lunch, over dinner, in the car and over the phone, to religious leaders and lobbyists, to his staff, a Senator and even to People magazine. On at least 11 occasions Ronald Reagan has suggested that the end of the world is coming, and it may be coming soon.''

So begins a 90-minute documentary entitled ''Ronald Reagan and the Prophecy of Armageddon'' that is being broadcast at various times over the course of the Presidential campaign on about 175 public radio stations. That and other reports of Mr. Reagan's references to Armageddon has caused about 100 mainstream Protestant, Roman Catholic and Jewish leaders to sign a statement of concern. The statement says that the Armageddon theology is a false reading of the Bible and that belief in it diminishes concern about the possibility of nuclear war.

The statement is to be released here Tuesday by the Christic Institute, an ecumenical public policy center that has been critical of some Reagan Administration policies, such as in Central America. The statement will call on both Presidential candidates to repudiate the Armageddon theology as advanced by the Rev. Jerry Falwell and other conservative religious leaders who are supporting Mr. Reagan's re-election. Comments Arouse Concerns

White House spokesmen have said the President's beliefs on Armageddon would not alter his firm conviction for peace and intent to seek arms control. But the rise of the religious right in politics and new evidence of Mr. Reagan's statements on Armageddon have aroused concern among nonfundamentalist religious groups, which say the Armageddon theories could lead to belief that a nuclear holocaust is inevitable.

Mr. Falwell and a number of other leading television evangelists or fundamentalists preach that the present age is under the control of Satan and is rapidly approaching the time when Soviet, European, Iranian, Arab, African and Chinese armies will invade Israel; that their armies will be destroyed by a limited nuclear war, and millions of Israelis will die but a remnant will be saved to accept Jesus as Christ.

Believing Christians, according to this view, will be physically lifted up from earth in ''the rapture'' and reu nited in the air with Christ, who will return to earth with an army of saints to punish unbelievers and destroy the forces of Antichrist in the battle of Armegeddon. The tribulation, they say, will end with the dawning of the Millenium, a thousand-year era of peace under the ''spiritual aristocracy'' of believing Christians.

These predictions, the evangelists say, are detailed in the Bible and are about to begin because the rise of Soviet power, the rebirth of Israel in 1948 and the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 are key parts of the prophecy. 'Eight Million Adherents'

Dispensationalism, the belief in the prophesy of Armageddon, is not new in the theology of a number of fundamental Protestant denominations. It is not a part of Catholic, Jewish or mainstream Protestant theology. Nor do all dispensationalists believe in the view of nuclear destruction. But the television evangelists have put so much emphasis on their belief in a limited nuclear war in the Middle East that the Christic Institute has estimated that the view has ''at least eight million adherents.''

''Nuclear dispensationalists dominate Moral Majority, founded by Mr. Falwell, and the New Christian Right,'' said Andrew Lang, research director of the institute. ''They are on the ascendent in the Republican Party.''

The 90-minute radio documentary is based on new research into the relation between Mr. Reagan and conservative religious figures dating to the time he was an actor. Joe Cuomo, who is unreleated to Governor Cuomo, made the documentary in cooperation with Radio Station WBAI-FM in New York City.

Mr. Cuomo, a broadcaster who teaches journalism at Queens College, said the most recent statement by Mr. Reagan on the subject was last Dec. 6 in an interview with People magazine. The interview was published in the official weekly White House compilation of Presidential documents.

In the course of a discussion as to why he had called the Soviet Union an ''evil empire,'' the President said that theologians had been studying the ancient prophesies in the Bible. ''Never, in the time between the prophesies up until now, has there been a time in which so many of the prophecies are coming together,'' Mr. Reagan said. ''There have been times in the past when people thought the end of the world was coming, and so forth, but never anything like this.'' He Never Surrendered to Belief

But he added that he had never considered Armageddon to the extent of throwing up his hands. ''I think that whichever generation and at whatever time, when the time comes, the generation that is there, I think, will have to go on doing what they believe is right.''

''Even if it comes?'' he was asked.

''Yes,'' he replied.

Last Oct. 28, The Jerusalem Post quoted the President as telling Thomas Dine of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, ''I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself wondering if, if we're the generation that's going to see that come about.'' On Oct. 28, 1981, Senator Howell Heflin, Democrat of Alabama, said the subject of Armageddon came up in a conversation with the President and Mr. Reagan said, ''Russia is going to get involved in it.''

Mr. Cuomo said he made the documentary in the belief that the fundamentalist Christians ''have a right to believe whatever they want, but if this is Mr. Reagan's belief the American people have a right to examine it.''

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RELIGIOUS LEADERS TELL OF WORRY ON ARMAGEDDON VIEW ASCRIBED TO REAGAN (Published 1984)

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This is a digitized version of an article from The Times's print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

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No topic, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, is out of bounds for the theologian. This is because theology's true subject matter is God, and "all things," Aquinas sagely points out, either "are God Himself or...refer to God as their beginning and end" (Summa Theologiae, q. 1 a. 7).

With the mandate of the Angelic Doctor, then, what might be said-theologically-about Taylor Swift, the 26-year-old musical megastar, who released her debut single, "Tim McGraw," 10 years ago this June?

On the face of it, not very much. Religion is one area of Swift's private life that she tends not to be so open about (though rumors persist that she is at least a cradle Catholic). True, the protagonists of "Our Song" from 2006 raise the philosophically intriguing possibility that God is able to replay the immediate past: "And when I got home, 'fore I said, 'Amen.'/ Asking God if he could play it again." But even in her early, countrified period, overtly Christian lyrics are otherwise few and far between.

No topic, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, is out of bounds for the theologian.

Gospel-era Bob Dylan-an obvious and well-trodden hunting ground for theology in popular music-Taylor Swift is not.

In other ways, though, comparisons with Dylan are not so wide of the mark. Both are singers, multi-instrumentalists and, taking a protean approach to genre boundaries, songwriters of genuine genius. (If you don't believe me, go listen-really, actually, properly listen-to any of her five albums. All, down to the very last track, were written or co-written by Swift. And there is scarcely a weak song on any of them.) And if Dylan was the voice of, and soundtrack to, the youth of 50 years ago, Swift-with album sales of 40 million worldwide-is all that and more for today's young people.

In fact, that is likely the best starting point for a kind of pastoral-theological approach to Taylor Swift. She has evidently touched a huge cultural nerve at the beginning of the 21st century. For those searching for "the signs of the times," the "T-Swizzle" phenomenon is undoubtedly one. Note, too, that it is among young adults that Swift is most popular-and that the Catholic Church (or any church, for that matter) is increasingly not.

Note that it is among young adults that Swift is most popular-and that the Catholic Church (or any church, for that matter) is increasingly not.

That said, my own Swiftian appreciation comes directly from the committed Catholic students I teach-especially a group of bright, 20-something women. I asked one of them just what it is about Swift that she finds so compelling. Alice Costar, now a razor-sharp theology postgraduate at the University of Bonn, commented on how, being similar ages...

things Taylor sang about were happening in my own life at that time. Just as I was beginning to think that adulthood wasn't all it was cracked up to be, she released "Never Grow Up," a song about wishing a child could be protected from the inevitable hurts in life. The song "22" was released the year I turned 22 and conjures up memories of easily the best year of my life.

If you spend any amount of time following Swift fandom online-as "research" for a commission from America, let's say- relatable is a term you will meet often. It is not surprising. Her eponymous album, "Taylor Swift," was released when she was just 16. Writing and singing about what she knows, Swift is essentially an ethnographer-a participant-observer par excellence-of young adulthood's everyday "joys and hopes, fears and anxieties" ("Gaudium et Spes," No. 1). The song "Fifteen," 2008's morality tale about navigating "life before you know who you're gonna be," is maybe the clearest example. But really, the same applies to her oeuvre as a whole. Would-be youth ministers, take note.

The theology of Taylor Swift can, in fact, go deeper still. While I previously noted the general lack of direct religious content in the Swift canon, there are two glaring exceptions to that rule-which are all the more remarkable for their rarity.

Buried on her 2007 Christmas album, the song "Christmas Must Be Something More," which Swift wrote alone, does not pull its punches: "So here's to Jesus Christ who saved our lives." I have heard Easter morning homilies less avowedly kerygmatic than that.

Subtler, and more powerful still, is "Innocent" from 2010. Received wisdom is that the song is directed to the hip-hop artist Kanye West, an extension of forgiveness for a public slight at the Grammys in 2009. Understood in that light, the song is ludicrously overblown. But as a meditation on Christian forgiveness and the chance to "begin again" (to steal the title from a different Swift song-probably her finest, in fact) it is magnificent. With lines like "Today is never too late to be brand new" and "Oh, who you are is not what you did/ You're still an innocent," it is a shame the Year of Mercy already has a theme song (for the curious, it's "Misericordes sicut Pater"). Taylor's song is much, much better.

"In sacred science, all things are treated of under the aspect of God: either because they are God Himself or because they refer to God as their beginning and end." Looks like Aquinas was right after all. He usually is.

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No topic, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, is out of bounds for the theologian. This is because theology's true subject matter is God, and "all things," Aquinas sagely points out, either "are God Himself or...refer to God as their beginning and end" (Summa Theologiae, q. 1 a. 7).

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Black Is King, Beyoncé's latest visual album, has received worldwide acclaim. One thing that makes this deeply spiritual album distinctive is Beyoncé's deployment of Oshun, the Yoruba goddess of water, fertility, love, and purity, as an alter ego. "I am Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter," she sings on "Mood 4 Eva." "I am the Nala, sister of Naruba / Oshun, Queen Sheba, I am the mother."

Such artistic license would have less resonance if it came from any other artist but Beyoncé. Her influence on the hearts and minds of fans and admirers can hardly be overstated. She has cross-cultural appeal and political notoriety, the latter due in part to her and her husband Jay-Z's association with the Obamas. Her wardrobe has influenced fashion trends. Now, with her artistic channeling of Oshun, her reach has gone beyond the likes of the late King of Pop, Michael Jackson.

The little girl from Houston who joined Destiny's Child in 1990 grew into a pop culture icon and a political powerhouse-and a religious muse. Beyoncé even has a worship service named after her-the Beyoncé Mass, which has used the Kennedy Center as its sanctuary-although the service does not worship Beyoncé but instead evokes the power of the divine feminine to tell biblically oriented stories steeped in womanist theology (see "Not my grandmother's church," June 17).

Beyoncé's influence transcends age and race. But with this growing cultural power has come controversy. Given her invocation of the goddess Oshun and the existence of a worship service named for her, some question whether her influence is ultimately for the good or if she may actually think she is, herself, a god. She has been accused of idolatry.

Black Is King's use of Oshun has provoked particular controversy in Christian circles. "Oshun and her orisha pals are not your friend," one Nigerian Christian leader warned on Facebook. "I know your favorite artist makes them look cool, but do not be deceived." For many Black Christians around the world, as well as for others, the Yoruba worldview is associated with the demonic, with evil, with a misguided past overcome by Christianity.

We might try to understand the uproar over Beyoncé's symbolic use of Oshun by looking at a difficult moment in Toni Morrison's work. In Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, a documentary about her life, she provides an analysis of the claim that America is a melting pot. She suggests that what is missing from that idea is an understanding that Black people are not in the pot; we are the pot. America cannot fully understand itself without understanding how it has been shaped by the lives and experiences of Black people.

Understanding this point reveals why Beyoncé's use of Oshun is controversial-and why it shouldn't be.

America is not only a cultural and ethnic melting pot; it is also a religious one. An account of American religion might begin with an appreciation for the idea that the Black church is the pot. It has continuously, from the moment of its inception, shaped American religious ideas and expression. If the religious histories of African Americans, let alone the history of the religious strivings of our indigenous African brothers and sisters, had not been rendered invisible, Beyoncé's use of a religious construct from West Africa would have a different kind of resonance and would not cause so much concern.

People object to Beyoncé's Oshun references, but not out of Christian fidelity. Instead this objection relays an embarrassment about what we do not know. Perhaps her use of a Yoruba goddess exposes what we have in common with Christian missionaries who felt they had nothing to learn from the inhabitants of what they believed to be the Dark Continent.

We would be better off recognizing that the fertility goddess Oshun belongs to what's often called African traditional religion. Gayraud S. Wilmore, the eminent Black church historian and theologian who died this April, taught that ATR designates a social imaginary that is essentially monotheistic but operationally polytheistic. Within that social imaginary, there are many heterogeneous religions that stretch backward into the dim reaches of prehistory and forward into many localized forms and languages, into modern Africa and places where the African diaspora is strong, like the United States and Haiti. Wilmore explains that ATR is the worship of God but also gods, closely identified with primordial ancestors, tribal histories, and founders of ethnic groups and civilizations that exist in all parts of the continent and beyond.

As a pastor in Louisiana, I find this framework profoundly helpful. In New Orleans, where eclectic religious claims are in the cultural air we breathe, I am able to make sense of such spiritual entanglements without a hint of cognitive dissonance.

The spiritual arguments brought on by Beyoncé's work may not be about things essential to the faith but rather about expressions to which we are accustomed and expressions that we find strange. We are used to religion with sacred scriptures, a single founder, a central temple or sanctuary, schools of prophets and apostles, ecclesiastical organization, and sacerdotal officialdom. We are used to how religion, especially Christian religion, has made it itself known to us in the West. Beyoncé deploys a religion that is family- and clan-centered, pragmatic in its relation to daily existence, and firmly ecological and anthropocentric in its ontology; one that intrinsically relates God, natural phenomena, and the ancestors. This strikes us as odd at best and perhaps even threatening.

But Christians who understand the importance of the Black church for our own religious development should be comforted by Beyoncé's use of Oshun, not dismayed. She gives us a glimpse of how the Black Christian religious pot was engineered. "Always Africa is giving us something new or some metempsychosis of a world-old thing," writes W. E. B. Du Bois. He goes on to quote historian Theodor Mommsen: "It was through Africa that Christianity became the religion of the world." Maybe the way to a deeper, more mature Christian discipleship and witness includes a more charitable consideration of ATR-since without it, according to Du Bois, none of us would be Christian anyway.

In his seminal book Black Religion and Black Radicalism, Wilmore shows that there is an African substratum to the way Black religion developed in America. The Black church has remnants of ATR within its DNA. Wilmore gives our enslaved ancestors the theological sophistication that harsh responses to Beyonce's work may seek to deny. This is to say that an awareness of how Black Christianity developed in the West at the hands of free and enslaved Africans may be echoed in its most basic form in Beyoncé's recognition of Oshun.

Morrison's observation that Black people are the pot of the American melting pot has religious implications. The religious aspect of Black Is King should not anger or frighten Christians, especially not Black Christians. The album uses ATR as an artistic substratum, the same way free and enslaved Africans used it to create the Black church and Black theology. Beyoncé offers a welcome reminder that ATR is an essential ingredient of the African American contribution to Western Christianity. American Christianity was forged in the creative crucible of African religions.
A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title "Why Oshun?"

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Beyoncé, Oshun, and the melting pot of American religion

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Black Is King, Beyoncé's latest visual album, has received worldwide acclaim. One thing that makes this deeply spiritual album distinctive is Beyoncé's deployment of Oshun, the Yoruba goddess of water, fertility, love, and purity, as an alter ego. "I am Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter," she sings on "Mood 4 Eva."

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"The National Church of Bey," is an organization in Atlanta, Georgia that is now being considered a church, that practices the religion "Beyism." Beyism is the worship of R&B star and singer Beyoncé Knowles.

Although this sounds like a joke and very similar to the church of Yeezianity, the Church founder known as "Minister Diva," Pauline John Andrews stated it is not. On the website created to promote this "church," Andrews said they are "very disappointed in the failure of the public to recognize the existence of a divine deity walking among them."

The organizers reportedly gather every Sunday to sing her songs like they are reading passages out of a Bible. They have their own version of the holy book called "the Beyble," and as stated on the site, it is currently being manufactured.

"There were 12 of us," Andrews explained to thenewsnerd.com. "We used to gather every Sunday and sing her songs together. One day, while drinking Moscato and smoking Beyha (marijuana), we analyzed one of her songs and came to the realization that Beyoncé is truly divine."

This new movement is allegedly growing with a reported 200 people in attendance. On their site it reads, "As our congregation continues to swell, we ask that you consider what is more real; an invisible spirit on high, or a walking, talking, breathing Goddess who shows you her true form daily."

Andrews explained to thenewsnerd.com that their true numbers rank in the millions. "Whenever you see a large group of women defending the actions of her divine divaness, Bey, they are practicing Beyism."

The "Church" invites people to "worship The Sanctity of Mother Bey-Surbort!" using the word Surbort in substitute of the word Amen.

The "church" site reads, "As Beyoncé spreads her gospel through song and dance, her message provides uplifting, loving, and many times real-life happenings. We humbly ask you to respect our beliefs, just as you want those to respect yours."

The group invites people to learn more about their religion from their official Tumblr account. Oddly enough the religion is already making headlines.

A member of the "church," Taniya Hattersfield, 23, of College Park, GA was found dead Tuesday morning of self-inflicted stab wounds to the chest. Some reported it was a sacrifice to the pop diva but that claim has not been proven.

Beyonce penned a song telling people to "Bow down" to her. She also carries the title "King Bey" by her supporters, but Beyoncé herself is not believed to be a part of it. She is reportedly aware of the new religion and refuses to endorse or denounce it.

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Beyonce Inspired Religion: 'The National Church of Bey' Opens in Georgia with Hundreds in Attendance to 'Worship The Sanctity of Mother Bey' (VIDEO)

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"The National Church of Bey," is an organization in Atlanta, Georgia that is now being considered a church, that practices the religion "Beyism." Beyism is the worship of R&B star and singer Beyoncé Knowles. Although this sounds like a joke and very similar to the church of Yeezianity, the Church founder known as "Minister Diva," Pauline John Andrews stated it is not.

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Name: The cult of Beyoncé.

Age: Quietly building since 1981.

Appearance: Fierce, but also quite holy.

Beyoncé! Yas queen! And yas queen with you.

What? Why are you talking so weirdly? Beyoncé, I am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and I shall be healed.

Seriously, what's going on? Wait, hasn't it started yet?

Hasn't what started yet? The Beyoncé mass.

What Beyoncé mass? O Lord Beyoncé, holy mother, almighty, everlasting Beyoncé. Through Blue Ivy thou didst redeem us from sin, giving her ...

This is getting creepy now. Join us in praise: the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn and Harlem's St James Presbyterian are holding Beyoncé masses, building upon last April's inaugural Beyoncé mass held in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral. We must worship Beyoncé, the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is hers.

Worship her? Oh fine, not actually worship, but the mass is an exploration of Christian themes through her art. That takes place in a church.

Is this real? Yes, it's real. The masses are the brainchild of the Rev Yolanda Norton who, inspired by Beyoncé's "physical and emotional and spiritual struggles", put together a service that uses her story and songs as an alternative to traditional Christian worship.

So what happens? According to reports, the mass is made up of black female officiants, dancers and singers, and uses sermons and scripture readings to meditate on race and gender among African Americans.

And people actually go to this? In droves. The San Francisco mass drew a crowd of 900 to a service that usually only attracts 50. To put it another way, Beyoncé is officially 18 times more popular than Jesus.

Should we really be using church services to celebrate Beyoncé, though? Of course we should. Why wouldn't we?

Because she once advocated an irresponsible crash diet? Jesus fasted for 40 days and 40 nights.
From Mutya to Beyoncé: who is the best girl band member of all time?
Because she has a history of taking huge sums of money from unsavoury characters? Remember that time she got paid $2m to play a concert for Colonel Gaddafi's son? Oh, come on. Getting rich at any cost is basically the entire point of all religion. Grow up.

Fine, OK, you win. Contemporary pop musicians are completely deserving of their own mass. That's right. And don't you forget it.

So does this mean we can also go to Kanye West's "Sunday Services" now? Oh, God, absolutely not. I might be spiritual, but I'm not stupid.

Do say: "Beyoncé is the new religion."

Don't say: "Join us next week for the inaugural divine Pussycat Dolls liturgy."
Topics

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Cult of Beyoncé: how the star inspired a new wave of Christian worship

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Name: The cult of Beyoncé. Age: Quietly building since 1981. Appearance: Fierce, but also quite holy. Beyoncé ! Yas queen! And yas queen with you. What? Why are you talking so weirdly? Beyoncé, I am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and I shall be healed.

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Millions of fans saw Justin Bieber worship the Lord and proclaim God's love as he sang a powerful version of 'Reckless Love' in his Instagram stories.

There was a time when Justin Bieber and worship music may have seemed like the most unlikely of pairings. The pop star has certainly had his share of bad publicity.
RELATED: Justin Bieber Christian Faith: Singer Says God Is At Work In His Life
However, after giving his life over to Jesus, the young man seems to be trying to turn his life around.

"I, personally, love Jesus and that was my salvation. I want to share what I'm going through and what I'm feeling and I think it shouldn't be ostracized," Justin said in 2015. He went on to say, "I'm gonna use my voice for a reason. . . I just wanna honestly live like Jesus."

WATCH: Justin Bieber's Journey To Faith

Over the past several years, Justin Bieber has become an increasingly outspoken Christian celebrity. His faith is something he doesn't mind sharing with his millions of followers on social media.

And fans got a powerful reminder of God's love for them as they watched Justin Bieber worship in a video the star posted one day to his Instagram story!

Powerful Reminder Of God's Love

In it, Justin belts out the soul-stirring lyrics of 'Reckless Love' by Bethel Music worship pastor Corey Asbury.

"And oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God

Oh, it chases me down, fights 'til I'm found, leaves the ninety-nine

And I couldn't earn it, and I don't deserve it, still, You give Yourself away

Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God"

RELATED: Justin Bieber Sings Worship Songs on London Street
In addition to proclaiming God's unwavering love through the worship song, Justin Bieber captioned the video with a reminder to his fans that this love is available to all of us.

"God's love is reckless, and He loves you mad tons," he wrote.

Seeing Justin use his platform to praise God is wonderful to see. We pray Jesus will continue to work in the young man's heart and that his transformation will be an inspiration for the younger generation.

Let the lyrics from Justin's sincere performance speak to your own heart, as a reminder that God will never abandon or forsake you!
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE: Justin Bieber Updates Instagram To Announce His Lyme Disease Diagnosis "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus" Romans 3: 23-24
WATCH: Justin Bieber Worship With 'Reckless Love'

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Justin Bieber Proclaims God's Love By Singing Beloved Worship Song For Millions Of Followers

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Millions of fans saw Justin Bieber worship the Lord and proclaim God's love as he sang a powerful version of 'Reckless Love' in his Instagram stories. There was a time when Justin Bieber and worship music may have seemed like the most unlikely of pairings.

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Justin Bieber's played hundreds of concerts for millions of people, but it took him years to work up the courage to lead worship at his church ... and he made it count.

Bieber hopped onstage with the worship band at Churchome in Beverly Hills Wednesday night, and poured his heart and soul into leading the congregation in song.

The pastor, JB's buddy Judah Smith, gave some backstory on what led to the big moment ... saying Bieber's always been a worshiper, but the time had come for him to use his immense talent to guide everyone in praising God.

Justin tells the church it's taken him a long time to do so because he doesn't want the expression of his faith to look like a show. Of course, once he started singing ... it wasn't hard to see why he's a star.

At one point, Biebs was feeling it so much he went off the lyrical script. No one seemed to mind.

As you know, Justin's immersed himself in religion in recent years, attending both Churchome and Hillsong services, and now it looks like he's taking on a bigger role.

Originally published -- 7:05 AM PT

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Justin Bieber Opens Up About Leading Worship at Church Service

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Play video content Exclusive TMZ.com Play video content TMZ.com Justin Bieber 's played hundreds of concerts for millions of people, but it took him years to work up the courage to lead worship at his church ... and he made it count.

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Charles Manson had an easy explanation for why he ordered the deaths of the family of Leno LaBianca and residents at Sharon Tate's house at the hands of his "Family": "It's the Beatles, the music they're putting out," he told the district attorney who sent him to death row. "These kids listen to this music and pick up the message. It's subliminal."

A half-century has passed since the Manson Family carried out the brutal, stunning Tate-LaBianca murders in August of 1969, and their supposed link to the Beatles remains confounding. The words "Healter [ sic] Skelter" had been painted in victims' blood on the LaBiancas' fridge, but the reference's significance did not come to light until the trial. When Charles Manson and his followers faced a judge for the crimes a year later, prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi explained that the motive for the killings came from Manson's twisted misinterpretation of lyrics on the White Album, which was released in November 1968, months before the murders. In Manson's mind, benign songs like "Blackbird," "Piggies" and, most prominently, "Helter Skelter," foretold a bloody, apocalyptic race war. But when the battle never began, he decided to kick-start it with the murders.

"Charles Manson interpreted that 'Helter Skelter' was something to do with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse," McCartney said in the 2000 book T he Beatles Anthology. "I still don't know what all that stuff is; it's from the Bible, 'Revelations' - I haven't read it so I wouldn't know. But he interpreted the whole thing ... and arrived at having to go out and kill everyone.... It was frightening, because you don't write songs for those reasons."

"It has nothing to do with me," John Lennon said in a 1980 Playboy interview. "Manson was just an extreme version of the people who came up with the 'Paul is dead' thing or who figured out that the initials to 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds' were LSD and concluded I was writing about acid."

"It was upsetting to be associated with something so sleazy as Charles Manson," George Harrison said in Anthology.

"I mean, I knew [Tate's husband] Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate and, God, it was a rough time," Ringo Starr said.

Although he would deny being into the Beatles years later ("I am a Bing Crosby fan," he declared in 1985 - despite inmates at a prison Manson stayed at in the early Sixties claiming he was obsessed with the Beatles), Manson discussed the group enough with his followers that his warped reading of the Fab Four's most adventurous album resounded throughout the trial. Bugliosi interviewed several Manson Family members, including those who were not facing criminal charges, and found consistency in their descriptions of his mythology surrounding the White Album and the garbled connections he made between it and the Book of Revelations, which depict end-times.

"This music is bringing on the revolution, the unorganized overthrow of the establishment," Manson told Rolling Stone in 1970. "The Beatles know [what's happening] in the sense that the subconscious knows."

"From the beginning, Charlie believed the Beatles' music carried an important message - to us," Manson Family member Paul Watkins wrote in his book, My Life With Charles Manson. "He said their album, The Magical Mystery Tour, expressed the essence of his own philosophy. Basically, Charlie's trip was to program us all to submit: to give up our egos, which, in a spiritual sense, is a lofty aspiration. As rebels within a materialistic, decadent culture, we could dig it."

Manson discovered the White Album in December 1968, while visiting Los Angeles on a sojourn from the freezing California desert. When he returned to Death Valley on New Year's Eve, he began pressing his entourage for their reactions to the record. "Are you hep to what the Beatles are saying?" Family member Brooks Poston recalled Manson asking him, as reported in Bugliosi's book, Helter Skelter. "Helter Skelter is coming down. The Beatles are telling it like it is." Watkins said this was around the time, too, that Manson began using the words "helter skelter" to describe an oncoming racial conflict, "and what it meant was the Negros were going to come down and rip the cities all apart. ... Before Helter Skelter came along, all Charlie cared about was orgies."

"It was upsetting to be associated with something so sleazy as Charles Manson," said George Harrison.

The White Album was soon resonating throughout the Manson Family. Manson had renamed Susan Atkins "Sadie Mae Glutz" prior to the LP's release, but the Beatles' inclusion of the cheeky song "Sexy Sadie" (originally written to the word "Maharishi," referring to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who had allegedly made sexual advances on Mia Farrow) made it seem like he had divined it. He interpreted some lyrics to the love ballad "I Will" - "Your song will fill the air/ Sing it loud so I can hear you" - as telling him to make his own album to spread the message that he was a resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the bizarre "Honey Pie" (McCartney's riff on vaudevillian music from the Twenties) with its reference to a "Hollywood song" reinforced that he was a singing messiah. He also claimed to hear messages that the Beatles were seeking him out in "Don't Pass Me By," "Yer Blues" and Magical Mystery Tour's "Blue Jay Way."

The Manson Family claimed to have sent telegrams, written letters and made phone calls to England to invite the Beatles to join them before the race war, but they didn't reach the band. So they worked on Manson's album, which he hoped would be produced by Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day, who'd worked with the Beach Boys and lived at 10050 Cielo Drive. The recording never came to be, as Melcher severed his ties with Manson and moved out of the Cielo Drive house; Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate moved in shortly thereafter.

All the while, the songs on the White Album meant more and more to Manson. Bugliosi wrote in Helter Skelter that "Rocky Raccoon" - a goofy, melodramatic number that began in India with McCartney, Lennon and Donovan making up a cowboy named Rocky Sassoon - was, to Manson, a veiled story of an African-American uprising. (The slur "coon" struck Manson.) "'Rocky's revival' - 're-vival,' it means coming back to life," Manson told Rolling Stone in 1970. "The black man is going to come back into power again." And, to Manson, "Happiness Is a Warm Gun," perhaps Lennon's most double-entendre-filled song, meant "the Beatles were telling blackie to get guns and fight whitey," in Bugliosi's words.

Then there were the five songs Manson liked most: "Blackbird," "Piggies," "Revolution 1," "Helter Skelter" and "Revolution 9." Manson's followers would later claim that he had drawn parallels between the last song's title and the ninth chapter of the Book of Revelation, which tells of a hellish bottomless pit opening up in the world, and a plague of anthropomorphic locusts with long hair coming to torture the unfaithful until an angel blows a trumpet to God. Family member Gregg Jakobson said in Helter Skelter that Manson drew comparisons between the Bible and "the Beatles' songs, the power that came out of their mouths."

"Blackbird," McCartney's touching, acoustic song supporting black women during the civil rights movement in the U.S., specifically addressed, in Manson's mind, African-Americans viciously fighting the establishment. Watkins told Bugliosi that Manson "figured the Beatles were programming the black people to get it up, get it on, start doing it," with lyrics like "Blackbird singing in the dead of night/ Take these broken wings and learn to fly ... You were only waiting for this moment to arise." "'Rise' was one of Charlie's big words," Jakobson told the prosecutor, which helped establish Manson's motive because "rise" had been written in blood on the LaBiancas' wall.

"Helter Skelter" was a song that began from a rivalry with Pete Townshend, after the Who guitarist called "I Can See for Miles" one of the wildest recordings ever made in a Melody Maker interview. "Just that one little paragraph was enough to inspire me, to make a move," McCartney later said. "So I sat down and wrote 'Helter Skelter' to be the most raucous vocal, the loudest drums, et cetera." He also once described it as "a ridiculous song ... 'cause I like noise." During the trial, Manson said that he'd interpreted the words to mean general chaos; it was obviously an important theme to him as "Helter Skelter" had been written on a door found at Spahn Ranch, one of the Manson Family hideouts. But Family member Poston told Bugliosi that Manson thought it referred to the Family emerging from the bottomless pit referenced in Revelation.

"['Helter Skelter'] means confusion, literally," Manson said in court. "It doesn't mean any war with anyone. It doesn't mean that some people are going to kill other people. ... Helter Skelter is confusion. Confusion is coming down around you fast....

"Is it a conspiracy that the music is telling the youth to rise up against the establishment because the establishment is rapidly destroying things?" he continued. "The music speaks to you every day, but you are too deaf, dumb and blind to even listen to the music.... It is not my conspiracy. It is not my music. I hear what it relates. It says 'Rise.' It says 'Kill.' Why blame it on me? I didn't write the music."

To Manson, the lyrics of "Revolution 1" meant that the once-ambivalent Beatles now condoned violent revolution.

The song's meaning, however, was crystal clear to its writer. "I was using the symbol of a helter skelter [a playground slide] as a ride from the top to the bottom - the rise and fall of the Roman Empire," McCartney once said. "This was the demise, the going down. You could have thought of it as a rather cute title but it's since taken on all sorts of ominous overtones because Manson picked it up as an anthem."

Then there was "Piggies," a playful Harrison takedown of the bourgeoisie, dining out with forks and knives, that he'd started in 1966 and finished during the White Album sessions with Lennon's lyrical addition of "What they need's a damn good whacking." But it meant something different to Manson. "By that, he meant the black man was going to give the piggies, the establishment, a damned good whacking," Jakobson told Bugliosi. Susan Atkins would later write word "pig" in Tate's blood on a door of the Cielo Drive house. The Family also wrote "Death to pigs" in blood on wall of the LaBiancas, whom they killed using forks and knives.

"All that Manson stuff was built around George's song about pigs and Paul's song about an English fairground," Lennon once said. "It has nothing to do with anything, and least of all to do with me." But the truth is, Manson also parsed Lennon's two "Revolution" songs on the White Album.

"Revolution 1" is a groove-heavy rocker with some admittedly mixed messages about political revolutions, notably the student uprising in Paris, the Tet Offensive and the global spread of communism from Mao Zedong in China - a fact lost on Manson. Right before the first chorus, Lennon sings, "When you talk about destruction/ Don't you know that you can count me out ... in." "I put in both ['out' and 'in'] because I was not sure," Lennon said. "I didn't want to get killed." To Manson, that meant that the once-ambivalent Beatles now condoned violent revolution. And Lennon's lyric, "We'd all love to see the plan," was, in Manson's mind, a message that he needed to show them he was capable of being the catalyst. (He seemed to miss the couplet, "But if you want money for people with minds that hate/ All I can tell is brother you have to wait.")

The most prescient "Revolution" to Manson, however, was "Revolution 9," Lennon's eight-plus-minute audial experiment, an avant-garde odyssey built with around 20 sound-effects loops, including samples of Sibelius' Seventh Symphony and part of the orchestral overdub from "A Day in the Life." The Beatle worked on the song with his then-girlfriend, Yoko Ono, and Harrison picked the "nine" in the title because of the numerological meaning it had in his life. "'Revolution 9' was an unconscious picture of what I actually think will happen when it happens, just like a drawing of a revolution," Lennon said in Anthology. "It was just abstract, musique concrète, loops, people screaming." The New York Times called the track one of the double-LP's "unqualified bummers" and an "aleatory drag."

For Manson, it was the album's peak. He thought, according to Jakobson, that "It was the Beatles' way of telling people what was going to happen; it was their way of making a prophecy; it directly paralleled the Bible's Revelation 9." Manson reportedly could hear pigs oinking and a man's voice saying "rise" deep in the track's machine-gun fire. In Helter Skelter, Bugliosi wrote that even he was struck by the song: "After having listened to it myself, I could easily believe that if ever there were such a conflict, this was probably very much what it would sound like." But to him, it was evidence.

The album became a constant soundtrack for the Manson Family, as they parsed the supposed hidden meanings the songs and how they all fit together into the blood-soaked tableau that was Manson's dubious beatific vision. Watkins claimed that Manson had heard a connection between "Piggies," "Helter Skelter" and "Revolution 9," in a chord that was repeated between the songs - notably around the machine gunning in "Revolution 9." It somehow spoke to Manson.

"Music gives everyone messages," Manson once said. "How do I have to appear like I'm some kind of maniac because I can hear something the music says? When the music says, 'Somewhere over the Rainbow,' I'm still there over the rainbow."

The White Album became a constant soundtrack for the Manson Family.

When Rolling Stone met with Manson in 1970, the reporters asked him to illustrate just how the messages all fit together. He asked them to pick songs from the White Album, and they chose "Piggies," "Helter Skelter" and "Blackbird" - and Manson added "Rocky Raccoon" for good measure. On a piece of paper, he wrote each song title as if it were a column header, and he drew a zigzag under "Helter Skelter" and two markings under "Blackbird," ostensibly to notate bird sounds. "This bottom part is the subconscious," he said. "At the end of each song there is a little tag piece on it, a couple of notes. Or like in 'Piggies' there's 'oink, oink, oink.' Just these couple of sounds. And all these sounds are repeated in 'Revolution 9.' Like in 'Revolution 9,' all these pieces are fitted together and they predict the violent overthrow of the white man. Like you'll hear 'oink, oink,' and then right after that, machine-gun fire: AK-AK-AK-AK-AK-AK! "

Asked if he really thought the Beatles meant revolution, he said, "I think it's a subconscious thing. I don't know whether they did or not. But it's there. It's an association in the subconscious."

It was so outlandish that, as Bugliosi put together his case against Manson and the killers, he realized he needed to take an unusual approach with the jury. "Ordinarily, I try to avoid repetitious testimony in a trial, knowing it can antagonize the jury," he wrote in Helter Skelter. "However, Manson's Helter Skelter motive was so bizarre that I knew if it was expounded by only one witness no juror would ever believe it." By the time the jury deliberated, they had two requests: to visit the murder scenes and to be able to listen to the White Album.

On January 25th, 1971, the jury found Manson and three other defendants guilty. That April, a judge had sentenced him and the others to death, though their sentences were commuted to life in prison when California overturned the death penalty in 1972.

In subsequent years, "Helter Skelter" - a scrappy deep cut about a slide that might have been otherwise ignored in the Beatles catalogue - has improbably become one of the Fab Four's most frequently covered songs. "This is a song Charles Manson stole from the Beatles," Bono said before U2's Rattle and Hum cover. "We're stealing it back." Other artists who have done versions include Aerosmith, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Mötley Crüe, Oasis, White Zombie, Soundgarden, Bon Jovi and the Killers, among others, and even the singer of the song that inspired it - Roger Daltrey - did a version. A hip-hop duo named itself Heltah Skeltah, another group called itself Manson Family and the D.O.C. named an album Helter Skelter, and Manson has served as a boogeyman in the lyrics of Ice Cube, Eminem, Lil Wayne, Big Pun and Death Grips, among others. "Helter Skelter" has also served as the title of a video game, a manga book and the titles of several television shows.

Perhaps most surprising, though, is that McCartney began performing the song in 2004 for the first time ever. It has since become a consistent set-list staple, one that he performed at his two Desert Trip concerts last year. One of McCartney's live recordings of the song was even won a Grammy. (Incidentally, it wasn't the first time the song was nominated for a Grammy: the Bobs' a cappella recording of the tune got a nod in 1984.)

"Bob Dylan thought that the line in 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' was, 'I get high, I get high, I get high,'" McCartney said in Anthology, reflecting on "Helter Skelter." "So there had ben some funny little misinterpretations, but they were all harmless and just a bit of a laugh. ... But after all those little interpretations there was finally this horrific interpretation of it all. It all went wrong at that point, but it was nothing to do with us. What can you do?"

"Helter Skelter" would probably have become a deep cut had it not been for the Manson Family association.

"It stopped everyone in their tracks, because suddenly all this violence came out in the midst of all this love and peace and psychedelia," Starr said. "It was pretty miserable, actually, and everyone in L.A. felt, 'Oh, God, it can happen to anybody.' Thank God they caught the bugger."

"Another thing I found offensive was that Manson suddenly portrayed the long hair, beard and moustache kind of image, as well as that of a murderer," Harrison said. "Up until then, the long hair and the beard were more to do with not having your hair cut and having a shave - a case of just being a scruff or something."

"I don't know what I thought when it happened," Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. "A lot of the things he says are true: he is a child of the state, made by us, and he took their children it when nobody else would. Of course, he's cracked all right."

And what of "Piggies" and "Helter Skelter"? "He's barmy, like any other Beatle-kind of fan who reads mysticism into it," Lennon said. "We used to have a laugh about this, that or the other, in a light-hearted way, and some intellectual would read us, some symbolic youth generation wants to see something in it. We also took seriously some parts of the role, but I don't know what 'Helter Skelter' has to do with knifing somebody. I've never listened to the words, properly, it was just a noise."
Watch below: He's nearly 80 and his Family is smaller, but darkness still surrounds America's most notorious criminal.

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Charles Manson: How a Twisted Beatles Obsession Inspired Family Murders

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Charles Manson had an easy explanation for why he ordered the deaths of the family of Leno LaBianca and residents at Sharon Tate's house at the hands of his "Family": "It's the Beatles, the music they're putting out," he told the district attorney who sent him to death row.

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What are the signs of a cult leader? How can you identify a leader of a cult? And what kind of language will cult leaders use to deceive their loyal cult followers?

All true cults deny Jesus as Lord through their actions and sometimes in their words (1 John 4:1-3). The main way to identity a cult is by testing their beliefs and actions against the word of God.

Before we really dive into this content, I want to be careful and say that just because a church leader does something unbiblical does not mean they are a cult leader. Every leader sins because all leaders are human. Jesus came to save us from sin, so we should not expect perfection from anyone. But perhaps that's one of the biggest themes found in a cult leader: They pretend like they are perfect and they are always above everyone else.

In this article I will list 13 phrases cult leader love to use. Not everyone who uses these phrases is a cult leader, but most cult leaders use these phrases. Don't be quick to accuse a Christian leader of being a cult leader, but don't deceive yourself into thinking that cult leaders are not real. Often times they are right under your nose.

Nobody in a cult thinks they are in a cult. Nobody who follows a cult leader thinks their leader is a cult leader. Therefore, be humble enough to at least examine the possibility that your leader could be a cult leader if he or she is saying these phrases.
"God told me to tell you . . ."
Whenever someone starts claiming they are speaking for God, you should realize they are most likely a cult leader. I prefer to stay away from language like, "God told me." I try to opt for the less definitive statement of "I feel like God told me."

The Bible clearly states that God speaks to his people. That's not the issue. The problem is when a leader starts claiming God told them something about you or God told them something you are supposed to do. Sorry, that's not how God works.

When you die and are judged for how you lived your life, God isn't going to let you say, "Well Pastor Daniela told me you said you wanted me to do that." God will hold us each responsible for obeying what God tells each of us to do. The cannon of Scripture is closed and God will no longer command you to do something through the mouth of another human. The cult leader is lying.

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus . . ." (1 Timothy 2:5)

"The Bible says . . ."
One easy way to deceive gullible people is to just add the phrase, "The Bible says . . ." before any statement you want them to believe. Obviously Christians should be referring to what the Bible actually does say, but all too often people just use this phrase rather than actually reading what the Bible actually says.

If someone doesn't actually read the Bible to you and neve references the truth they are saying with an actual chapter and verse in the Scriptures, don't believe what they say until you check it out for yourself. I've seen cult leaders literally walk on stage and never read anything from the Bible and yet their whole "sermon" is filled with phrases like "The Bible says" and "God says" and "Jesus wants you to know tonight" and so on.

A good Christian leader loves to actually read and reference the Bible rather than just slapping the all too common phrase "We are a Bible believing church" on their website.

But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing." (James 1:25)

"God sent me to . . ."
The truest mark of cult leader is the man or woman who claims to be a Christian and yet denies the person and work of Jesus Christ in their words or actions. One way cult leaders deny Jesus is by trying to replace him with themselves.

Subtly overtime the cult leader takes center stage. Suddenly Jesus is no longer sent to save Cleveland, now Pastor David Burgess is somehow the one sent to be the savior of our town. When a cult leader starts preaching about how "God sent me to lead a revival in this town," you should seriously start to investigate the mental health of this person.

I'm not saying it's wrong to feel like God sent you somewhere to do something for him. The problem is when you start leading a large group of people and telling everyone "God sent me." Really? I thought God sent Jesus?

When the money dries up, don't be surprised if God is now suddenly sending that cult leader to another town to save.

God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble." (James 4:6)

"God will punish those people for what they did to me . . ."
Another classic sign of a cult leader is the belief that God is their personal executioner. Cult leaders genuinely believe they have a special status with God that other mere mortals do not possess. So in their minds they actually believe that those who "wrong" the cult leader are actually going to be physically harmed by God himself.

The cult leader believes God loves him more than God loves other people. Therefore the cult leader can easily justify wishing divine harm on people he doesn't like or on people who he feels have wronged him. Cult leaders are very vengeful people because they have elevated themselves so high in their own hearts that when they are offended they feel the person who "wronged" them deserves cosmic punishment.

For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. 20 For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. 21 For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. 22 He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. 23 When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly." (1 Peter 2:19-23)

"Don't question my authority . . ."
Cult leaders are marked by dogmatic, militant, and authoritative control over their followers. If any member gets out of line by questioning the supreme leader's authority (gasp), this will not go unnoticed. The member will either be scolded and will fall back in line or the member will be demonized by the cult leader to the other members and shunned by the group.

All Christian leaders should certainly respond if there is a problem or someone challenges their authority, but there's a difference between responding and reacting. Good leaders respond to the people's concerns and address the issues head on. Cult leaders react to the problems in the church and blast people with their authority.

If a leader ever says, "Don't question my authority" or expressed the sentiment through their body language and actions, it's best to call them what they are - a lost cult leader who is leading others astray.

To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder . . .Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care, watching over them-not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you . . ." (1 Peter 5:1-3, NIV)

"This is okay for me to do because . . ."
One sign of a cult leader is a psychotic ability to justify evil in their lives. Cult leaders are very "religious" people. Therefore they are uncomfortable with just blatantly sinning and calling it what it is. Rather, to cope with their own mental and moral strain, they must become masters at justifying doing the opposite of what God clearly says in his word.

The easiest way to see cult leaders justify unfit behavior for Christian leaders is with money. A cult leader always has a reason why they need the mansion, "Well we are going to use it for ministry!" The cult leader always has a reason why they need to use church resources to travel first class and take vacations. The cult leader always has a reason why the church should pay for their normal life expenses (coffee, gas, cell phone bills, etc.)

Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows." (Galatians 6:7)

"Don't talk to those people because . . ."
One well established trait of all true cults is shunning. When one group member begins to question the cult leader, suddenly the cult leader will warn everyone how dangerous this person is to talk to. If your leader feels you are so weak minded and fragile that you can't sift through the lies and truth of others, you should be insulted.

A good leader who disagrees with someone will not tell everyone in his church to never speak to that person again. He will explain his side and tell the people to talk to that person to. He will tell the people the facts and encourage them to decide for themselves who is telling the truth. A cult leader doesn't want his people to actually think for themselves so he just tells his followers to stay away from people who don't believe in him.

If your leader has basically shrunk your social circle to only people who also attend his cult, send him money, and hang on his every word, this is not healthy. A good leader rarely says, if ever, "Don't talk to those people . . ." Every now and then it happens. Paul did warn Christians to stay away from certain people who were harmful to the church (Romans 16:17-18). But these were people causing divisions within the church, not people who disagreed with the supreme leader. John told Christians to avoid people who spoke theological heresy (2 John 1:10).

Leaders should protect the sheep from wolves. But wolves are not simply those people who disagree with the leader or have personal issue with the leader. Wolves lead Christians away from Christ. Someone is not a wolf if they try to help people see the evil in the cult leader.

If the leader is not evil people should be able to listen to the accusations being made against this leader for themselves and make that conclusion based on the evidence of the leader's life. A cult leader knows they can't answer the accusations with evidence so they just tell their followers not to talk to the person making the accusation. A cult leader again usurps Christ's place and makes his followers feel that if people speak badly about the cult leader they are speaking badly about God himself.

Cult leaders are quick to limit their followers from speaking to non-followers.

Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted." (Galatians 6:1)

"You need to give me your money because . . ."
Cult leaders get into "ministry" because they are after something they want. Some cult leaders want respect, some cult leaders want sexual control over others, but most cult leaders are after money.

Cult leaders are oftentimes brilliant pitch men. They have a salesman-feel to them. Lots of times they even used to be in sales before entering ministry. Cult leaders seem to always have a big, grand vision for the future that requires a capital campaign. Most times the capital campaign is simply a ruse for lining their own pockets. All of sudden some reason totally outside of their control (I'm being sarcastic) seems to always stop them from doing what they promised they would do with the money they raised.

"The orphans are really in need!" "The young adults really need this new ministry!" "The church really needs new camera gear!" The money is raised but only part of it, if any, is used for the reason stated. Cult leaders are always asking for more cash. They won't just ask though, they will always have a good "because" to make you feel guilty for not giving. Cult leaders raise money through guilt, manipulation, and sob stories. Real pastors raise money too sometimes, but they do it through joyful givers, not people weighed down with guilt and fear for not giving.

Here's a great way to identify a cult leader. Take the square footage of everyone's home in the church, add it up, divide it by how many people are in the church, and that should be the average square footage of everyone's homes in the church. Now go to Zillow.com or Trullia.com, type in your pastor's address (assuming you have it since cult leaders usually guard their address) and compare that number to your pastor's house square footage. If your pastor's house is more than twice as large as the average person's house in the congregation, he's probably a cult leader.

Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs." (1 Timothy 6:9-10)

"My church is better than that church because . . ."
Somehow every cult leader is always the pastor at the best church in town, at least in their own minds. Cult leaders have an "us verse them" mentality. They will tell everyone in the congregation that their city is filled with unreasonable church leaders who all bicker and fight with one another.

The thing is though, once you get set free from the cult and start actually talking to other churches in town, you suddenly realize the real problem was the cult leader, not all the other churches. As most mature adults know, when someone claims everyone else is the problem, usually it's safe to assume that person is the real issue. It's unlikely one person is always right and everyone else us always wrong. The same is true with churches. If one church claims all the other churches in the area are bad, that church is usually the real issue.

Good pastors love to collaborate when possible and they love to celebrate the successes of other churches. Cult leaders wish bad on other churches, keep their church isolated, and claim they are the best in town. They compete rather than collaborate. Cult leaders are always legends in their own minds. Sad.

For when one says, "I follow Paul," and another, "I follow Apollos," are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building. (1 Corinthians 3:4-9)

"A spiritual revolution is coming here . . ."
Cult leaders are always talking about the future. Their past is too sketchy to mention. Usually they show up from another state and no one really knows anything about them. There's usually a long trail of broken churches they have left behind.

Cult leaders certainly don't want to focus on the present. Cult leaders usually have a small following because it's hard to find masses of people naive enough to follow their nonsense. So the only thing left for a cult leader to do is talk about the future.

There's always spiritual revival on the way. The end is always just around the corner. A great move of God is always just about to break out. I'm certainly not saying these things can't be true. Cult leaders just talk about it all the time. What's the point of saying a great move of God is coming? Why not just let it come!

Cult leaders also work off excitement and emotion. Therefore they need to always keep their people in an excited state of anticipation. When people have to actually look at the facts in the present and they see how ineffective this leader's ministry actually is, it's hard to get them to open their wallets. But when a great move of God is coming, a cult leader knows the tithe baskets will be a little easier to fill.

Then if anyone says to you, 'Look, here is the Christ!' or 'There he is!' do not believe it. For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect." (Matthew 24:23-24)

"The spiritual revolution is not happening because you people are not . . ."
The most ridiculous part about a cult leader promising "a great move of God" is that when it doesn't happen, they blame the people who were sitting in the audience listening to that junk.

The cult leader turns on his own following and blames them for why the revival never occurred, "You people don't reach out enough. You people don't pray enough. You people didn't do the yearly church fast legalistically enough." The cult leader always blames someone else because he is a god in his own mind. Clearly he can't be the problem his prophesy isn't coming true (sarcasm). Therefore he always finds someone to blame.

He has to do this because he publicly told everyone what was going to happen. So if you are a follower of guy who claimed he knew what God was going to do, watch out, because eventually that cult leader will be mad at you for not doing what he said God was going to do. Weird logic, I know, but would you expect anything less from a cult leader?

Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. 17 These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. 18 Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, 19 and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God." (Colossians 2:16-19)

"Outsiders hate me because . . ."
Another excuse a cult leader is forced to create is why everyone in town dislikes him. A cult leader sometimes even likes when other Christian leaders call him out because this gives him the attention he craves. Because he is a master manipulator, he usually finds ways to turn the animosity of the community towards him for his own good.

Suddenly he will do a sermon series on how all true great church leaders end up getting persecuted, "The reason all the other pastors don't like me is because I love Jesus more than them." Oh, how convenient. "The reason so many people don't like me is because the presence of God is so thick around me." Wow, I never knew how hard it was to be in God's presence. "People don't like me because Satan is mad that I'm so good at preaching." Yes, Satan himself has been assigned to you because you are that important.

Don't get me wrong. The Bible does say that Christians will be persecuted when they stand for Christ and spiritual warfare is real. However, the Bible also says that Christian leaders are supposed to have a good reputation with outsiders (1 Timothy 3:7).

The way it usually shakes out is that some people love a good Christian leader and some people hate him. If everyone loves him it probably means that leader is compromising on the truth and is preaching prosperity theology. If everyone hates the leader it's probably because he is a narcissist and literally can't get along with anyone unless they are worshiping him.

Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil." (1 Timothy 3:7)

"If you leave us, you are turning your back on God and horrible things will happen to you . . ."
There are so many more common signs of cult leaders, but we will close with this.

Cult leaders always produce a fear in their followers to leave. Whether through making people so dependent on the cult leader the follower can't imagine life without this person, or whether through brainwashing them into thinking their group is the chosen group in that town and to leave is to leave God's chosen group, or whether through actual threats of retaliation if they chose to leave like suing for slander or threats of violence - cult leaders make people feel like they will suffer for leaving the cult.

There are many good reasons to leave a church and a good pastor will help you weigh through this important decision. A good pastor might be sad about it, but he won't intentionally try to make you feel evil for doing what you feel is best for you and your family. A cult leader will make you feel like you are leaving Christianity by leaving his little cult.

A good pastor will not teach you to follow him. A good pastor will teach you to follow Christ. Therefore if your pastor makes you feel damned because you feel Christ is leading you somewhere else, he might be a cult leader.

Then Jesus told his disciples, 'If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.'" (Matthew 16:24)

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What are the signs of a cult leader? How can you identify a leader of a cult? And what kind of language will cult leaders use to deceive their loyal cult followers? All true cults deny Jesus as Lord through their actions and sometimes in their words (1 John 4:1-3).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
What are the signs of a cult leader? How can you identify a leader of a cult? And what kind of language will cult leaders use to deceive their loyal cult followers?

All true cults deny Jesus as Lord through their actions and sometimes in their words (1 John 4:1-3). The main way to identity a cult is by testing their beliefs and actions against the word of God.

Before we really dive into this content, I want to be careful and say that just because a church leader does something unbiblical does not mean they are a cult leader. Every leader sins because all leaders are human. Jesus came to save us from sin, so we should not expect perfection from anyone. But perhaps that's one of the biggest themes found in a cult leader: They pretend like they are perfect and they are always above everyone else.

In this article I will list 13 phrases cult leader love to use. Not everyone who uses these phrases is a cult leader, but most cult leaders use these phrases. Don't be quick to accuse a Christian leader of being a cult leader, but don't deceive yourself into thinking that cult leaders are not real. Often times they are right under your nose.

Nobody in a cult thinks they are in a cult. Nobody who follows a cult leader thinks their leader is a cult leader. Therefore, be humble enough to at least examine the possibility that your leader could be a cult leader if he or she is saying these phrases.
"God told me to tell you . . ."
Whenever someone starts claiming they are speaking for God, you should realize they are most likely a cult leader. I prefer to stay away from language like, "God told me." I try to opt for the less definitive statement of "I feel like God told me."

The Bible clearly states that God speaks to his people. That's not the issue. The problem is when a leader starts claiming God told them something about you or God told them something you are supposed to do. Sorry, that's not how God works.

When you die and are judged for how you lived your life, God isn't going to let you say, "Well Pastor Daniela told me you said you wanted me to do that." God will hold us each responsible for obeying what God tells each of us to do. The cannon of Scripture is closed and God will no longer command you to do something through the mouth of another human. The cult leader is lying.

For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus . . ." (1 Timothy 2:5)

"The Bible says . . ."
One easy way to deceive gullible people is to just add the phrase, "The Bible says . . ." before any statement you want them to believe. Obviously Christians should be referring to what the Bible actually does say, but all too often people just use this phrase rather than actually reading what the Bible actually says.

If someone doesn't actually read the Bible to you and neve references the truth they are saying with an actual chapter and verse in the Scriptures, don't believe what they say until you check it out for yourself. I've seen cult leaders literally walk on stage and never read anything from the Bible and yet their whole "sermon" is filled with phrases like "The Bible says" and "God says" and "Jesus wants you to know tonight" and so on.

A good Christian leader loves to actually read and reference the Bible rather than just slapping the all too common phrase "We are a Bible believing church" on their website.

But the one who looks into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and perseveres, being no hearer who forgets but a doer who acts, he will be blessed in his doing." (James 1:25)

"God sent me to . . ."
The truest mark of cult leader is the man or woman who claims to be a Christian and yet denies the person and work of Jesus Christ in their words or actions. One way cult leaders deny Jesus is by trying to replace him with themselves.

Subtly overtime the cult leader takes center stage. Suddenly Jesus is no longer sent to save Cleveland, now Pastor David Burgess is somehow the one sent to be the savior of our town. When a cult leader starts preaching about how "God sent me to lead a revival in this town," you should seriously start to investigate the mental health of this person.

I'm not saying it's wrong to feel like God sent you somewhere to do something for him. The problem is when you start leading a large group of people and telling everyone "God sent me." Really? I thought God sent Jesus?

When the money dries up, don't be surprised if God is now suddenly sending that cult leader to another town to save.

God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble." (James 4:6)

"God will punish those people for what they did to me . . ."
Another classic sign of a cult leader is the belief that God is their personal executioner. Cult leaders genuinely believe they have a special status with God that other mere mortals do not possess. So in their minds they actually believe that those who "wrong" the cult leader are actually going to be physically harmed by God himself.

The cult leader believes God loves him more than God loves other people. Therefore the cult leader can easily justify wishing divine harm on people he doesn't like or on people who he feels have wronged him. Cult leaders are very vengeful people because they have elevated themselves so high in their own hearts that when they are offended they feel the person who "wronged" them deserves cosmic punishment.

For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. 20 For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God. 21 For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps. 22 He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth. 23 When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly." (1 Peter 2:19-23)

"Don't question my authority . . ."
Cult leaders are marked by dogmatic, militant, and authoritative control over their followers. If any member gets out of line by questioning the supreme leader's authority (gasp), this will not go unnoticed. The member will either be scolded and will fall back in line or the member will be demonized by the cult leader to the other members and shunned by the group.

All Christian leaders should certainly respond if there is a problem or someone challenges their authority, but there's a difference between responding and reacting. Good leaders respond to the people's concerns and address the issues head on. Cult leaders react to the problems in the church and blast people with their authority.

If a leader ever says, "Don't question my authority" or expressed the sentiment through their body language and actions, it's best to call them what they are - a lost cult leader who is leading others astray.

To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder . . .Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care, watching over them-not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be; not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve; not lording it over those entrusted to you . . ." (1 Peter 5:1-3, NIV)

"This is okay for me to do because . . ."
One sign of a cult leader is a psychotic ability to justify evil in their lives. Cult leaders are very "religious" people. Therefore they are uncomfortable with just blatantly sinning and calling it what it is. Rather, to cope with their own mental and moral strain, they must become masters at justifying doing the opposite of what God clearly says in his word.

The easiest way to see cult leaders justify unfit behavior for Christian leaders is with money. A cult leader always has a reason why they need the mansion, "Well we are going to use it for ministry!" The cult leader always has a reason why they need to use church resources to travel first class and take vacations. The cult leader always has a reason why the church should pay for their normal life expenses (coffee, gas, cell phone bills, etc.)

Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows." (Galatians 6:7)

"Don't talk to those people because . . ."
One well established trait of all true cults is shunning. When one group member begins to question the cult leader, suddenly the cult leader will warn everyone how dangerous this person is to talk to. If your leader feels you are so weak minded and fragile that you can't sift through the lies and truth of others, you should be insulted.

A good leader who disagrees with someone will not tell everyone in his church to never speak to that person again. He will explain his side and tell the people to talk to that person to. He will tell the people the facts and encourage them to decide for themselves who is telling the truth. A cult leader doesn't want his people to actually think for themselves so he just tells his followers to stay away from people who don't believe in him.

If your leader has basically shrunk your social circle to only people who also attend his cult, send him money, and hang on his every word, this is not healthy. A good leader rarely says, if ever, "Don't talk to those people . . ." Every now and then it happens. Paul did warn Christians to stay away from certain people who were harmful to the church (Romans 16:17-18). But these were people causing divisions within the church, not people who disagreed with the supreme leader. John told Christians to avoid people who spoke theological heresy (2 John 1:10).

Leaders should protect the sheep from wolves. But wolves are not simply those people who disagree with the leader or have personal issue with the leader. Wolves lead Christians away from Christ. Someone is not a wolf if they try to help people see the evil in the cult leader.

If the leader is not evil people should be able to listen to the accusations being made against this leader for themselves and make that conclusion based on the evidence of the leader's life. A cult leader knows they can't answer the accusations with evidence so they just tell their followers not to talk to the person making the accusation. A cult leader again usurps Christ's place and makes his followers feel that if people speak badly about the cult leader they are speaking badly about God himself.

Cult leaders are quick to limit their followers from speaking to non-followers.

Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted." (Galatians 6:1)

"You need to give me your money because . . ."
Cult leaders get into "ministry" because they are after something they want. Some cult leaders want respect, some cult leaders want sexual control over others, but most cult leaders are after money.

Cult leaders are oftentimes brilliant pitch men. They have a salesman-feel to them. Lots of times they even used to be in sales before entering ministry. Cult leaders seem to always have a big, grand vision for the future that requires a capital campaign. Most times the capital campaign is simply a ruse for lining their own pockets. All of sudden some reason totally outside of their control (I'm being sarcastic) seems to always stop them from doing what they promised they would do with the money they raised.

"The orphans are really in need!" "The young adults really need this new ministry!" "The church really needs new camera gear!" The money is raised but only part of it, if any, is used for the reason stated. Cult leaders are always asking for more cash. They won't just ask though, they will always have a good "because" to make you feel guilty for not giving. Cult leaders raise money through guilt, manipulation, and sob stories. Real pastors raise money too sometimes, but they do it through joyful givers, not people weighed down with guilt and fear for not giving.

Here's a great way to identify a cult leader. Take the square footage of everyone's home in the church, add it up, divide it by how many people are in the church, and that should be the average square footage of everyone's homes in the church. Now go to Zillow.com or Trullia.com, type in your pastor's address (assuming you have it since cult leaders usually guard their address) and compare that number to your pastor's house square footage. If your pastor's house is more than twice as large as the average person's house in the congregation, he's probably a cult leader.

Those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs." (1 Timothy 6:9-10)

"My church is better than that church because . . ."
Somehow every cult leader is always the pastor at the best church in town, at least in their own minds. Cult leaders have an "us verse them" mentality. They will tell everyone in the congregation that their city is filled with unreasonable church leaders who all bicker and fight with one another.

The thing is though, once you get set free from the cult and start actually talking to other churches in town, you suddenly realize the real problem was the cult leader, not all the other churches. As most mature adults know, when someone claims everyone else is the problem, usually it's safe to assume that person is the real issue. It's unlikely one person is always right and everyone else us always wrong. The same is true with churches. If one church claims all the other churches in the area are bad, that church is usually the real issue.

Good pastors love to collaborate when possible and they love to celebrate the successes of other churches. Cult leaders wish bad on other churches, keep their church isolated, and claim they are the best in town. They compete rather than collaborate. Cult leaders are always legends in their own minds. Sad.

For when one says, "I follow Paul," and another, "I follow Apollos," are you not being merely human? What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building. (1 Corinthians 3:4-9)

"A spiritual revolution is coming here . . ."
Cult leaders are always talking about the future. Their past is too sketchy to mention. Usually they show up from another state and no one really knows anything about them. There's usually a long trail of broken churches they have left behind.

Cult leaders certainly don't want to focus on the present. Cult leaders usually have a small following because it's hard to find masses of people naive enough to follow their nonsense. So the only thing left for a cult leader to do is talk about the future.

There's always spiritual revival on the way. The end is always just around the corner. A great move of God is always just about to break out. I'm certainly not saying these things can't be true. Cult leaders just talk about it all the time. What's the point of saying a great move of God is coming? Why not just let it come!

Cult leaders also work off excitement and emotion. Therefore they need to always keep their people in an excited state of anticipation. When people have to actually look at the facts in the present and they see how ineffective this leader's ministry actually is, it's hard to get them to open their wallets. But when a great move of God is coming, a cult leader knows the tithe baskets will be a little easier to fill.

Then if anyone says to you, 'Look, here is the Christ!' or 'There he is!' do not believe it. For false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect." (Matthew 24:23-24)

"The spiritual revolution is not happening because you people are not . . ."
The most ridiculous part about a cult leader promising "a great move of God" is that when it doesn't happen, they blame the people who were sitting in the audience listening to that junk.

The cult leader turns on his own following and blames them for why the revival never occurred, "You people don't reach out enough. You people don't pray enough. You people didn't do the yearly church fast legalistically enough." The cult leader always blames someone else because he is a god in his own mind. Clearly he can't be the problem his prophesy isn't coming true (sarcasm). Therefore he always finds someone to blame.

He has to do this because he publicly told everyone what was going to happen. So if you are a follower of guy who claimed he knew what God was going to do, watch out, because eventually that cult leader will be mad at you for not doing what he said God was going to do. Weird logic, I know, but would you expect anything less from a cult leader?

Therefore let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or a Sabbath. 17 These are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. 18 Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind, 19 and not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together through its joints and ligaments, grows with a growth that is from God." (Colossians 2:16-19)

"Outsiders hate me because . . ."
Another excuse a cult leader is forced to create is why everyone in town dislikes him. A cult leader sometimes even likes when other Christian leaders call him out because this gives him the attention he craves. Because he is a master manipulator, he usually finds ways to turn the animosity of the community towards him for his own good.

Suddenly he will do a sermon series on how all true great church leaders end up getting persecuted, "The reason all the other pastors don't like me is because I love Jesus more than them." Oh, how convenient. "The reason so many people don't like me is because the presence of God is so thick around me." Wow, I never knew how hard it was to be in God's presence. "People don't like me because Satan is mad that I'm so good at preaching." Yes, Satan himself has been assigned to you because you are that important.

Don't get me wrong. The Bible does say that Christians will be persecuted when they stand for Christ and spiritual warfare is real. However, the Bible also says that Christian leaders are supposed to have a good reputation with outsiders (1 Timothy 3:7).

The way it usually shakes out is that some people love a good Christian leader and some people hate him. If everyone loves him it probably means that leader is compromising on the truth and is preaching prosperity theology. If everyone hates the leader it's probably because he is a narcissist and literally can't get along with anyone unless they are worshiping him.

Moreover, he must be well thought of by outsiders, so that he may not fall into disgrace, into a snare of the devil." (1 Timothy 3:7)

"If you leave us, you are turning your back on God and horrible things will happen to you . . ."
There are so many more common signs of cult leaders, but we will close with this.

Cult leaders always produce a fear in their followers to leave. Whether through making people so dependent on the cult leader the follower can't imagine life without this person, or whether through brainwashing them into thinking their group is the chosen group in that town and to leave is to leave God's chosen group, or whether through actual threats of retaliation if they chose to leave like suing for slander or threats of violence - cult leaders make people feel like they will suffer for leaving the cult.

There are many good reasons to leave a church and a good pastor will help you weigh through this important decision. A good pastor might be sad about it, but he won't intentionally try to make you feel evil for doing what you feel is best for you and your family. A cult leader will make you feel like you are leaving Christianity by leaving his little cult.

A good pastor will not teach you to follow him. A good pastor will teach you to follow Christ. Therefore if your pastor makes you feel damned because you feel Christ is leading you somewhere else, he might be a cult leader.

Then Jesus told his disciples, 'If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.'" (Matthew 16:24)

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What are the signs of a cult leader? How can you identify a leader of a cult? And what kind of language will cult leaders use to deceive their loyal cult followers? All true cults deny Jesus as Lord through their actions and sometimes in their words (1 John 4:1-3).

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WhenI text my youngest sister - 17, headed to college this fall - and ask her about the dozens or hundreds of One Direction posters once taped to her bedroom wall, she responds icily, as is her way. "They have been thrown out," she texts back immediately. I have no follow-up questions, and I'm not planning on speaking to her for the rest of April.

What I wanted to hear was that they are part of her forever, and that she cares for and maintains them easily, and that One Direction is still a band, and that posters are widely available. Of course, she can't say that, and it's not all her fault. Still, she could have tried harder.

Posters are inherently temporary, and they are also inherently gaudy expressions of fandom - a passion we are culturally expected to grow out of. They used to be sold in records stores and malls, places we have in diminishing numbers. They are a confusing business dominated by companies you have never heard of, and muddied by rights issues. They are not part of the modern merch wars, in which rappers and pop-stars compete to sell the most obscure and unnecessary objects, designed by the most Instagram-famous stylists and streetwear stars.

They are in some ways, a joke - Scarface posters, in particular, have become a cultural shorthand for "unstimulating heterosexual man," and are used as such regularly. But they are clearly available somewhere, as teenagers absolutely need to surround themselves with the things they love.

In photos submitted to the Fuck Yeah Teenage Bedrooms blog, we can see that not everyone is as fickle as my shape-shifting little sister, and there are many shrines to One Direction still in perfect condition. There is a shocking amount of All Time Low and Warped Tour stuff, given the year. There are so many strings of twinkle lights! My heart jumps around a little bit while I struggle to remember being bored in a bedroom instead of being bored online all day.

My relationship with my sister is on hold, so I'm not going to find out from her, but I am going to find out: What's the state of physical posters now that we are so firmly online? In 2019, doesn't anyone sell a poster of Harry Styles?

Teenagers have been cutting photos of celebrities out of magazines since at least the 1920s, according to Ryerson University historian and teen bedroom expert Jason Reid, author of Get Out of My Room! A History of Teen Bedrooms in America. But posters as we know them are a more recent phenomenon.

They started in the late '60s and early '70s, coming out of anti-war posters and psychedelic concert posters. "The first issue of Rolling Stone in 1967 featured an ad for a store out of Mill Valley, California whose posters cost between $1.50 and $2," he writes. "Teens could easily get their hands on, say, a reproduction of Pink Floyd's iconic Dark Side of the Moon album cover, a pop art rendering of Che Guevera, or an assortment of well-coiffed teen heartthrobs."

But posters didn't boom as a big business until the mid-1970s. That's when Ohio brothers Mike and Ted Trikilis founded Pro Arts, initially as an anti-war poster retailer, and then as the manufacturer of the famous Farrah Fawcett swimsuit poster. The poster sold over five million copies between 1976 and 1980 - at about $2 apiece - and the brothers signed a deal with Kmart to set up entire racks of posters in big-box stores across the country.

At the time, Fawcett was making $5,000 per episode for her work on Charlie' s Angels, but she made an estimated $400,000 in royalties off of the Pro Arts poster. Ted Trikilis was profiled in Playgirl and the Washington Post. Competitors popped up across the country - including the Adstat-Adprint Company in Los Angeles, which sold 1.2 million copies of its Bo Derek poster in two years. It was a glamorous time.

"By 1980, the New York Times estimated that the poster industry was selling between $100 million and $200 million of merchandise per year," Reid writes. "The vast majority of which ended up hanging in the rooms of American youth." Posters were cheap and teens loved them, and it was easy enough to wallpaper an entire living space with one passion, then tear it all down and start over when you moved on to another.

The best place to buy a poster, for several decades, was the mall. The record stores in the mall, the comic book stores in the mall. Spencer's Gifts opened its first mall store in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, in 1963 and had 450 stores across the US by 1967. The first Newbury Comics opened in Boston in 1978 and spread into East Coast malls throughout the 1980s. The late 1980s brought Hot Topic, the early 1990s brought F.Y.E., which expanded throughout the early 2000s, then crumbled alongside physical media. But until quite recently, there was no reason to worry about where your next poster would come from.

Jason Reid tells me that he had three or four Metallica posters as a teen in the late 1980s, as well as some Iron Maiden posters. "I'm pretty sure I would have gotten them either at record stores or head shops, just at the mall basically," he says. "They weren't too hard to come by." But now, malls are dying. No, they are dead. "Dead mall" is literally its own Wikipedia page.

In the post-mall internet shopping age, obviously, everyone can just make their own posters on the dozens of identical custom-product-making websites. But that is expensive. And it's technically illegal to use images you don't have the rights to. Kids can order posters from Etsy, but that is a complicated financial operation if you are a teenager: explain to your parents what Etsy is, ask them for their credit card information, present them with cash, explain again that Etsy is not a scam, wait for them to hit the order button, it's taking them so long.

The easy solution would be for artists to sell posters themselves. It would be odd - I think you would agree - to find that they aren't doing that. But though the streaming era has resulted in major shifts in the music industry that make it nearly impossible to make a living selling actual music and an imperative to tour constantly and sell tons of merch, big artists are not selling posters either.

"On a practical level, posters are actually pretty unwieldy things to sell from a web store," according to Darren Hemmings, managing director of the music-focused digital marketing agency Motive Unknown. "They have to be sent in a protective tube, which in turn adds cost and overhead to the whole exercise," he tells me in an email.

The proof is in the web stores. On Harry Styles's website, I can buy a 7-inch of his first single, or a notebook embossed with his favorite phrase ("Treat people with kindness"), or a coffee mug with a Polaroid photo of him in a towel and brown leather boots, which I did buy and use every day. But no poster.

Ariana Grande sells clear vinyl fanny packs, and "thank u, next" shot glass sets, and crewneck sweatshirts with her baby photo on them, but she does not sell posters. Taylor Swift sells an Instax camera, and a plastic poncho, and a duvet cover with pictures of her cats printed on it, but she does not sell posters. Beyoncé sells laptop shells, and wrapping paper, and pajamas, and a flag, but she does not sell posters. Travis Scott currently sells nothing on his website, but is engaged in some kind of inscrutable war with John Mayer over who makes the best minimalist, ultra-expensive, impossible-to-buy, limited-edition Japanese streetwear. You get it.

Maybe the pop stars have gotten a little too creative? Or maybe, the industry is a little too cynical.

"In 2019, your Instagram is your poster. It's moving, interactive, and you can monetize it."

"No one needs a poster on their wall when they are staring at their phone all day," says Chadwick Johnson, a member of the creative team at Manhead Merch. "In 2019, your Instagram is your poster. It's moving, interactive, and you can monetize it." Plus, the mark-up on a rain poncho that costs "literally something like 50 cents" can be much higher than the mark-up on a poster, according to Hemmings.

(Just so you know: You can't order One Direction posters from their official website either because the merch store quite literally doesn't exist anymore, and the link redirects to an empty domain.)

Celebrities are increasingly registering trademarks for everything about themselves - not just their name and their catch-phrases and their song lyrics, but the very idea of their existence. This makes the poster game a complicated one. When your business is selling inexpensive things to customers who don't have a lot of money of their own, a legal battle is not going to be worth it.

Even the brothers who made their fortune off of Farrah Fawcett's right nipple did not have good luck forever. In an exhaustive profile published by alt-weekly the Cleveland Scene in 2005, reporter Kevin Hoffman followed them as they crumbled.

In 1977, days after Elvis Presley died, they paid $2,500 for the copyright for a photo of him, took one million pre-orders for posters, and printed them, only to be sued by a rival who had purchased post-mortem publicity rights from Presley's estate. The brothers put 800,000 of the million posters in a trash compactor, then counter-sued and eventually won only $17,000. They failed to sell enough other posters to recoup the several million dollars they had spent installing poster racks in thousands of Kmart locations, and eventually filed for bankruptcy and exited each others' lives.

Celebrities are increasingly registering trademarks for everything about themselves

"[Ted] was the most stupid person, most unappreciative person I've met in my life, by far," Mike told thealt-weekly. "I wasted my life with this guy."

The poster fell out of favor in pop culture for similar reasons. As you can see if you peruse my new favorite website Teenage Bedrooms On Screen, the idea that a teenage bedroom ought to be filled with posters was accepted wholeheartedly by the media for a long time. Ferris Bueller's bedroom - which the world saw in 1986 - had posters for the Scottish rock band Simple Minds, the British electronic band Cabaret Voltaire, and the upsetting goth-rock band Killing Joke, among others.

In 2000, when Kirsten Dunst played cheerleading captain Torrance Shipman in Bring it On, her bedroom had a Nancy Kerrigan poster and a print of a Degas ballerina. It made perfect sense for her: She had to learn to loosen up. Her love interest, whose name was unfortunately "Cliff," had an oddly-shaped bedroom with many sharp angles and dozens of posters including the Ramones, Iggy Pop, the Clash, and Elvis Costello.

Many years later, production designer Sharon Lomofsky told Broadly that she had to do a lot of work to hang up all of those posters, and she did it because it was important. "You think that would be easy. But it's not, because of all the clearances," she said. "We had to get permission for everything! At one point we called Elvis Costello and said, 'Do you want to be in a cheerleading movie?'" She also said that most production designers don't bother with this anymore. "To me, that's really sad - you end up losing the texture and flavor of everything," she added.

It was extremely noticeable, I think, that Lady Bird's bedroom in the otherwise unimpeachable 2017 film Lady Bird had no posters other than posters of Lady Bird that Lady Bird made herself. It was also extremely noticeable in the 2018 Netflix hit To All The Boys I've Loved Before that heroine Lara Jean had no posters and only a strange mix of scrapbook paper squares and tree drawings on her bedroom wall. I'm sorry, but her defining trait is that she loves crushes? Where is Harry Styles?

According to production designer Paul Joyal, "We didn't want Lara Jean to have a regular teenage bedroom, like, 'Let's just stick up some posters and give her a bedspread.'" He says she's creative and that's why she painted a tree. Okay.

Currently, the selection of posters at big-box retailers is not what one would hope. Walmart sells posters from dozens of third parties, but the largest are an Ontario-based company called Trends International, which did not respond to my request for an interview, and a Missouri-based company called Movie Posters USA, which did not respond to my request for an interview.

Trends International offers an utterly random selection of celebrity posters including several of YouTube star JoJo Siwa surrounded by inspirational phrases, one of Canadian pop-folk singer Shawn Mendes surrounded by flowers, and of course, the Beatles, walking across the road. The latter offers an utterly random selection of movie posters, including Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Stephen King's It, and several Chuck Norris titles. It also makes an "Eat Sleep Game Repeat" poster, and an "Always Be Yourself Unless You Can Be a Unicorn" poster.

Of the other brands listed on Walmart's website - Pop Culture Graphics, Poster Revolution, Rolled Poster, Poster Paper - none answered my emails. Fancyleo, the brand responsible for seemingly every K-pop poster, does not appear to exist anywhere else online, unless it's the same company that sells reusable straws and mosquito coils on Amazon. All available evidence - which is scant - points to the modern poster industry as confusing and competitive and not very rewarding.

But on Tumblr, I scroll through the tag "my room," which is full of bedrooms, all of them carefully personalized, all of them gorgeous. I see that these teenagers are getting posters somewhere and showing them off on the internet mostly anonymously. There are teenagers with Bjork concert posters, and teenagers who love The X-Files, and teenagers who are into both the aging pop-punk band Panic! At the Disco and the very young former YouTube star Troye Sivan. BTS posters and the 1975 posters are in circulation somewhere.

Abby, who is 18 and lives in Wisconsin, covered the walls of her room with giant posters of Blue is the Warmest Color and Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction, as well as magazine pages of Elle Fanning, Winona Ryder, and Greta Gerwig. "I usually just cut out pages from magazines, print pictures off the internet, or buy them on Amazon," she tells me. "I also work at a movie theater so I get a lot of my posters from there." Cameron, who is 19 and lives in Texas, tells me that their dad printed off their Maximum Ride poster for them at work. (Dad!)

The teen bedroom is in an odd tension with social media, Reid tells me. On the one hand, if you can post everything you like and everything that defines you on the internet in seconds, why would you waste the time and money to also tape it up on your wall?

"The teen bedroom is this haven for self-expression, but ... there's still so much self-consciousness in it"

On the other, "teen lives are lived in public now, every part of your life is put up there. Now, the bedroom might be even more important," he suggests. "It's a place where they can express themselves but they don't have to worry about being judged like they would on Instagram or what have you." What if your bedroom ends up on Instagram? I ask. Then you can be judged. What if all my posters are a back-drop for my vlog?

"The teen bedroom is this haven for self-expression, but because teenagers are involved there's still so much self-consciousness in it," he concedes. "This is why I can't even fathom what kids are going through nowadays. I'm very happy that I didn't grow up in a time where I had a social media account to broadcast every screw-up that I made." But he is confident that everyone is fine and finding posters and putting them up - teens have done this for 100 years now.

Andy Cohn, president and publisher of the Fader, which started selling poster-size reprints of its issue covers in 2011, tells me that I am right to be worried, but that posters will be part of the analog renaissance. People love vinyl and print magazines again, he insists. "There's only so much you can do with an image online."

If you're a fan, and you really love something, "you can put wallpaper on your computer or post stuff on socials," but it's not the same thing as having a poster. "When I was growing up there were all these record stores in malls and you know, they had posters and you'd go through the racks of posters and they had so much cool stuff and then they all went away," he explains after telling me that he's 45. "[Posters] are not really a revenue source for us, there's no money there. It's more marketing, and for fans of the artists we put on the covers."

Cohn's son, who is 11, has Gucci Mane and the Migos in his bedroom, and his daughter, who is 15, has Kacey Musgraves and Ariana Grande. "I have Frank Ocean in my office," Cohn tells me.

Tersha Willis, co-founder of Terrible Merch, which works mostly with indie singer-songwriters like Julia Jacklin and Let's Eat Grandma, agrees with him. The poster is "definitely back on the rise" she says, and getting more interesting. There will be fewer cheaply made pop-star posters with an ugly logo on them she argues, and there will be more things that "look and feel like art."

"This is something that requires a physical presence for it to have its full effect, and something that can't be experienced online in the same way," she explains.

Harry Styles is wearing a pink silk Alexander McQueen shirt underneath his floral embroidered Alexander McQueen suit, and may he always.

This image, torn out of his April 2017 Rolling Stone cover story, has been taped to my bedroom wall for two years. The week the magazine came out, I drove 20 minutes to the Wegmans near my parents' house to buy two copies of the issue (one for reading and one for ripping up). I brought him back to New York and hung him up above my dresser, and every morning for two years I have looked into his eyes and wished his visage were bigger, sturdier, more permanent.

If there is one thing I believe ought to be a basic, unshakeable physical fact of my apartment, it is Harry Styles's face, specifically as it was captured in spring 2017. Perhaps it is rude that I am only now revealing this selfish reason for caring about posters.

But what will I do when my magazine page crumbles from age? Or worse, when I carefully peel it from its current place to move it to a new apartment, and inadvertently shred it into a mess with my own stupid hands? Idolatry can be dangerous, I know, but not if you choose your heroes carefully. I know what I'm doing. Harry Styles is the one.

I can't believe I'm alone here, so, finally, I email my sister's friend Miranda. She is, like my sister, a senior in high school, and explains to me that her walls are still covered with posters that she tore out of J-14 - the teen celebrity magazine founded in New Jersey in 1998, now owned by a German super-corporation. These are slightly better than my flimsy magazine page because J-14 savvily includes big tear-out posters as the main incentive to buy the publication at all.

Idolatry can be dangerous, I know, but not if you choose your heroes carefully

"My mom bought me a subscription to J-14when I was 12, and that's how I obtained most of them," she tells me. "I would take all the posters that I wanted of One Direction and Selena Gomez out and put them in a folder and I still have it today." From her poster folder, Miranda selected posters to put on her wall, and in her poster folder, she saved more posters for later. When she gets to college, she will dip into her posters savings account - her folder.

She says she needs and wants posters on her wall because they're a way of expressing "love and appreciation" for the people in them, and I agree. This is an obvious and natural impulse. All we can really hope is that the poster, currently down on its luck, will have another day in the sun - alongside cassettes and vinyl, VHS tapes and Polaroid cameras, velvet suits and rock and roll.
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This story is part of a group of stories called WhenI text my youngest sister - 17, headed to college this fall - and ask her about the dozens or hundreds of One Direction posters once taped to her bedroom wall, she responds icily, as is her way.

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If you grew up in the 1970s, you likely spent at least part of the decade in a wood-paneled rec room where you listened to 8-track tapes of Olivia Newton-John, Donna Summer, and Neil Diamond, while your parents read The Joy of Sex, played racquetball, debated Watergate, and went to key parties (if they were particularly adventurous). And you had one, if not more, of these things in your home.

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Children of the '70s Will Remember These Home Trends

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If you grew up in the 1970s, you likely spent at least part of the decade in a wood-paneled rec room where you listened to 8-track tapes of Olivia Newton-John, Donna Summer, and Neil Diamond, while your parents read The Joy of Sex, played racquetball, debated Watergate, and went to key parties (if they were particularly adventurous).

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Web Design in the 90s | Web Design Museum

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Today, 90s web design is more likely to raise a smile than admiration. See what Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo or Pepsi websites looked like in the mid-1990s.

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At the start of this decade, "fandom" wasn't a word most people knew, much less fully understood.Though the word has been in use since the early 1900s, for most of the last 100 years or so, it's been known mainly to people who considered themselves to be in fandom - a relatively niche number of people who self-identified as being part of a community of fans.

That all started to change with the rise of the Marvel Cinematic Universe near the end of the Aughts, which kicked the gradual mainstreaming of geek culture into high gear. And alongside that mainstreaming, fandom itself changed and evolved in dramatic, significant ways.

Before the Marvel Cinematic Universe, participatory fandom was something fans could only do publicly every once in a while; performative geek culture was reserved for special events like Comic-Con or the newest sci-fi or fantasy film. But because of Marvel's steady rollout of films over the decade, fandom was suddenly, perpetually expected to be engaged in participating in the Marvel apparatus. Geek culture became a new and intense form of consumerism, and superheroes, instead of being a nerdy fringe interest, became a standard model through which a plethora of fans could relate to pop culture.

In alignment with the Marvel machine, fans became increasingly vocal about their fandom identities, partly thanks to emerging, vibrant, and visible fandom communities on social platforms like Tumblr and Twitter. For better or worse, Fifty Shades of Grey introduced much of the world to the vastness of online fanfiction, while media outlets like BuzzFeed mainstreamed fandom-based ideas like shipping and " problematic faves." The user-built fanfiction archive AO3 gained widespread recognition and then closed out the decade by winning a Hugo award. Massive fandoms for groups like One Direction and K-pop band BTS helped evolve the cultural perception of the shrill teenage fangirl toward a more positive image of fans as active, engaged participants in the narratives they consume.

That engagement was also increasingly ideological. Throughout the 2010s, fandom found its way into politics, and politics found their way into fandom, from call-out culture to Gamergate. Fans took to social media to protest narrative developments they found offensive, like Captain America being revealed as a Nazi-esque figure in a 2016 comic, or The 100 killing off half of its popular queer couple.

And while fan backlash is nothing new, in the 2010s that backlash gained the tenor of political fervor to an unprecedented degree. Everything from fictional relationships to empowered female characters became polarized critical battlegrounds - not even criticism was immune. And "fans" themselves became divided into several more aggressive tiers, from "superfans" (really intense fans) to "stans" ( really intense, possibly toxic, fans) to "antis," fans whose identities revolved around hating other fans or even parts of their own fandom.

So where, at the end of the decade, has all this left us? Has anyone benefited from the increased politicization of fandom? Do we think of fandom differently now than we did a decade ago? And can any of these disruptive changes of the past decade help us predict what might be around the cultural corner?

To gain some insight into these questions, I asked two friendly neighborhood fans, Vox critic-at-large Emily VanDerWerff and Constance Grady, to join me, Aja Romano, in discussing fandom in the 2010s - the good, the bad, and the problematic, faves and otherwise.

From Marvel to K-pop: Fandom underwent a sea change over the decade

Aja Romano: I think when we look back at the 2010s, there are some obvious immediate tentpoles that jump out to people as fandom milestones - but first, I really want to know what the most significant fandom moments of the last decade were for both of you personally. For me, it was the part where Fifty Shades of Grey single-handedly jump-started my career. What were the moments that shaped you directly?

Constance Grady: The biggest fandom moment for me would have to be the moment that led indirectly to me writing in this roundtable today: when Gossip Girl fandom went completely fucking wild.

I started lurking in Gossip Girl fandom around 2010 out of sheer boredom. I was just out of college and trying to make it in book publishing, and I was slowly losing my mind trying to figure out Microsoft Word's mail merge feature on starvation wages. So at night, I would go home to my crappy sublet and soothe myself with some good old-fashioned trashy teen soap opera. Then I would poke around online to see what everyone else was saying about the show - maybe check out some memes here and a fic there.

Mostly, the fanwork was low key and often gently mocking. Gossip Girl fandom was refreshingly aware that the show it was committed to was pure garbage, but everyone was having fun picking it to pieces and making something new with the detritus nonetheless.

If you know your Gossip Girl history, you know 2010 is the year the show went off the rails. That was the year season three aired, in which Chuck - by then the show's romantic lead - sells his girlfriend Blair to his rapist uncle in exchange for a hotel.

For the fandom, this plot development was traumatic. Chuck and Blair were the biggest ship on the show. They were so big that the Tumblr tag #chair was filled exclusively with gifs of them making out, and fans used to go into the tag to yell at people for posting pictures of actual chairs. But for a lot of fans, season three was the end. They weren't willing to keep on rooting for true love to triumph between a girl and the boy who sold her for real estate. Chair shippers started to jump ship.

Those who stayed committed to the ship started to panic. They needed to keep their numbers up. A fandom can't survive without fans there to fan the fires of enthusiasm!

Luckily, the Chair shippers had a secret weapon. They had a source on the set who was willing to leak them spoilers.

What followed was way more enthralling than absolutely anything that ever happened on Gossip Girl itself. Chair shippers developed secret chatrooms in which they strategized their spin on any spoilers that looked bad for Chuck (the conversation after news leaked that Chuck would shatter a glass window over Blair's head was a rough one). They rigged online polls, plotted Twitter campaigns, and doled out spoilers as a carrot for those who remained faithful to the ship.

Chair haters, meanwhile, fled to an anonymous community - referred to by those in the know as an anon meme - on LiveJournal, where secret sources inside those secret Chair-only chatrooms fed them screencaps of all those strategic conversations to be dissected and mocked. And eventually even the show's writers' room got in on the drama, too, forming secret alliances with fans to flush out the spoiler leakers and shame them.

By 2015, I was over Gossip Girl itself. Gossip Girl fandom had become my favorite nighttime soap instead. I was also over book publishing, and I was starting to think that maybe I wanted to try my hand at writing about pop culture.

And then one day on Twitter, one of my favorite critics tweeted out a link to apply to a fellowship that would teach you how to write about pop culture at Vox. "Come work with me!" wrote Emily VanDerWerff.

"What is the single biggest cultural story that nobody is covering enough right now?" asked the application.

I wrote a 500-word essay explaining the shit that was going down in secret Gossip Girl fan chatrooms these days.

That essay didn't get me a fellowship, but it did get me an interview. And a year later, Emily emailed me and told me that Vox was hiring more fellows and I should apply again. So thanks, Gossip Girl, for being such a mess of a show that your basically chill fandom turned into a toxic wasteland of dysfunction - and in the process getting me a new job and a new career.

Emily VanDerWerff:I have had the surreal experience of mostly seeing fandom through the eyes of someone who covers the things fans adore. Particularly when I was recapping TV shows like Glee and Community, I was a person whose views fans would either engage with or outright reject. I would occasionally find myself bearing the brunt of some fandom tizzy about a shipping war I had no idea even existed. (The weirdest of these might have been when the Big Bang Theory fans who shipped Sheldon and Penny came for me.)

But this reflects to me another side of fan engagement: people who were less interested in transforming a work than in engaging with it critically. For me, that sort of engagement was most prominent in places like comment sections, an opinion that may be colored from having spent years working at the AV Club, which had a thriving comment section during my time there.

The fans of a TV show would pick it apart and reduce it down to its bones, then suck the marrow out of those bones. It was really something to see, and it often left me - me - wondering if they got any enjoyment out of the work itself or primarily found enjoyment in finding things about it that didn't work for them.

Perhaps the strongest example of this was the TV show Girls, which began in 2012 and immediately became a show that had legions of fans and legions of anti-fans who couldn't stop watching every single episode. The arguments and conversations around that show (a show I really, really liked, to be clear) underlined just how different our experiences of it could be - and how often fandom found itself divided in the 2010s by complicated political and social issues that the works we loved talking about weren't always designed to bear. (Other examples: Hamilton, Game of Thrones.)

But I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that fandom had a darker side in the 2010s, too. I'm sure you two are going to push back against my definition of the Star Wars fans who harassed Kelly Marie Tran off the internet or the gamers who kicked up Gamergate as "fans," but they were. In the TV space, these sorts of fans were often dubbed "bad fans," because they wanted, say, Walter White to win the day at the end of Breaking Bad (thus missing the show's entire point). But it wasn't as though these people weren't as engaged as the more thoughtful and critical fans were. Because they were.

The 2013 Veronica Mars Kickstarter fundamentally changed the fan-creator relationship

Aja: Believe me, I've been in so many toxic fandom environments that I'd never try to claim that the Gamergaters and Ghostbusters trolls and their ilk weren't "real fans." The truth is that fandom has always bred incredibly toxic sub-communities, both because fans often have very intense feelings and because all the cultural shame and mockery we face can make it hard to know how to be a fan and what "a good fan" looks like. I'm sure theAV Club commenters felt that their level of knowledge and personal investment also conferred upon them a level of ownership over their canon, and being hypercritical was one way of performing that ownership.

But those kinds of performances changed radically over the decade. On one level, this had a lot to do with platform cultures. In 2010, fans started migrating away from the closed, niche culture of LiveJournal and moving toward the more mainstream Tumblr, which came to dominate fandom culture for the rest of the decade. Largely as a result of this migration, fandom culture became vastly more accessible to huge swaths of the population - including the creators of the properties around which these fandoms cohered. As fan culture became more accessible to the creators themselves, they started to expect fans to be visibly, enthusiastically participatoryin specific ways.

The 2013 Veronica Mars Kickstarter fundamentally changed the way many creators and fans saw their relationship, evolving it almost instantly from a top-down, worshipful artistic hierarchy to something like an equal partner investment. Before the Veronica Mars fandom kickstarted an entire movie sequel to the cult show, Kickstarter itself was mostly the domain of niche geek culture and indie creators. But this campaign showed Hollywood that fandom culture at large could be channeled to act as an early investor for projects the industry might deem too risky - and as a result of its record-breaking success, industry attitudes toward fandom rapidly changed.

That shift, in turn, meant that fans started to see themselves as investors in the works they consumed, and creators were eager to exploit collective fan engagement. I'm thinking of a broad range here, from cult faves like webcomic and YouTube series Lizzie Bennet that profited from deep fan investment, to prestige dramas like True Detective and Westworld that benefited from self-aware fandoms who saw their interactivity as part of the "game" of the show. You can argue that the entire modern entertainment complex now builds participatory fandom into its business model. But when fans ask for things in return, they're seen as demanding. How do we reconcile all these things? What makes performative fan engagement empowering rather than toxic - and why does all of this tend to get framed by the media and by creators as fan entitlement?

Constance: Ooh, this is tricky, and actually, Veronica Mars is a good case study here.

Veronica Mars went on as long as it did entirely because of its fandom. In the '00s, fan mail-in campaigns got it renewed for a second and third season despite low ratings. In 2013, the fan Kickstarter campaign raised over $5 million to pay for the movie's production budget. This year, the show's history of intense fan engagement is an enormous part of what led to the Veronica Mars Hulu revival - and in that revival, Veronica's love interest Logan dies, destroying the ship that large swaths of the fandom were hugely invested in and, with it, their fannish investment in the show.

My impulse when Logan died was to think, "Well, that sucks, but certainly showrunner Rob Thomas is entitled to do whatever he wants with his characters. He doesn't owe me or his fans anything." But a number of fans disagreed: Rob Thomas, they said, had taken advantage of their desire to see Veronica and Logan together, using their investment as shippers to leverage not just their time and attention, but the literal dollars out of their pockets. In that case, didn't he owe them something? Wasn't killing Logan a betrayal of the contract Thomas had made with the fandom?

To be honest, I can see the argument. When a show's survival depends this heavily on its fans, the power dynamic between creator and fandom does change dramatically. The Veronica Mars fandom went above and beyond to keep that show coming back again and again, and the showrunner responded by destroying the piece of the show that a huge part of the fandom cared about most. Emotionally, that does feel like a betrayal.

The 100 offers a more politically-charged example. TheCW teen sci-fishow built up a huge amount of fandom support for its queer central pairing of Clarke and Lexa (a.k.a. Clexa). The showrunners tweeted supportively to fans about how everyone deserved love, and they published pictures on Twitter of the two actresses eating rainbow candy together. In a world in which TV's queer characters and especially lesbians are killed off so frequently that the trope has a name (" Bury your gays "), Clexa seemed like a safe haven. Fans, understandably, felt that they had finally found a safe queer romance to root for, and they turned out in droves for the show.

Then The 100 killed Lexa off. On a certain level, that's just the kind of thing The 100 does, because it's a show that built its reputation on shocking and brutal onscreen deaths. But this time, fans went wild. The showrunners responded with bewilderment: Didn't fans know that The 100, where a dwindling number of teens try to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth, was a show on which no one was safe? And the fans replied in outrage: Didn't the showrunners know that there were too few queer romances on TV for them to be treated so cavalierly, and that killing the lesbian had become a gross and harmful cliché? What had the writers' room been thinking, drafting off fan enthusiasm for Clexa while knowing that Lexa, like so many of TV's lesbians, was doomed? That argument also feels more than fair to me.

That said, I don't want us to enter into an era in which fans end up dictating canon, and I think a lot of fans feel similarly. And again, Veronica Mars is a good example here: That crowdfunded 2014 movie was explicitly built to be fanservice, designed to give fans exactly what they wanted, and it was not very good. I, a fan, did not enjoy being serviced in that way.

I guess my question is, how do we find a balance here? What would it look like for creative teams to be aware of what they owe to their fans, without feeling pressured to make mediocre and unchallenging work in an attempt to satisfy everyone?

Emily:I was going to say something along the lines of, "I have always felt like creative teams don't owe fans anything, even as fans don't owe those creative teams their allegiance," but that feels too harsh at this point in time. It's pretty clear that in the late 2010s and heading into the 2020s, an engaged fandom can be the difference between life and death for a lot of cultural properties. But it's also clear that engaged fandoms don't always want to be pushed out of their comfort zones. And yet the best storytelling often does take place outside of those comfort zones.

I think a lot about a quote from Joss Whedon that I heard when I was a teenager and decided was accurate without a ton of reflection: "Don't give people what they want; give them what they need." Of the many bits of storytelling wisdom Whedon has dispensed in interviews over the years, this is the one that has most taken on a life beyond his fandom, because it speaks to something that I think we're all a little wary of in 2019: anesthetizing art against the horrors of the world so much that it becomes a sort of safe space.

Here's a for-instance: The season four finale of The Magicians made a huge, bold storytelling choice, killing off the show's protagonist. In the first season - when he was just another whiny white guy heading up a TV show - fans might have rejoiced. But by the end of season four, when we had lived through four years of his struggles with mental illness and learned he was bisexual (one of the few bisexual men on TV, period), he had come to stand in for a whole host of other ideas. The audience revolted. To this day, the showrunners can't so much as tweet without a bunch of angry responses. And season five is just around the corner.

The Magicians is exactly the sort of show that requires its engaged fanbase to stay alive. And in interviews around the finale, it was clear that the show's writers had thought about how much the character meant to fans on a variety of levels, both pertaining to the narrative and pertaining to TV representation of bisexuality and of those struggling with mental illness. But it was also clear they felt the story turn was too interesting not to do.

Truth be told, I agree with them. I found the final stretch of Magicians episodes in season four shattering for the way they told a story about trauma and friendship and self-sacrifice. But I also love grim, epic tragedy as a general rule. I'm not averse to the idea that maybe people from underrepresented groups on TV deserve any little bit of anything they can get - after all, it wasn't so long ago that the only people like me on TV were presented as jokes or murdered sex workers - but I also don't want to ever suggest that whole classes of human beings aren't allowed the emotional outpouring of great tragedy simply because the world is a dark place for too many of us.

What I am saying, I think, is that I don't think it's that far of a walk from the folks who hated Last Jedi because it violated some element of Star Wars canon they were deeply passionate about (who were mostly mocked) and the folks who were mad at the death of Logan on Veronica Mars (who were mostly easy to sympathize with). I get why the latter is more sympathetic. The folks behind Veronica Mars came off as blinkered and callous with their show's big death, and they had far less of a justification for that big death than the Magicians producers did. But at the same time, there has to be room for storytellers to expand and experiment, lest we end up in a world where everything is protected by bulletproof canon.

And yet that callousness rankles me all the same. There has to be some sort of demilitarized zone where fans allow artists the grace of trying new things, while artists make sure they're not doing things just to do them (or, worse, just to piss off the audience). I still largely agree with the Joss Whedon quote from above - but I also think his predilection for killing characters off got kind of old about 10 years ago. Sometimes what you think the audience needs is what you think you need, and the better choice is to try to find another path to the story you want to tell.

Aja: The hard part about this "better path" is that I think a lot of times, creators think they're already on that better path. But the fans simply don't trust that they are, especially if they're marginalized people who have a real-life stake in the outcomes of stories. It's one thing for the writers to ask their audiences for trust and patience and a willingness to follow them into some difficult places. It's another thing when those difficult places intersect with real marginalization - when they have the potential to reinforce regressive and harmful social norms.

Take, for example, queerbaiting, one of the most frustrating fandom-related phenomenons of the decade. It's present in everything from Sherlock, Supernatural, and Teen Wolf to , Harry Potter, and , and still going strong as we head into the next decade. Queerbaiting tends to happen because writers and/or actors with initially good intentions - to seed the idea of characters maybe being more than straight - realize that now they've gone too far, and what was once light subtextual teasing has become a whole thing. So what do they inevitably do? They rapidly backtrack, overemphasizing how straight the queerbaited couple or character is.

That sounds inherently homophobic, but often it's not - often it's queer creators doing the queerbaiting. In fact, queerbaiting is often just down to a kind of major, reactionary obstinance from creators toward fan engagement, of a kind we've seen more and more often. Remember when Sherlock resolved its giant season 2 cliffhanger by presenting a montage of fan theories about what could have happened and then never actually telling us what happened? Remember when Westworld creators panicked and rewrote the show after fans guessed the big twist? That's not giving the audience what it needs, nor is it giving creators what they need as artists. That's just reacting to fannish obsession. It's creators failing to fully understand the pact they've made with their fanbase and then blaming their fanbases for it. And homophobic or otherwise regressive plot points can become side effects of that reactionary feeling because the creators privilege their desire to shape or control the narrative over all these other factors.

Of course, the flip side of this is when, for example, the Star Wars creators' reactionary response to misogynistic Star Wars fans is to double down on making Rey the most awesome badass in the galaxy. Turns out I'm totally fine with that kind of reactionary obstinance. Then again, the backlash to the transformative elements of The Last Jedi arguably paved the way for the rote, disappointing trilogy conclusion that Rise of Skywalker turned out to be, because J.J. Abrams and company apparently felt the ideas Rian Johnson worked with in the middle film were too radical. It was a compromise to the worst parts of the Star Wars fandom that ended up pleasing very few people.

Which brings me to my last question: What are some of our favorite examples of fans and creators getting things right and doing fandom well in the last decade? And can they tell us anything about what's next?

Constance: I'm an old-fashioned kind of fan who generally likes my fourth wall to remain intact, I guess, because when I try to think of fan/creator interactions I like, I can't think of that many. Most of the major interactions I've seen have seemed to lead to a sense of betrayal and promises broken on one or both sides.

Probably the closest thing I can think of to a creative "doing fandom well" would be Bryan Fuller, the showrunner behind Hannibal and Pushing Daisies and the first season of American Gods. Fuller always seems to react to his fandoms with delight: He tweets out fanart and uses hashtags with abandon; when offered a flower crown at a panel, he will absolutely wear that flower crown; and when asked if Hannibal Lector and Will Graham were in love, he responded philosophically, "What is love?"

But at the same time, Fuller rarely seems to be deeply involved in his fandoms. I never see him weighing in on fandom controversies or fights, and he never seems to be lecturing fans about giving them what they need rather than what they want. He just promises that he will make good television, goes on to make really good television, and then gets out of the way.

Now, maybe that's just because Fuller tends to either leave his shows after one really good season or see his shows get canceled after a few really good seasons, so he hasn't had the opportunity to get all that messy with a fandom. But even if it's just sheer luck that's protecting him so far, that's the kind of fandom involvement I like to see from a creative: benign and supportive lack of interest.

Aja: I greatly appreciate this approach. Another group that I'd say has a relatively healthy approach to their subject matter and their creators is the recently revived Good Omens fandom, which is basically just beautiful fanart of its OTP and lots of Michael Sheen love.

I'd give a shout-out to the creative team of Supernatural for the massive sea change it underwent in its approach to its predominantly female fandom this decade, from overt mockery and misogyny to loving respect and celebration. (And a shout-out to SuperwWhoLock, just because!) I'd also toss in the mighty Disney fandom generally, because for all that Disney itself has endless issues, fans have done a lot of work in the Tumblr era especially to make the canon more progressive, while showcasing the kind of excellent fan engagement that's slowly dragging Disney into a slightly less restrictive mode when it comes to cracking down on transformative fanwork. And the K-pop fandom as a whole deserves massive amounts of credit for mainstreaming an entire genre over the decade, based heavily on the strength of their love.

While Gamergate has overshadowed just about all other aspects of gaming culture throughout the decade, gaming fandom has had a huge and outsized influence on the culture in other positive, collaborative ways over the decade, in everything from Twitch playing Pokémon to Drake playing Fortnite, and much more. We also found moments of fandom unity in unexpected ways throughout the decade, like when we all fell back in love with Keanu Reeves.

Still, most of these fandoms remain regressively white and patriarchal, and my best hope for the future is that fandom continues to diversify and gain new cultural ground - while losing some of the more toxic elements that still too often keep marginalized fans at bay.

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Fandom went mainstream in the 2010s - for better and worse

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At the start of this decade, "fandom" wasn't a word most people knew, much less fully understood.Though the word has been in use since the early 1900s, for most of the last 100 years or so, it's been known mainly to people who considered themselves to be in fandom - a relatively niche number of people who self-identified as being part of a community of fans.

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n the final days of December, speculation that Rihanna might be about to release her ninth album, known among fans simply as R9, entered overdrive. Despite the many articles and social media posts leaking titbits about the work in progress over the last four years, Rihanna has never shared official details about the project, though she once said her next album would come out in 2019.

It's because of this throwaway comment in 2018 that relations between Rihanna and her "stans" (super fans) reached a kind of mania in late December. The star has posted taunts about "listening to R9 by myself and refusing to release it", while her fans are gleefully joking about breaking into her house and holding her at knifepoint to obtain the album. Whatever Rihanna posts - whether it's about the Australian bushfires or a friend who has died - the response is the same. Among Rihanna's first tweets of 2020 was a carefree selfie. The first reply came from a fan: a picture of a child holding a knife, captioned: "Where's the damn album."

When did fans start believing they deserve albums from their favourite pop stars? New albums were once "eagerly awaited"; now fans believe that work is, in effect, being held to ransom. A similar chaotic energy surrounded Frank Ocean in 2016. He hadn't released music in more than four years; like Rihanna, he had casually teased dates for new music only to miss his own deadlines. For a while, he couldn't be spotted in public without being criticised on social media for not being in the studio. "Frank Ocean is behaving like a dickhead," stated the Ringer critic Justin Charity, although he said Ocean's fans with their "psychotic mob chants" were worse. The mood became so embittered, it was hard to tell whether fans still really wanted new work.

The situation is exacerbated by the music media. In the 2010s, online news outlets began to behave like fans themselves, scouring artists' social media for any clues about big releases and then publishing their findings as gospel. These days, we know a lot about an album before the work is officially announced. (Search "everything we know about R9" and you'll find many results.) Publications and blogs report on Ocean's every Tumblr post, contributing to fans' already frantic anticipation. Grimes has also been hit hard by this rolling news cycle. In 2013, she posted an angry missive on Tumblr, stating: "nothing i write here is an official statement and i really resent this shit turning into news".

If new music does materialise, but fails to meet fans' high expectations, the backlash is swift and brutal. In the summer of 2016, Ocean broadcast a livestream of himself building a staircase to an ambient soundtrack titled Endless. Endless is a beautiful, haunting piece, and its introduction to the world seemed to convey a message about patience and perseverance. But fans were simply upset that this wasn't the traditional album they felt they had been promised. ( That record, Blonde, arrived days later.)

In stan culture, everything is hyperbolic. This breed of extreme fandom has emerged from a connected world in which fans can access (and berate) stars at the click of a button. In her book Fangirls: Scenes from Modern Music Culture, Hannah Ewens observes that music fans have long been early adopters and innovators in the world of tech. Today, their rhetoric permeates online culture. The binary tendency to declare something either a "hit" or a "flop" has rippled through the increasingly polarised music press: in an economy driven by page views, it pays to declare everything either an era-defining masterpiece or a heap of trash.

In 2014, Popjustice founder Peter Robinson described how online fandom was supplanting the traditional, top-down fan club. With fan bodies becoming more autonomous and organised away from the control of artists and labels, Robinson depicted a stark power imbalance, saying that many artists felt "trapped by fanbases that invariably look unfavourably on an artist wishing to progress their sound". He predicted that fan-artist relations might be running headlong towards a "full-on, real-life siege". One glance at Rihanna's Twitter mentions suggests his prophecy is coming true.

Stan power can make or break an artist. As hinted at by Justin Bieber's recent cynical plea for his fans to stream his comeback single in their sleep and use proxy US IP addresses to help it to reach the top of the charts, hardcore fans are well versed in how to manipulate streaming and sales figures, and they mobilise to make sure their faves are successful. They regularly battle other fandoms by pointing to the latest streaming figures or chart positions their icon has achieved, and take pride in having influenced those numbers. In this respect, some stan factions - usually at the vanguard of digital culture - feel slightly archaic. Their obsession with the album "era", charts, sales and commercial success is out of step with how the music industry functions today.

The traditional "album cycle" is certainly not the only way for artists to operate any more. Some have abandoned this model altogether: German pop star Kim Petras recently said that she likes to make her fans feel "connected" by dropping music as a weekly event, "like a TV show". Many artists have ambitions beyond music. Journalist Tshepo Mokoena has explored how black artists, Beyoncé and Rihanna in particular, reshaped what it means to be a pop star in the 2010s. Their careers no longer centre around album releases - although those remain their most publicly hyped moments. Instead, with ventures such as Beyoncé's Ivy Park and her Homecoming film, or Rihanna's Fenty Beauty and Savage lingerie line, they've positioned themselves as curators, designers, businesswomen, directors and all-round entertainers.

Berating artists for not releasing albums to schedule feels anachronistic in 2020. As critic Alex Pappademas argued of comic-book nerds' vehement support for movie studios in the 2010s, it represents a "populist groundswell in service of the status quo, of corporations, and of power". For Slate's 2019 Music Club essay series, critic Jack Hamilton wrote about how poptimism calcified in the music press this decade, creating a world in which every time an artist releases new music, it is characterised as "gifting". As Hamilton points out, your faves are not generously showering you with presents, they're selling products. Depicting pop stars as benevolent gift-givers plays into the hands of music industry executives who want us to believe that we are lucky to receive what we get. To borrow a phrase from Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis, it casts musicians as a kind of Pez dispenser, and their legions of fans as eternally outstretched hands, waiting for the next treat.

For all that stans cast themselves as the people who truly get an artist, this demand for satisfaction - for product - fundamentally misunderstands creativity, and fails to appreciate the ebb and flow of human life. Any artist they perceive as slacking may not be in a music-making phase; they may be going through some kind of personal turmoil, writer's block, or simply be busy with another project. Fan armies pestering idols heightens the pressure that labels, managers and other invested parties can apply to artists to meet contractual obligations, and thus make more profit. As Zayn Malik's second album showed, nobody wants to hear records churned out to meet a quota. Keeping cherished artists tied to the content treadmill until they let fans down isn't love.

For me, music fandom in the 2010s was defined by Beyoncé 's surprise album release in 2013: one of those rare, thrilling moments when you remember exactly where you were when you first heard something. That album, Beyoncé, remains one of Beyoncé's most mature and complex works, but it can never be separated from the masterstroke of surprise that brought it into the world: "I changed the game with that digital drop," she rightfully bragged on Nicki Minaj's Feeling Myself two years later.

That kind of shock release from any major pop star no longer feels possible in 2020. Fans are too finely attuned to the minutiae of clues dropped online, too well-trained as internet sleuths. The promise of the number of retweets you might get from being the first to discover a new song registered on ASCAP is too great; as is the number of page views you might get from posting a fake leaked tracklist as news. Fans are even circumventing streaming services' lax security to upload fake albums, usually comprising old demos, to Spotify and Apple Music: a prank that has brought flashes of chart success and ill-gotten royalties.

At the start of a new decade, what might a better model of fandom look like - maintaining the joy of being part of a global collective with a shared passion for a culture-shifting artist, but not privileging constant releases and sales as a measure of love?

First, we need space to listen harder and have nuanced discussions. In this column, Tom Ewing argued that online forums may be the future of fandom, explaining that the behaviour of fans "is guided by limits and defaults baked into the technology". Subreddits like r/popheads provide the format for stans to go deep in a way that Twitter and Instagram don't. On forums for individual artists, such as Kanyetothe, there's even more willingness to dive into an artist's back catalogue and explore what already exists. Podcasts such as Dissect and Song Exploder are bringing deep critical and technical readings of pop into the mainstream and making a case for subtlety.

The pace of pop culture hardwires fans to constantly expect more. Up against waning attention spans and falling album sales, artists have learned how to hustle harder to avoid vanishing from view. As we move forward - with a deeper consciousness about the impact that a culture that's always asking "what's next?" is having on both our planet and on our minds - let's ask for less.

As the 2010s ended, sustainability became an urgent concern for the music industry, with artists such as the 1975 and Coldplay leading the discussion on how it can be made more eco-friendly. But sustainability is also a mindset: not demanding novelty, not prioritising economic growth, and not treating art as disposable. Fandom's next phase might be rooted in cherishing what we have. As Gen Z resist oversharing on socials and everyone is feeling overwhelmed by connectivity, perhaps in the 2020s, the performance of fandom will come to feel less important than the intimate connections we all form with music.

As usual, Rihanna is way ahead, operating with the cool detachment of someone who knows where her best interests lie. Her last album, 2016's joyfully weird Anti, was her first after leaving the Def Jam label and purchasing her masters. She released it on her own label, in conjunction with Jay-Z's Roc Nation. It's likely that R9 will arrive the same way. Last year, she told Interview magazine, "it makes no sense to rush it". She's beholden to nobody's schedule but her own. For that reason, I truly stan for ever.

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Leave Rihanna alone! A manifesto for healthier pop fandom in the 2020s

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n the final days of December, speculation that Rihanna might be about to release her ninth album, known among fans simply as R9, entered overdrive. Despite the many articles and social media posts leaking titbits about the work in progress over the last four years, Rihanna has never shared official details about the project, though she once said her next album would come out in 2019.

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The 2010s marked a turning point for fan culture, as franchises like Star Wars and Marvel began to dominate mainstream entertainment, and online fanworks rapidly became more accessible. For some fans, it was a tricky transition period, moving from a time when fandom was more niche and private to a point where media companies comb through social media for fan-made commentary and content.

In particular, the 2010s saw an explosion of activity in shipping fandom, with queer ships fueling much of the traffic for an entire blogging platform- Tumblr. Thanks to a series of bizarre business choices from Tumblr's owners, the site no longer holds the unique sway it did earlier in the decade, but it's still a defining force of fandom in the 2010s. Without Tumblr, we wouldn't have Superwholock, or Homestuck, or a lot of the weirder elements of One Direction's fanbase. Elsewhere, the fan-created Archive of our Own fanfic site is going from strength to strength. Launched in 2008, it's become the central hub for English-language fanfiction, winning a Hugo Award this year. Twitter, Tumblr, AO3, and Reddit were the four cornerstones of fan culture in the 2010s, marking the rise of the ten unforgettable fandoms on our list.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe

Without exaggeration, the , Hollywood studios quickly started trying to build their own multi-strand franchises... MCU changed cinema as we know it. Following the success of The Avengers in 2012 with limited results. Meanwhile, Marvel still reigns supreme, dominating the pop-culture conversation for better or worse-"better" being the fact that Marvel movies are pretty good by blockbuster standards, but "worse" in the sense that Hollywood studios barely make lower-budget original films anymore. So, make of that what you will.

Marvel is now a ubiquitous commercial product, but at this point, its fandom is often at odds with the source material. Along with the core fanbase of comic book fans, the MCU spawned an incredibly active transformative fandom. Partly because the movies are so male-dominated, the MCU is home to several of the most popular slash ships of the decade, including Iron Man/Captain America and Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes. Hawkeye/Black Widow is the only major hetero ship in the fandom, so the one thing all these pairings have in common is a total lack of recognition in canon. This doesn't make a dent in their popularity, but it creates an obvious divide between what we see on-screen (formulaic action-comedies featuring straight romances) and what fans gravitate toward online (adult-rated queer love stories, often with more complex political and psychological themes than the films themselves).

This divide between mainstream success and a more adventurous, progressive fandom came to a head with this year. An enormous commercial hit that earned middling reviews from critics, and ultimately split the fanbase between enthusiastic adulation and Avengers: Endgame outright dismay.

Star Wars

Disney purchased Lucasfilm for $4 billion in October 2012, a move that initially worried fans but ultimately revitalized a franchise and saw it grow far beyond what we could've ever imagined-bringing out both the best and worst in us. Although we've seen our fair share of inner-connected films, TV shows, tie-in books, and comics, two theme parks, and one cohesive canon since then, the ultimate fruition of that purchase was the creation of a new trilogy. Those films had the seemingly impossible task of introducing a new cast of characters to inherit the older generation's mantle and legacy, and its gamble largely paid off. The sequel trilogy has already made billions at the box office ( The Rise of Skywalker was released theatrically on Dec. 20), and over the past four years, many fans latched onto the new characters with their fair share of , thoughtful analysis , and plenty of shipping .

Thanks to new characters like , and , which has led to a particularly vitriolic response from some Rey, Finn, Rose Tico, Poe Dameron fans of all ages finally had a chance to see themselves in a galaxy far, far away that was becoming more inclusive, something that not just drew in a new generation of fans but also older viewers who may have only casually watched the films before. But inclusivity was sometimes elusive in other areas: It took until The Mandalorian for someone other than a white man to direct a property (Victoria Mahoney is also second unit director for The Rise of Skywalker ) and LGBTQ representation is practically non-existent . But the gatekeeping and fan toxicity that's existed in fandom for decades reemerged in full force . It ramped up significantly with the Star Wars fans.

Under Disney, the franchise hasn't been completely smooth sailing. underperformed, leading Disney to scale back its movie slate while Solo: A Star Wars Story have been let go during varying states of production multiple directors and writers . The backlash lives on two years later to the point where relitigating the backlash to The Last Jedi has become a major narrative of The Rise of Skywalker press tour. But even with the Skywalker Saga coming to a close, the future of remains bright thanks to Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland and Disney World, as well as a little green puppet at the center of its first live-action series.

Game of Thrones

At the height of its run, Game of Thrones wasn't just the biggest or most popular TV show in the world. It was an entire phenomenon, the kind of thing that made its entire, largely unknown cast-some who have since gone on to star in Marvel, DC Comics, and properties-become household names. It was an often-misunderstood political touchpoint for some pundits and even a U.S. president . Barack Obama was openly a fan . Based on an incredibly dense series of novels , Game of Thrones took high fantasy to the mainstream, a move that replicated by several rival networks (albeit in pale imitations ). It brought the kind of fan speculation we've thrived on in our own spaces for years to the mainstream, which became just as much a part of the conversation surrounding the show as the character work, the plot, and the .

But it wasn't like that from the start. The series debuted on HBO in 2011, but it didn't achieve that next level until fans , one that we've seen experienced the Red Wedding , an event that stunned both show viewers and readers when they originally encountered it, in season 3's penultimate episode in June 2013. Thanks to book fans who secretly filmed their loved ones' reactions , the Red Wedding became a major shared fan experience of Game of Thrones . Since then, Game of Thrones replicated far and wide ' popularity and influence on pop culture only grew.

Our opinions on the show have certainly fluctuated over the years, as some fans point to the show going off-book for when Game of Thrones appeared to decrease in quality. Some drew their ire toward the showrunners themselves, who had a sometimes combative relationship with fans , and the contentious atmosphere online toward has definitely soured some of us on the series as a whole. It's only been seven months since Game of Thrones ended, and although Watchmen and The Mandalorian have already proven that the weekly episode release model isn't dead yet, the end of Game of Thrones still felt like the end of an era. We shall never see its like again.

Harry Potter

Few fandoms have seemingly gone through as much of an emotional roller coaster over the past decade as Harry Potter fandom. Fans saw Harry's world expand across multiple mediums: Universal Studios' theme parks, the West End and Broadway play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child , and the Fantastic Beasts franchise, fulfilling demand for more stories from that world ever since 's original series ended in 2007. But what they might not have expected is how much their love of a series-and Rowling herself-would ultimately test their patience.

The original, seven-book series is still beloved and revered to this day by fans, many of whom largely grew up alongside Harry. For many, helped shape how they viewed the world, serving both as a moral compass and a With that moral compass, some fans became inspired to call out injustice and hypocrisy when they saw it, even when it involved highlighting Rowling's own shortcomings, which often arose when she wanted credit for doing the bare minimum when it came to the depiction of representation in her own work that fell apart under even a hint of scrutiny. Fans who had grown up with the progressive messages that Rowling's Harry Potter go-to political reference Harry Potter had to offer were now faced with a play that relegated queer representation to subtext and a film franchise that is queerbaiting its audience (and continues to cast an alleged domestic abuser , which Rowling defended); . politics have also rubbed a lot of people the wrong way

That's not to mention the canonical mess that Fantastic Beasts has become since its launch that has turned some off of that franchise. Just last month, Warner Bros. officially greenlit a third Fantastic Beasts film , a decision that was met with eye-rolling and derision and questions of who even wants this (among questions of how Warner Bros. came to the conclusions that it did about the franchise's issues). If that's not an indication of how much the Wizarding World's reception has changed in 10 years, we don't know what is.

The BeyHive

Beyoncé is the reigning queen of American pop music, going from strength to strength throughout the 2010s. 2011 saw the release of iconic hits like "Run the World (Girls)" and "Love on Top," and since then her art and public image have evolved much further. Along with the obvious success of her business empire and celebrity status, 2016 saw the release of her bold visual album Lemonade, with her documentary Homecoming arriving last year. So yes, this list wouldn't be complete without Beyoncé and her Beyhive.

In an era where every major pop star seems to have their own self-titled squad of followers, the Beyhive are the epitome of stan culture. Passionately active on social media, they're known both for their intense attention to detail regarding Beyoncé's life and career... and also for their collective power as an army of Beyoncé defenders. As the name suggests, they come with a sting. Members of the Beyhive occasionally go overboard by tracking down and harassing people who appear to do something anti-Beyoncé. This isn't exactly unique to Beyoncé's particular fanbase, but we have to admit the Beyhive and the BTS Army are especially known for their swift and unbeatable takedowns.

But for all that the Beyhive's attacks grab headlines, Beyoncé fandom runs much deeper. Moreso than Taylor Swift or Rihanna, Beyoncé is a political figure as well as a pop idol. Fully aware of her cultural power and status as a role model-particularly for Black women-she consistently takes political action in her artistic decisions, from behind-the-scenes choices like hiring US Vogue's first black photographer, to the complex artistry and messaging in works like "Lemonade" and " Apeshit." Recent Beyoncé videos are famously layered with meaning, to the point where there is a whole academic syllabus based on her work.

Homestuck

's influence probably won't be understood for another decade, but this webcomic was groundbreaking and incredibly popular... while also being mostly unrecognized by outsiders. Created by Andrew Hussie, it was less "webcomic" and more of a serialized multimedia project; a sprawling sci-fi/fantasy epic about a group of gamer teens who accidentally cause the apocalypse. At over Homestuck 800,000 words long plus illustrations, animations, games and soundtrack albums, it's a major undertaking to read-which is why it's the quintessential "you had to be there" fandom.

Running from 2009 to 2016, was famous for being slightly incomprehensible to outsiders, making it the cultural opposite to more accessible Tumblr-era fandoms like Marvel or SuperWhoLock. During its heyday, around a million people visited the Homestuck website each day, catching up with new installments. Firmly rooted in internet culture, it mostly played to an audience of young millennials, instantly recognizable at conventions for their grey-skinned troll costumes. It's a true example of internet counterculture-a unique project that couldn't possibly exist offline, rather than a traditional media product with an online following.

One Direction

One Direction 's boyband crown has since been usurped by BTS, but in the early 2010s, they reigned supreme. Formed in 2010, they combined traditional boyband appeal (five cute guys marketed at young women and girls) with a new era of social media-driven fandom. They arrived at a perfect inflection point between the rise of Tumblr and Twitter, and the true mainstreaming of fanfiction and shipping culture.

1D were at the forefront of a new wave of RPF (real person fanfic), the most popular subgenres being self-insert stories about girls falling in love with a member of the band (some which were later republished as original novels), and slashfic shipping the boys with each other. Larry Stylinson-aka Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson-was a fandom juggernaut throughout the mid-2010s, spawning some pretty intense conspiracy theories alongside the more typical fannish output. For several years, Tumblr was a hotspot of detailed analyses "proving" that Harry and Louis were secretly in love IRL, that Louis' longtime girlfriend was a beard, and even that his child was a hoax. Fortunately, this died down in later years, with many fans still enjoying the 1D community after the band broke up and moved onto other projects.

BTS

's rise to become not only an incredibly successful K-pop group in South Korea-and one of the biggest musical acts in the world-since the group's formation in 2013 has been nothing short of meteoric . Their music often tackled social issues, their openness on social media made them relatable to fans of all ages, and while they've been a K-pop staple for years (and changing people's perception of K-pop ), it's only in the last couple of years that they've really broken out in the U.S. Despite western media only discovering BTS relatively recently, the group is so successful in South Korea-bringing in billions of dollars-that they're on the same level as Samsung and Hyundai.

Since then, BTS has collaborated with the likes of Halsey, Ed Sheeran, and Steve Aoki, but they've also released their own share of music as the ARMY supports them every step of the way, including with the nuance it deserves. And it's not just their music: K-pop fandom has raising money for charity in BTS's name . The ARMY is protective of the group, and while that can sometimes lead to harassment within the fan community, BTS's fans will also call out bullshit, like when it comes in the form of a they perceive doesn't treat BTS and the K-pop industry surged in popularity, and four of the top 100 ships on Tumblr this year are RPF ships involving several members of BTS. (By far the most popular BTS ship is Jikook, which pairs Park Jimin and Jeon Jungkook together.)

BTS is already becoming a staple at several U.S. awards shows, although they have yet to be nominated for a Grammy . But the impact they've already left be overstated: Stephen Colbert painstakingly the Beatles' American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show with BTS for The Late Show back in May, indicating that yes, BTS is on that level-and they're just getting started.

SuperWhoLock

Super what now? While SuperWhoLock -which the names of Supernatural , Doctor Who , and BBC's -might lead to more cringing nowadays, for a time, it was both the culmination of both three of the most active fandoms on Tumblr during the early-to-mid 2010s and a fan-created desire of a shared universe between those major properties. If you paired off Sherlock Holmes' wit, the Winchester brothers' grit, and the Doctor's timey-wimey resourcefulness, it makes for an unbeatable team. At its heart, SuperWhoLock sparked lots of fanart and remixes, although some who only liked some of those shows (and even some fans who liked all of them) were annoyed by the constant mashups.

Even in their heyday, all three series have fallen under scrutiny for various reasons. and Supernatural were accused of queerbaiting fans by teasing slash pairings (JohnLock for , Destiel for Supernatural ) that it never intended to make canon. In the mid-2010s, Steven Moffat-who has a history of insensitive comments , gaslighting , and admitting to catering to sexist fans - ran both and . Supernatural spent much of its run fridging a majority of its female characters . All three shows have at one point or another.

But in 2019, SuperWhoLock seems like the product of a bygone internet era, although they're still quite popular: All three series appeared on Tumblr's list of its top 50 live-action TV shows . hasn't aired a new episode since January 2017 (and we have no indication if we'll ever get another one). Supernatural is ending next year after a 15-season run, although some fans would argue it could've easily done so several years earlier. But presses on: In just a few weeks will debut its first new episode in a year , the second season with Jodie Whittaker steering the TARDIS.

Welcome to Night Vale

Starting off as a tiny indie operation, became the first fictional hit of the podcast revolution, spawning spinoff novels, numerous live tours, and a Welcome to Night Vale colossal fandom. Drawing from H.P. Lovecraft and a long tradition of weird fiction, is a combination of horror and surreal slice-of-life humor, narrated by the local radio host of an isolated town beset by bizarre paranormal events. Its blend of atmospheric storytelling and engaging voice-acting made it an immediate hit, gradually unfolding more long-form story arcs in later episodes.

Praised for its There are several fandoms on this list that became popular for more complicated reasons than the high-quality source material, but Night Vale is, well... good! It's a great podcast, and while it's not a trending fandom in 2019 the same way it was around 2014, the overall audience is still going strong, supporting the creators as Night Vale continues to diverse and inclusive cast, and a queer romance involving the main character Cecil Palmer, it was perfectly pitched to attract horror fans, Tumblr shippers and -ish audiences alike. (And of course, plenty of listeners were all three at once.) grow.

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The 10 most influential fandoms of the 2010s

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The 2010s marked a turning point for fan culture, as franchises like Star Wars and Marvel began to dominate mainstream entertainment, and online fanworks rapidly became more accessible. For some fans, it was a tricky transition period, moving from a time when fandom was more niche and private to a point where media companies comb through social media for fan-made commentary and content.

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Lil Uzi Vert is a so-called "SoundCloud rapper" from Philadelphia who rose to fame with his 2016 Migos collaboration "Bad and Boujee." Heaven's Gate was a San Diego-based cult - one of the most notorious from the beginnings of the Internet era - that led to the deaths of 39 people who believed they must commit suicide in order to reach a spacecraft trailing the comet Hale-Bopp.

These two disparate sides of Internet culture met in a strange twist of fate this week.

On Tuesday, Lil Uzi Vert released the artwork for his new album. Called "Eternal Atake," the design seems to directly reference the infamous early-Internet aesthetic of Heaven's Gate, with its keyhole and galaxy backdrop. Uzi also changed his Instagram avatar to a photo of Marshall Applewhite, the cult's founder.

"Looks awesome," wrote one commenter on Uzi's Instagram post.

"Album of the year," someone else mused.

"Pretty sure this cult pulled a mass suicide," another added.

That statement is correct, of course. In 1996, 39 members of Heaven's Gate killed themselves in a rented San Diego mansion wearing matching tracksuits and Nike sneakers.

Like Uzi's fans, surviving members of the cult also had a response to the new album cover: "Not cool."

"Lil Uzi Vert has to abide by common trademark and copyright laws. Especially in a matter as sensitive as this," said members of the Telah Foundation - those left behind to run the Heaven's Gate website during the 1996 suicide - in a statement to PageSix.

"You can rage against social inequities but be cognizant of someone else's intellectual property," the statement continued. "How [would] he feel if his songs were altered a bit by someone else and they made money off of it? Not cool." SFGATE could not reach the foundation for comment.

Uzi later posted a second possible album cover: a cartoon depiction of himself wearing a galaxy-print t-shirt with a keyhole. Uzi's reps did not respond to requests for comment.
Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf.

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Surviving members of deadly Heaven's Gate cult peeved by rapper Lil Uzi Vert album art

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Lil Uzi Vert is a so-called "SoundCloud rapper" from Philadelphia who rose to fame with his 2016 Migos collaboration "Bad and Boujee." Heaven's Gate was a San Diego-based cult - one of the most notorious from the beginnings of the Internet era - that led to the deaths of 39 people who believed they must commit suicide in order to reach a spacecraft trailing the comet Hale-Bopp.

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JAPANESE DOOMSDAY CULT AUM SHINRIKYO MEMBERS WEARING THEIR GURU SHOKO ASAHARA'S MASKS PARADE ON JANUARY 27, 1990 IN TOKYO, JAPAN. IMAGE: GETTY IMAGES

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The game is called “上九一色村物语," which roughly translates to The Story of Kamikuishiki Village. Nobody seems to know where it came from, and some speculate it was created by the Aum Shinrikyo cult itself as a digital effort to indoctrinate new members. The only thing anyone can agree on is that it’s creepy. And so the game has spread across the internet like a kind of visual creepypasta, or an interactive version of the tapes from The Ring.

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The groups make money by having followers purchase religious study books and paraphernalia, as well as paying to undergo ceremonies to increase their spiritual powers. These ceremonies typically require lengthy fasting, electric shock treatments and purchasing water that was “blessed” by Asahara before his arrest, Watanabe said.

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Japanese are still baffled at how Mr. Asahara, whose real name was Chizuo Matsumoto, was able to persuade some of the nation’s brightest students to put their faith in him — and attempt mass murder. He adopted the long hair and white robes of an Indian guru, and claimed he could levitate and read minds.

Hiroyuki Nagaoka, the leader of a group of families trying to get their children out of Aum and its successor, Aleph, said he worried that, without societal soul-searching and change, more young people would fall victim to such men.

“Even if you break up Aleph, another cult will just appear,” said Mr. Nagaoka, whose son left Aum before the gas attack. “This is a never-ending battle.”

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Ms. Kikuchi’s apparent desire for a second chance reminded some Aum observers of what they say is the continued vulnerability of Japanese youth to cult leaders who fool them with promises of some greater cosmic meaning and an escape from the rigid confines of their lives.

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The Aum�s current membership is estimated to be less than 1,000 persons. At the time of the Tokyo subway attack, the group claimed to have 9,000 members in Japan and as many as 40,000 worldwide.

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Many of Asahara's followers in Japan were students at elite universities. They were young people from academically pressured backgrounds who had similarly pressured careers ahead of them - and the cult promised them a more meaningful life.

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Aum Shinrikyo, whose name means "supreme truth", began in the 1980s as a spiritual group mixing Hindu and Buddhist beliefs, later working in elements of apocalyptic Christian prophesies. The group's founder, Shoko Asahara, declared himself to be both Christ and the first "enlightened one" since Buddha.

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In 1993, a former member of the group named Ricky Dupuy appeared on Larry King Live, and told the host that he’d been ordered by the group to rape a 10-year-old. Dupuy, like other ex-members of the group, later committed suicide.

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Berg’s church melded worship of Jesus Christ with ’60s-era free love, and preached a fairly standard cult leader prophecy—the apocalypse was coming, and soon. This doomsday predication encouraged his followers to live hand-to-mouth rather than making long-term plans; ex-members later told The Guardian of begging for alms and subsisting off of donated food.

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However, they lived a commune lifestyle

"We had no contact with the outside world," Verity says.

"We did not have music or television or culture. We had no idea how the world worked."

Although Verity and her siblings received no formal education, they were taught survival skills and how to keep secrets from the "systemites" in the outside world, especially social workers.

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The Children of God began in the United States in the late 1960s.

Its founder, David Berg, told members that God was love and love was sex, so there should be no limits, regardless of age or relationship.

"It actively encouraged sexual activities among minors as young as two or three years old," Verity says.

Berg's cult spread and claimed to have 10,000 full-time members in 130 communities around the world by the 1970s.

Hollywood stars Rose McGowan and Joaquin Phoenix were born into the cult.

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She is not fake, and she is not afraid of being different and -- like Miley said -- this is a movement, so we are going to keep this evolution going and will support Miley 'til the end.

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For a significant number of followers, Rev. Jim Jones provided guidance which they could find nowhere else in their lives. Many of his followers had been addicted to drugs prior to joining the Temple, or homeless, or escaping from abusive situations. Teri O’Shea (who defected from Jonestown three weeks before the massacre) had been 19 years old when her mother tried to strangle her with a dog chain. O’Shea had been hitchhiking to California when one of the people who gave her a ride told her about the Temple, a community where O’Shea would be unconditionally welcomed and protected. According to O’Shea, “I fell for it hook, line, and sinker” (O’Shea). For people like O’Shea, Peoples Temple appeared to be a safe haven where they could work on reshaping and rebuilding their lives. In his speeches, Jim Jones certainly promoted this image and his role as a crusader against injustice. He said at one Temple meeting,

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It Wasn’t Kool-Aid That Poisoned the Temple Members
After the attack on Congressman Ryan and his party at the Port Kaituma airstrip, Jones urged his more than 900 followers in Jonestown that they had to commit suicide or else the Guyanese military will come in and take their children away. From a vat, his people drank the cyanide-laced punch, which birthed the phrase “drinking the Kool-Aid,” referring to those who blindly and foolishly follow something. But it wasn’t actual Kool-Aid that was used in the suicides but rather a similar brand called Flavor-Aid. The reference to “Kool-Aid” could be traced to the early reporting in the days after the tragedy, such as this article in The Washington Post. Today, the phrase “drinking the Kool Aid” has mixed, even offensive, meanings to Temple survivors and relatives.

“It…still hurts every time I hear it,” Juanell Smart, whose four children, mother and uncle died in the tragedy, said in The Road to Jonestown. “I hated that people laughed when they said it, like what happened was somehow funny.”

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Tim Carter, another ex-member, says that Jones hated romantic relationships within the Peoples Temple because they were seen as a threat to the cause and that the members should be focused on their work. “[My wife] Gloria and I were one of those couples who never really talked to each other about what our true feelings were about Jones,” he says, “or anything else, because we were afraid that the other one might get called up to the carpet.”

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“Jim said that all of us were homosexuals,” Joyce Houston, an ex-Temple follower, said in the Jonestown documentary. “Everyone except [him]. He was the only heterosexual on the planet, and that the women were all lesbians; the guys were all gay. And so anyone who showed in interest in sex was just compensating.”

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a popular, if controversial, black evangelist and founder of the Peace Mission movement. Born sometime in the early 1880s, Father Divine started a religious movement in the 1910s that drew huge numbers of worshippers who saw him as God. As described in Raven, a judge suddenly died shortly after handing down the preacher a prison sentence for being a public nuisance. (“I hated to do it,” Divine reportedly responded).

Father Divine, who lived in an estate in Pennsylvania with his wife Mother Divine, possessed the qualities that Jones mirrored for himself and the Peoples Temple: He had a multiracial congregation, believed in racial equality and preached the abstention of sex.

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“We all felt that we were a ‘family’ rather than a church,” says Kohl.

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“I thought Jimmy was a really weird kid,” Jones’ childhood friend Chuck Wilmore recalled in the 2006 documentary Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple. “He was obsessed with religion; he was obsessed with death. A friend of mine told me that he saw Jimmy kill a cat with a knife.” According to Jeff Guinn’s book, The Road to Jonestown, Jones also had an early fascination with Adolf Hitler. “When Hitler committed suicide in April 1945, thwarting enemies who sought to capture and humiliate him, Jimmy was impressed,” he wrote.

Rev. Jim Jones himself served as a model for the Temple’s commitment to societal equality. In 1960, Jones and his wife adopted a black child. They were the first white couple in Indiana’s history to do so (Ksander).

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Today, the legacy of Jonestown has been reduced to the popular expression of “drinking the Kool-Aid.” But the history of Jones and the Peoples Temple is much bigger than that somewhat inaccurate catchphrase.

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Decades later, survivors of Jonestown still remember being part of a church/organization that they devoted a good portion of their lives to. “The people were incredible,” says Jean Clancey, who worked on the Temple newspaper. “People who were capable of committing themselves to something outside of their own self-interests.” Adds Laura Johnston Kohl, another former Temple member, “We – all of us – were doing the right things but in the wrong place with the wrong leader.”

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Concern over the welfare of those in the jungle encampment prompted U.S. Congressman Leo Ryan to visit Jonestown in November 1978. After checking out the settlement, Ryan was shot to death along with four other people by Temple gunmen at an airstrip. Following those murders, Jones commanded his followers to drink cyanide-laced punch, starting with the children first. In all, there were over 900 who died in Jonestown, including Jim Jones, who was found dead of a gunshot wound to the head. There is speculation that he may have taken his own life, or that his nurse Annie Moore fatally shot him before she killed herself in the same manner.

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But by 1977, Jones had grown paranoid from the media scrutiny over the Temple’s suspicious activities, so he and his numerous followers moved to an agricultural settlement (a.k.a. Jonestown) in Guyana, the remote country east of Venezuela.

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To focus on the leader is to overlook the basic decency and genuine idealism of the members. Jim Jones would have accomplished nothing without the people of Peoples Temple. They were the activists, the foot soldiers, the letter writers, the demonstrators, the organizers.

Don Beck, a former Temple member, has written that the legacy of the movement is “to cherish the people and remember the goodness that brought us together.”

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Members saw themselves as battling on the front lines against colonialism, as they listened to guests from Pan-African organizations and from the recently deposed Marxist Chilean government speak in their San Francisco gatherings. They joined coalition groups that were agitating against the Bakke case, which ruled that race-based admissions quotas were unconstitutional, and demonstrating in support of the Wilmington Ten, 10 African Americans who were wrongfully convicted of arson in North Carolina.

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Regardless of the motives of their leader, the followers wholeheartedly believed in the possibility of change.

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My younger sister, Annie, seemed to be drawn to the Temple’s ethos of diversity and equality.

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A food truck was one of several moneymaking operations the Temple ran in Northern California. Peoples Temple Collection, 1942–2015, (I.D. MS-0183), Special Collections and University Archives, San Diego State University

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Scholars suspect that an Esquire magazine article – which listed nine parts of the world that would be safe in the event of nuclear war, and included a region of Northern California – gave Jones the idea for the move.

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In a deeply segregated city, it was one of the few places where black and white working-class congregants sat together in church on a Sunday morning. Its members provided various kinds of assistance to the poor – food, clothing, housing, legal advice – and the church and its pastor, Jim Jones, gained a reputation for fostering racial integration.

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The Temple began as a church in the Pentecostal-Holiness tradition in Indianapolis in the 1950s.

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A 1990 University of Toledo study

of 382 college students examined just how clothes can make the man. One “attractive” and one “unattractive” man (as previously determined by a panel of females) donned a variety of clothes—from designer watches and pressed shirts to baseball caps and Burger King polos. Consistently, women rated the well-dressed man as more attractive than the sloppier one, regardless of which model sported which ensemble.

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The most photographed subject of the 1960s was the Beatles.[3]

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George Harrison was stabbed seven times by an intruder in 1999.[8]

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Bob Dylan introduced the Beatles to marijuana. Paul McCartney would later become an outspoken advocate for its legalization.[8]

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After George Harrison mentioned during an interview that he liked Jelly Babies, fans began to throw the sweets at the Beatles on stage.[10]

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The Beatles song “Got to Get You into My Life” (1966) is generally thought to be about a girl, but McCartney later claimed that it is actually marijuana.[12]

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Mae West initially refused to have her image on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but changed her mind after receiving a personal letter from the band. Other famous women on the cover include Marilyn Monroe and Shirley Temple.[10]

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The Beatles became a catalyst for bohemianism and activism that fueled such movements as women’s liberation, gay liberation, and environmentalism.[10]

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The single “I Want to Hold Your Hand” sold 1.5 million copies in less than a week and the interest the Beatles gained in the UK marked the start of a musical phenomenon known as the “British Invasion.”

The first time a Beatles record was played in America was December 17, 1963. James Carroll, a Washington, D.C. disc jockey played a record his stewardess girlfriend had brought back from Britain called “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Due to listener demand, it played daily, every hour.

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Chapman was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sentenced 20-years-to-life in prison. Three Beatles fans committed suicide after John Lennon’s assassination.

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At the time, John Lennon made a famous statement, saying, “the Beatles are more popular than Jesus.” This made the band an even bigger target of public outcry.

Mark David Chapman, a Beatles fan who idolized Lennon, shot him in 1980 because he found his statement about Jesus offensive. Chapman fired at him five times and remained at the crime scene until the police came. He pleaded guilty, claiming it was God’s will.

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Bridget Kelly. "People think they're silly but they're not. It's the togetherness. We had this big communal thing that we all knew and loved and understood — something that was yours and nothing to do with your mum and dad. We were all in it together. It was lovely."

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But in the late 1980s and early 90s, a number of writers, including Jensen and Ehrenreich, began looking at fans with a sympathetic eye. Fan studies is now a fertile field of academia, while pop stars such as Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga are increasingly canny about managing their fans. But at the same time, fans' high profile on social media, where a trending topic can lead the casual observer down a rabbit hole of bewildering intensity, has inspired a new wave of adult angst. "A scorned Directioner is a terrifying beast," remarked one TV critic reviewing a recent documentary Crazy About One Direction.

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They were viewed as either hysterical mobs to be patronised or, especially after the murder of John Lennon, obsessive loners to be feared.

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Jan Myers, a Londoner who is writing a book about her experiences as a hardcore Beatles fan, went to extraordinary lengths. She bunked off school to cycle 20 miles to Heathrow to greet the band's flight. She crawled through the sewers under Abbey Road to hear them recording Rubber Soul through the floorboards. She even gatecrashed the Yellow Submarine after-party. "We did crazy things," she says. "We were fanatical. We could stand outside Abbey Road for 16 hours and as long as one of them came and smiled or said something it was fine. But my mum would rather I was doing that than stealing or popping pills. I didn't smoke, I didn't drink, I was just obsessed. All I could think about was them."

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"The writer Susan Clerc says the most primal instinct of the fan is to talk to other fans and I think there's something in that. The idea of community and collectivity is important."

It didn't matter what your clothes were or where your parents worked; we were all in it together."

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When Paul Johnson wrote, "The teenager comes not to hear but to participate in a ritual," he meant it as an insult but it certainly was a ritual. Although stereotyped as brainwashed consumers, the fans were far from passive. They loved the music, of course, but they'd heard these songs a thousand times. When they screamed they were also celebrating themselves, their freedom, their youth, their power. Screaming didn't drown out the performance: it was a performance.

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"I never felt people came to hear our show," Ringo later grumbled. "I felt they came to see us."

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"For reasons that are beyond me I liked Ringo," says Linda Grant. "There was a real goody two-shoes at school who liked Paul. George seemed a bit nothing. John seemed off-limits, too intimidating."

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Londoner Bridget Kelly remembers her first Beatles concert, at the Finsbury Park Astoria on Boxing Day 1963, as the most important day of her young life. "It was something to do with being in a place between childhood and adulthood where you could let go and go mad. I would never dream of being cheeky to my parents so that was our little outlet."

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The baby boom meant there were more teenagers than there had been for Elvis or Sinatra, with more money in their pockets, filled with a powerful sense that society was changing

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It was first applied to fandom in 1844 when German poet and essayist Heinrich Heine coined the word Lisztomania to describe the "true madness, unheard of in the annals of furore" that broke out at concerts by the piano virtuoso Franz Liszt

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Some of that has to do with class: different pursuits are seen as more culturally valuable than others. Some of it has to do with gender. There's a whole range of cultural prejudices. One thing our society seems to value is moderation. Fandom represents excess and is therefore seen as negative

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In an influential 1992 essay, Fandom as Pathology, US academic Joli Jensen observed: "Fandom is seen as a psychological symptom of a presumed social dysfunction… Once fans are characterised as a deviant, they can be treated as disreputable, even dangerous 'others'."

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In an infamous New Statesman essay Paul Johnson sneered: "Those who flock round the Beatles, who scream themselves into hysteria, whose vacant faces flicker over the TV screen, are the least fortunate of their generation, the dull, the idle, the failures."

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“The Beatles are the Book of Genesis." Linda Grant

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the screaming, the queuing, the waiting, the longing, the trophy-collecting, the craving for even the briefest contact. When One Direction's Niall Horan recently said of his group's fans: "They are nuts. Mostly all I see is a sea of screaming faces," he could have been any boy-band star from the past 50 years.

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A Radio Scotland reporter turned to Lothian and gasped, "For God's sake Andi, what's happening?" Thinking on his feet, the promoter replied, "Don't worry, it's only… Beatlemania."

The coinage is usually attributed to a Daily Mirror story about the Beatles' London Palladium concert eight days later but Lothian insists it came from him, via Radio Scotland. Either way, the phenomenon predated the label. Throughout 1963 there had been reports of teenage girls screaming, crying, fainting and chasing the band down the street; police escorts were already required. But catchy new words have a magical power in the media. Once it caught on, it seemed to cement the phenomenon in the collective imagination.

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A tearful Beatle lover pleads unsuccessfully with a policeman to carry her fan button to Ringo Starr, one of the four mop-top singers who drew squeals and shrieks from more than 30,000 spectators at two Indiana State Fair shows in Indianapolis on September 4, 1964. #

AP Photo/Bob Daugherty

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A man covers his ears as 18,000 screaming fans react to The Beatles in the Hollywood Bowl, California, during their U.S. concert tour on August 23, 1964. #

AP Photo