Leave Chappell Alone: Why Do Fan-Artist Relationships Turn Toxic, And What Can Be Done?
After weeks of climbing the charts and drawing groundbreaking crowds to her performances, Chappell Roan had to get something off her chest.
Addressing her audience of over 3 million followers in a frank pair of TikTok videos, the “Pink Pony Club” singer stared directly into her camera, eschewed the typical dynamics of artist-to-fan communication and laid everything bare. “I don’t care that abuse and harassment, stalking, whatever, is a normal thing to do to people who are famous or a little famous,” she said, her voice breaking. “I don’t give a f–k if you think it’s selfish of me to say no for a photo, or for your time, or for a hug. That’s not normal, that’s weird. It’s weird how people think that you know a person just because you see them online.”
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While Roan disabled comments on her videos, that didn’t stop the oncoming discourse from consuming online spaces. A majority of the messages across X, TikTok and Instagram were affirmations, supporting the singer for taking a strong position; a vocal minority of others offered comments that bore a striking similarity to the ones Roan called out in her videos. Some users said Roan wasn’t “cut out” for pop stardom. Others proclaimed that being a pop star required a “sacrifice” of personal privacy. More still suggested that Roan should “be a little more open” to photos with fans in public.
The debates about what is expected of pop stars when it comes to interacting with fans forces the question — at what point does genuine appreciation for an artist’s work cross the line into inappropriate behavior?
Nick Bobetsky, Roan’s manager, puts it simply on a call with Billboard: “It’s about artists setting boundaries. The majority of fans don’t cross that line, but there are some who just don’t respect those boundaries. And it’s not even really all about fans — it’s about human boundaries.”
When she first read Roan’s statement, artist manager Kristina Russo says she felt something within her “relax.” Russo has worked with pop singer-songwriter GAYLE since the “abcdefu” singer was 14 years old, and says that preparing her client for inappropriate fan behavior has always been one of the hardest parts of her job.
“I had like a whole other purpose, aside from wanting to make her dreams a reality,” Russo says. “It was like an experiment — ‘Can you raise a young person up in this industry who can also maintain their humanity and their personal autonomy?’ Seeing [Chappell] talk about this made me feel like we were on the right path.”
Why do some fans feel a need to be so close with an artist who doesn’t know them? “A fan I interviewed once said, ‘I have stage four cancer, and when I go to my chemotherapy, I take my iPod with my Josh Groban music because it makes me feel better,’ “ explains Dr. Gayle Stever, an associate professor of psychology at Empire State University and the author of The Psychology of Celebrity who has spent her career studying fan behavior, embedding with fandoms across the cultural gamut. “[The fan was] seeking to be near this person through their work … and her proximity to this person and their work in turn gives her comfort.”
What Stever is talking about is a phenomenon in which a person develops a close relationship with someone — often a media figure or celebrity — who does not know them in return. That one-sided relationship can develop over time as a fan begins to derive feelings of comfort and security from a figure and their work, which then forms what she refers to a “parasocial attachment.”
The concept of the parasocial relationship has become a major talking point online. The phrase is often deployed by those criticizing what they deem to be irregular behavior, in order to paint certain fans as weird and off-putting. But Stever makes it clear that parasocial relationships are a feature, not a bug, when it comes to human behavior — and no one is immune to forming a one-sided bond.
“As humans, we are biologically hard-wired to create connections with people from infancy,” she says. “So whether we want to admit it or not, we all form connections with familiar people in media all the time.”
It’s also not a new concept in the music industry. Back in the mid-’60s, news broadcasts around the world touted the onset of Beatlemania as the Fab Four rose to public prominence. In the decades following, stars like Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Prince and dozens more found themselves garnering massive, mobilized fan bases. Soon after, fans began to give themselves their own branding — the Beliebers, Little Monsters and others became veritable fan armies all marching under the same flag.
Robert Thompson, the director of Syracuse University’s Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture, points out that these types of fan-celebrity relationships go back even further in history. “We can look at the Roman Empire and the fandom that went on for gladiators — there’s old graffiti of the top gladiators at the time, and the fans were carving stuff into buildings and furniture,” he says. “I suspect that as long as we’ve had people performing in any way, we have had relationships with those performers.”
So why, in 2024, does it feel like we’ve reached a fever pitch in terms of boundary-crossing fan interactions?
One factor is how the advent of the internet has fundamentally changed the way that fans and artists interact with one another. Ryan Star, a recording artist and the CEO and co-founder of social-audio platform Stationhead, says that with the internet came a complete upending of the way the industry thought about fan engagement.
“Social [media] became everything, where music was almost secondary to it,” Star says. “If you were a rock star [pre-internet], there was a disconnect where [fans] couldn’t relate to you. Now you suddenly have a hyper-connection between fans and artists thanks to social media.”
Bobetsky agrees, adding that artists don’t have much of a choice when it comes to using networking platforms like X and TikTok. “Whether an artist leans into it or not, they’re generally on social media,” he says. “That heightens the personal connection that fans feel. That’s an amazing part of modern culture, that people can have that. But I think that in particular feels new, where you’ve got this more personal connection with fans broadcast at the broadest potential level.”
Colette Patnaude Nelson, a manager for artists like Conan Gray and J. Maya, knows firsthand how fundamentally social media has changed the course of fan-artist interactions. “I started my career representing YouTubers — I’ve watched the social interaction between audiences and influencers or artists just intensify,” she says.
But Stever posits that fan dynamics, be they online or in-person, have remained largely unchanged throughout the history of modern pop culture. “Every single one of these things we’re talking about, I saw pre-internet,” she says. “What you had was the same kind of fans doing the same kind of things.”
What the internet has done for fans, Stever says, is remove most barriers for entry. Where pre-internet fandoms would have to meet in-person — at conventions, concerts or elsewhere — today’s fans have direct access at all hours to others with similar points of view. Some fandoms of the past required payment in order to be a member of a fan club; now fans can organize independently without money changing hands.
Social media has also inexorably concentrated the power of fan bases, to the point where they now inherently compete with one another. Swifties, Barbs, Stylers, Team Drizzy, ARMY and others can not only show support for their favorite artists, but defend them against other fan groups. “Nowadays, there is almost a sense that one of the ways one expresses fandom online is to protect the border, to take the wagons and defend your territory,” Thompson says. “The blessing about everything opening up is that it is opened up to all kinds of other voices who were either silenced or stigmatized before. The curse is that it opens it up to everybody, and we’ve seen the manifestation of that with the spread of hate speech and false information online and among fandoms.”
That’s part of why Star wanted to create an online platform that prioritized community building over tribalism among fans. At Stationhead, fans are able to join channels corresponding to the artists they adore and essentially stream music with fellow fans. Occasionally, the artists themselves will host listening parties for fans on the platform, solidifying their own base while silently promoting a healthier, less-fraught online dynamic.
Star points out that other social platforms, despite benefitting from artists’ presence on them, were not “purpose-built” to support artist-fan relationships. Stationhead, by contrast, was created with that relationship in mind. “When fans all come together to listen and the artist is there, too [on a Stationhead channel], it is like kind of a live event,” he explains. “Joining that without being a fan would be like going to a concert for someone you didn’t like — why would you be there?”
Creating a sense of community and safety among fans is important — but as Roan pointed out in a follow-up Instagram post to her original videos, artists’ safety and well-being also has to be considered. “Women do not owe you a reason why they don’t want to be touched or talked to,” she wrote. “I am specifically talking about predatory behavior (disguised as ‘superfan’ behavior) that has been normalized because of the way women who are well-known have been treated in the past.”
As unwelcome behavior toward artists persists, many in the music industry believe that it is within an artist’s best interests to stay silent about unwanted interactions. One artist manager, who spoke to Billboard on the condition of anonymity, described Roan’s comments as “a thought best kept in her head.
“The relationship with fans is incredibly precious. Fans are hard-earned — especially from artists who are relatively new to the pop space — and pop fans especially are ruthless,” they added. “[Saying what Chappell said] definitely comes across as a ‘biting the hand that feeds you’ situation.”
Russo fundamentally disagrees with that notion, saying the only way to help mitigate the surrounding circumstances of toxic behavior is to have hard conversations with fans. “Unfortunately, that is the training we receive in this industry — put up with the things that you’re not comfortable with in order to do well. Which is why what Chappell said fuels me as a manager,” she says. “The only way to change things like this is to talk about them. If somebody is telling you how to treat them, listen.”
So what can realistically be done to help artists dealing with inappropriate fan behavior? For starters, Stever says there is a danger of painting all fans as boundary-crossers — what she refers to as “homogeneity of the out group.” (“I know, it’s very jargon-y,” she quips.) “The psychological tendency is to treat a group of people as if they’re all the same,” she adds. “The reality is that the vast majority of fans are just as appalled at this [behavior] as [Chappell] is.”
The same concept applies to artists: Bobetsky claims that any industry-spanning “solution” to toxic behavior is virtually impossible because different artists prioritize different aspects of their jobs. “Some seek the fame, some seek the celebrity — others, like Chappell, are all about music and message, and about being an artist,” he explains.
With that understanding, Patnaude Nelson says a good industrywide starting point would be to normalize letting artists say “no” to certain opportunities. “Not everyone has to do a meet-and-greet at a show — that’s not something that we should press upon every single artist,” she offers. “We can’t control fans, but what we can do is be supportive of our artists and listen to them.”
For Russo, eliminating boundaries for artists to access mental health professionals is a must. “My dream is to have a psychologist on the road,” she says. “I would love if, structurally, we can make that a thing worked into artists’ deals.”
But Bobetsky is quick to point out that real change has to start at fans’ level. “I understand why we put artists on a pedestal because we all find a sense of self through our favorite artist,” he says. “But I think you have to remind yourself that, as superhuman as you may consider your favorite artist, they are a person, and that person deserves boundaries.
He adds, ”Take the advice I give my 4-year-old, fans: Behave in a way that you’d want someone to behave around you.”
Stephen Daw
Billboard
