2023-06-10 16:31:21
Defeat is one of the torments of a football fan. But what about pop idols? And what does sex have to do with maturity and tolerance? The Column.
Rammstein frontman Lindemann at a concert in DenmarkGonzales Photo/imago
I first understood what it means to be a fan after reading Nick Hornby’s book Fever Pitch. In it he describes his lifelong suffering from the emotional bond with his club Arsenal. It wasn’t easy to understand what Hornby was talking about because the London club was immensely successful for a couple of years. Whence the suffering? Former Schalke player Mesut Özil played there for eight years, played 184 games and scored 33 goals in the English Premier League during that time.
It’s hard to reconcile the statistics with the experience Nick Hornby had on his first visit to London’s Highbury Park in 1968. In “Fever Pitch” he described the unforgettable part of that afternoon as follows: “The deepest impression on me was how much most of the men around me hated, really hated, being there.”
The fan, that should probably mean, doesn’t just come to a fair-weather experience. The sports writer Christoph Biermann put it in a nutshell. “For Hornby, fan love is a tragic one, because in the end it always ends in disappointment. The fan hates himself for wasting his time in run-down stadiums on lousy footballers.” He goes back because there he can experience the community of like-minded people and, in rare moments, the delirium of happiness that cannot be found anywhere else. In football’s early years, the fan was largely male.
The gap between pop star and fan
But there are different forms of fanhood, and a football fan’s relationship with their idols is different than a music lover’s with pop stars. The latter have always claimed that it is always about sex, and using the example of the affair surrounding Rammstein singer Till Lindemann, many felt compelled to recall the phenomenon of sexual abuse on the backstage of pop: Led Zeppelin, Frank Zappa, David Bowie – the list of allegedly delinquent stars is long.
Most of those named and implicitly thought of differ from Lindemann in that in their wild years they were hardly older than the underage girls who seduced them to physical devotion simply by being stars. The image of old man sex that Lindemann evokes can’t seem to be offset by the symbolic magic that Rammstein performs on stage.
In contrast to the unbearable gulf that seems to have always existed between pop star and fan, the fan base described by Nick Hornby implies the possibility of maturity and aging. Among the blessings of aging with your idol is the tolerance to keep listening even though it hurts. I feel that way with some Bob Dylan songs. There are pieces where poetic inspiration failed him. In “Sweetheart Like You,” for example, he sings about a paternalistic old man who wonders about the presence of a young woman he finds in a seedy hole. No trace of role prose, the protective instinct is rather embarrassing, the come-on clumsy. By the way, “That hat you’re wearing,” Dylan sings, “looks cute on you.”
Forgiveness is part of the fan base. Whether tolerance and maturity also apply in the Rammstein universe is another matter.
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