Hello again everyone, so I feel like people are in the habit of sharing on this website, and this I’m not sure this could go on any of the blog categories, because I suppose it’s not really”advice” per sé, but I’d like to say it anyway, and I’m sorry if it’s long winded. Anyway, so Music is a big part of my life, as I said in my first post (I also apologise if this isn’t in the correct part of the forum) and around summer last year, I learned more and more about the genres I grew up listening to (R&B and Hip Hop, and I then learned of neo soul artists like India.Arie, who is one of my favourite people in the world right now, Erykah Badu, D’Angelo etc.) and a lot of the knowledge I got was from critics and “stans.”

A Stan is a super fan for those that don’t know, it was originally an Eminem song about an extremely zealous fan. These people will do the absolute most for their favourite artists. However this can sometimes be really dangerous I just wanted to reference this video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr81nLW6PJ4 to say that like Trent said in this video, you attach your worth to something or someone outside of you and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from all the great things I’ve read on this website, it’s that happiness comes from within.

I used to do this with a singer who I idolised as a child called Aaliyah. She and Toni Braxton were my introduction to R&B (although I had NO business listening to some of their stuff as a child, 4 year olds should not be singing about Rocking anyone’s Boat), and from the outside looking in, people always described Aaliyah as the sweetest person ever, almost angelic etc. So, when I found out she had died in a plane crash (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaliyah), it hurt me, and it hurt me for years afterwards because I learned her death could have been prevented, she was so young, she didn’t deserve to die etc. I am not saying none of these things are true, but Aaliyah’s passing wasn’t something anyone could do anything about, ESPECIALLY a child (you will see she died in 2001, at which point I was just over a year old.)

So as I grew up, I would get extremely defensive and angry when people would say anything negative about Aaliyah, and I would gather all the evidence I could about her effect on R&B music, the legacy she left behind, how she’s influenced others etc. When I first got a YouTube account (at the tender age of 10) I would actively seek out and insult people who said anything bad about Aaliyah. Only recently have I realised the behaviour I “despised” from Beyoncé fans was the same thing I was doing for Aaliyah.

So, back to the information I got from critics and stans. While I’m proud of all the knowledge I gathered, whenever I read reviews or saw what the “stans” had to say about the artist or their work, it would colour my perspective and I couldn’t be open to that person’s creativity. I would force myself to listen to songs over and over and over again until I heard what the stans heard. Instead of just sitting and enjoying what the artist had to share, I would force myself to listen to albums I perhaps wasn’t in the mood to listen to. In my mind, what I thought was irrelevant because these stans and critics were music connoisseurs and whatever they had to say about music was more important.

When you have a stan mentality, you concentrate more on the superficial. This can be anything from “my artist is better than your artist” and trying to vociferously convince people that your artist is better than theirs, measuring an artist’s worth by how many “hits” they have, awards won, how much more “technically gifted” one artist is to another, and if you’re a Neo-Soul fan, there would be argument after argument about how “deep” say, Jill Scott is compared to Erykah Badu, and you completely forget that music is supposed to make YOU feel something. Whoever you’re listening to is sharing their truth with you. They’re sharing a part of themselves, and you’ve disregarded that in lieu of all the things I mentioned above. When I finally realised they are just people, my “stan ego” as Trent spoke about in the video, slowly faded away when I realised they are just people sharing their truths.

So eventually, one day I thought “why does it matter to me so much what other people have to say about the people I like?” and I realised I started this “search for knowledge” if you will for validation. Not because I was actually interested in the history, not because I wanted to listen to others share their truth, but because I wanted to show off how smart I was. I think this is still an insecurity I have, I used to randomly use “big words” in sentences to show off, because no matter how many people told me how intelligent I was, I simply didn’t believe it. When I finally accepted this about myself, the “big word” stuff (haha) came naturally, among other things. I realise I’m rambling at this point

So, I guess I said all this to say, just be a fan. Support your favourite artists, and if someone isn’t into what you are, just accept it and realise that what matters is that you’re into it.