TMR Creative Collective

I have been a fan as long as I can remember. I come by it honestly. My mom was a huge Elvis fan. My dad hated Elvis because my mom (and later stepmom) loved him, but he obsessed over Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Batman, Big Band music, and Tom Landry’s Dallas Cowboys. Two of my sisters loved The Beatles (Paul to be specific). The other was too cool to follow the crowd so she opted for Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits.

I believe my fandom started with Vivien Leigh. I saw Gone With the Wind in the theater around age 4 or 5. My dad told me stories of me declaring from the backseat of the car “as God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again” or “after all, tomorrow is another day”.

My fandom progressed to more mature things like: Garfield, Hall and Oates who were my first 8-track; Olivia Newton-John due to Grease with a little Star Wars sprinkled in; and then came Duran Duran. All bets were off, I was all in. My room was wallpapered in posters. I owned an entire wardrobe of t-shirts and buttons, hosted sleep overs with friends where time was spent calling the radio stations to request Hungry Like The Wolf in order to hear our name announced in the same sentence as Duran Duran over the air waves and finally getting away with owning their infamous video album without my parents knowing that it had the racy versions of Girls on Film and The Chauffeur. This was my gateway drug to the eventual heisting of my sister’s cassette tapes of Prince and David Bowie which later developed into the hard core level of waiting in line outside of Sears to get tickets to lives shows in the New Wave, Goth, Grunge, and Hip Hop eras. As you can tell from this site, it never stopped.

What specifically prompted this blog post is that today I reposted a short clip of a lovely interview posted by Definitely Dylan (@defdylan) Instagram in which Jack White discusses the “humongous” impact that Bob Dylan has had on him both creatively and personally. Yes, even he is a fan. I wanted to share the link to the original source so that viewers could see more of the interview (it’s a good one). I found the interview on YouTube. At the end of the clip, the interviewers clamored to get autographs and photos with Jack. He appeared extremely gracious and it seemed quite obvious that he is used to that reaction in his life.

Later this evening , I went back to YouTube where the interview was still on my screen. I noted the description that I didn’t notice before that included this statement:

Guessing they want to make money off of clips. I then noticed the video was paused at the beginning of the interview that said in part:

“Legitimate”? Is this some weird validation that fans are indeed low-life scourges of the Earth who have no right to bear witness to collections of the sacred archives? Evidentially, this anti-fan snobbery irked me enough to find myself pounding the keys at this hour particularly in the light of the interviewers apparent hypocrisy after witnessing them ‘fan-girling’ in the video (I use that term with an eye-roll because that is apparently it’s the lowest of the low to not only be a fan, but also a GIRL, but I digress). Realistically, I get it, “we” can be annoying. Some of us clearly go too far. There are songs written about “us” saving cigarette butts, digging through trash, asking for locks of hair, and God-forbid unloading a Colt 45 in the face, but that’s not all of us.

I wish to reconcile in my brain why this particular statement from the archivists needed to be phrased in that manner. It got me back to wondering why the phenomenon of “Fandom” is such a shame-based experience which is what prompted me to create an Instagram post last year about fandom. It included many of the still unanswered questions that I write about tonight and comments from others that made reference to “coming out as a fan” or hiding it altogether. Over the last two years, several artists have told me that they are embarrassed of sharing their fan art. Some hide it from friends and family, some use Finsta accounts to share, while others post at the risk of being teased. Even “fans” can be seen shaming other fans on various social media platforms for fanning improperly. The act of shaming is one most grotesque parts of being a fan (another is fan entitlement which is a topic for another day). It is sad that people aren’t allowed to love what they love and organizations make statements to exclude the very thing they are propagating in the first place. Ultimately, I guess I really don’t care to find out what wrath will be placed upon me for allowing fans to see sacred footage, so I begrudgingly decided to delete the video from our feed and the link from our stories. Please feel free to leave a comment on your own fandom experience, thoughts on excluding creative materials from certain groups of people, or make your own blog post about this blog post. For the love and hypocrisy, A