In a quarter of a century reviewing music, I have somehow managed to avoid riling the major pop fandoms. There have been small-scale assaults, like the Blackpink fan, or Blink, who called me a “dirty pig” over Twitter, now X, for an unfavourable review of a gig by the K-pop girl group. And I have a hazy memory of members of the Beyhive, Beyoncé’s fandom, posting disobliging commentary about my byline photo following a podcast discussion in which I was judged to have committed some forgotten act of lèse majesté
The most sustained abuse has come not from (mostly) young female pop fans, but rather a bellowing mass of (mainly) middle-aged male indie-rock followers. They were maddened by the two-star review that I gave to The Stone Roses’ awful comeback show in Manchester in 2012. The provocation of the Financial Times sending its Little Lord Fauntleroy of a critic up north to have a go at an iconic working-class band was too much for scores of Roses fans, who made their feelings known in a veritable doomscroll of abusive below-the-line comments (since deleted).
That sort of pile-on has a name. “Toxic fandom” sits alongside a host of similarly radioactive ills in the modern lexicon: toxic masculinity, toxic politics, toxic romance, toxic work environments. The term emerged sometime in the last decade: Oxford Dictionaries made “toxic” its word of the year in 2018.