Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

If I’m really honest, I like One Direction because their music reminds me of myself. I’m nineteen and I’m not nineteen; I get to hold the two images side by side and think about the ways in which I’m changing and the ways in which I will always be the same.

Infatuation is irrational but it can be a precursor to introspection. The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time. Screaming at pop music is not direct action, and screaming does not make a person a revolutionary, or even resistant, but what screaming can and does do is punctuate prolonged periods of silence.

“As soon as I set foot in that stadium, I lost it,” she said. “I was by myself; nobody went with me. That was the best moment for me, in my life, to be honest.”

When we shrieked, it was at the knowledge that the moment would end.

That night on the phone, I asked her if she thinks about when Bruce Springsteen will die, and she started crying, so I did too. “I honestly can’t imagine a world without him in it,” she said. “It would make me feel even older than I already feel. It would be the end of my youth. Because even if he’s not running around onstage anymore, it’s in my head. When I see him, I’m nineteen.” How else do you get to be nineteen forever? Is there an easier way to do a quick check and remember who you are?