The Beatles Live!
New generations of fans are cultural archaeologists, working with the materials of the past to create the passion of the present.
To be a modern-day music fan is to be in love with history in the making. You chronicle as you participate, archiving as you engage, co-creating the mythology of the pop star or band even as new chapters emerge and the story changes.
Music fandom is a big-tent community that’s home to many different kind of fans, including celebrity-focused update accounts; devoted tour-followers, meet-and-greet buying groupies; solo fans covering their lockers and bedroom walls with posters; rack-up-the-streams chart obsessives; and local and indie music supporters.
No matter where one falls in these overlapping groups and practices, music fans form intimate relationships with their objects of fandom—from the Taylor Swifts and BTSes of the world to thousands of counterparts with smaller but just as dedicated contemporary followings, these fandoms are evolving as the artists at their center do.
But then, music fandom today isn’t reserved for today’s artists. I don’t mean older people who still love the bands they loved back in the day: I mean younger fans of a classic or legacy act, people who were born long past an artist’s musical heyday, but have discovered it during their own youth.
There’s a thriving classic rock fandom online, obsessed with bands like Queen, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles, among others. These fans are in love with the music and the personalities behind it—just as any fan would have been during each act’s prime—but by temporal necessity, the way they enact that fandom isn’t the same as would be for a modern artist.
“being a classic rock fan is so hard literally all your faves are always dead or terrible people,” bemoans a 2022 TikTok by @yunggremlin.
This distanced, wry post-irony about the cancellability of historical icons speaks to the epic highs and lows of being, say, a Pink Floyd fan. It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it. And in fact they do, in droves.
The classic-rock side of TikTok is full of youthful enthusiasts of sixties, seventies, and eighties music. Some of them perform their historical music fandom as part of a broader sort of LARPing lifestyle, collecting vintage clothes and practicing vintage-inspired makeup styles. They aren’t completely living in the past—often there’s a big overlap with fandoms for contemporary alternative bands who have historically-inspired sounds, like the Lemon Twigs, Greta van Fleet, and Declan McKenna.
There’s certainly an aesthetic element to their fannish nostalgia, which sees them connecting and identifying with the fans that came before them. But they’re also fully embracing the expanded range of modern-day fan practices: not just listening to music and dressing like their idols, but shipping band members and creating things like fanart, fanfiction, and memes. And no modern-day classic rock fandom has taken to these practices quite like the Beatles fandom.
