When the Pet Shop Boys were ‘imperial’: Fans’ self-ageing and the neoliberal life course of ‘successful’ text-ageing

Abstract

I follow Harrington and Bielby’s (2018) call for more work on ‘texistence’ ‐ how fans’ self-ageing and the text-ageing of pop-cultural texts become intertwined. I focus on the British pop duo Pet Shop Boys (PSB), formed in 1981. Lead singer Neil Tennant coined the term ‘imperial phase’ (2001) to describe the success of their album Actually (1987), and this terminology has been embraced by PSB fandom; enduring fans consider their fandom in relation to imperial/post-imperial phases. I consider how PSB fans desire a return of the ‘imperial’, refuting any text-ageing ‘narrative of decline’, as well as counterfactually reimagining the duo’s career success. Fannish interpretive community is based on celebrating the commercial authenticity of PSB’s music, articulating both text-ageing and fans’ self-ageing with neoliberalized concepts of the ‘successful’ life course (Clack and Paule 2019) and ‘uniqueness’ in marketized contexts (Nealon 2018). I thus argue that neoliberalism needs to be integrated into analyses of the contemporary fannish life course, even when fan objects (such as PSB) have been explicitly anti-neoliberal across their careers.

Best Song ever - forever?

“…Second, from previous research we know fandom links closely to identityformation, also when aging or encountering age-graded life transitions (Hills 2019;Harrington and Bielby 2018;Anderson 2012;Lavin 2015). This study can help us learn about fandom and different life milestones, which allows us to delve deeper into the sense of (ontological or at least) self-security among this group of fans over time and how fandom plays a role in this.…”

“…Think about working a full-time job, starting a family, or living independently from their parents, becoming financially responsible for their own lives and household, or combining a career and family-life for example. Although there is a growing body of research on aging fans, these works discuss elderly fans (for example Van den Bulck and Van Gorp 2011) or older adults (for example Hills 2019;Anderson 2012;Vroomen 2004), while studies on young adults' continued fandom are emerging (Driessen 2015(Driessen , 2018Gerrard 2022;Yodovich 2016). More so, fandom and music play important roles in life events and milestones (Bielby and Harrington 2010Harrington , 2011Jennings and Gardner 2016;Istvandy 2019).…”