Barbara Blum
Sao Paulo-SP

British singer Harry Styles’ concert in São Paulo is this Tuesday, but fans have been camping outside Allianz Parque in the west of the city since last year. The goal is to secure a place close to the balustrade that separates the audience from the stage where the idol will be.

Until October, 120 fans took turns in three tents waiting for the doors to open. The weekend before the show, the number of camps increased.

Fan of the former One Direction member ten years ago, Rafaella Arruda Costa, 24, bought a ticket for the event’s premium track in 2019. The presentation was postponed due to the pandemic and the ticket , whose premium modality reached R$ 668, ended up being reassigned to this Tuesday.

The camp has been open since June 27. At the Arruda Costa tent, 60 people take turns from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. and from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. There’s even a ranking system among the regulars – whoever takes the most shifts is rewarded with a better position in the queue.

The idea was born out of chaos in the queue for fellow One Direction ex-show, Louis Tomlinson, who performed in Brazil in May. Even arriving in the queue a day early, Arruda Costa was unable to make it onto the grid. Contacting other frustrated fans resulted in recruitment to Styles’ concert camp. She planned to sleep outside the Allianz from October, but news that other camps were being set up put her plans ahead of schedule.

The fan who identified herself as Amy, 23, also from Arruda Costa’s tent, ‘swore she would never do this kind of madness’. But he did. “A lot of people don’t understand that we can continue to have a normal life,” says the young woman, who combines camp with college, an internship and a store dedicated to Styles.

The proximity of the concert, however, increased the tension in the queue. Arruda Costa says he faced threats from fans who couldn’t camp at the gate and now wonders if that early line-up is fair. On Saturday afternoon, the number of stalls increased.

The sacrifice of sleeping in rows is common among fans. That’s what another fan who identified as Gabrielle did at age 12 in 2014 to secure a spot at a One Direction concert. Today, at 24, she is one of the managers of the Harry Styles Brasil portal.
The site, organized by six fans, collects information about the singer on social networks. They translate interviews, report on concerts and interact with other fans. The portal’s Twitter account has 45,000 followers.

Everyone got to know Harry Styles in their own way. Maria Eduarda, 20, discovered One Direction in an English class at school ten years ago. Gabrielle, Tamiris, 24, and Vanessa, 22, have been with the musician since The X Factor reality show in 2010, when the boy band that made Styles famous was formed. Bruna, 26, the oldest administrator of the portal, is the only one to have met Styles in a solo career.

According to Maria Sherman, author of the book “Larger than Life”, about the history of boy bands, this type of group is characterized by the target audience – young women. “Boy bands can be BTS doing more trap and hip-hop or The Beatles singing ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ What unites them is that they’re young men performing to a majority audience. feminine.

The author states that the appeal of a fandom, the name given to all fans, is the sense of belonging. Being part of a community of fans makes it possible to share shows, releases and news.

Fan Maria Eduarda defines passion for the pop star as a lifestyle. “Just like my friends buy cars or start a family, I prefer going to concerts,” he says. “I started so young that I barely remember my life before.”

Fans play a vital role in the career growth of these stars. Canadian singer Justin Bieber started posting videos on YouTube and rose to fame through the efforts of his fans. In the same vein, it was at the hands of the “directors” that the song “No Control”, rejected by the group’s producers, became an informal One Direction single. The young women ran an online campaign, putting the song among the most played and even produced amateur music videos.

Fan behavior online dictates how social media works itself, according to researcher Kaitlyn Tiffany, author of the book “Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Invented the Internet” about One Direction fans. Memes like “come to Brazil”, a phrase repeated until exhaustion by Brazilian fans, hashtags and GIFs, it all started with fan communities.

“Groups dedicated to bands like the Grateful Dead and the ‘X-Files’ series had some kind of prior motivation to use the internet and the networks. Fans are always the first to appear on new platforms introduced on the internet because they have already have the instinct to seek out the tools and utilities for the fandom,” says Tiffany.

The same organizational capacity manifests itself outside of music, and fandoms turn out to be politicized groups. During the 2020 U.S. election, BTS fan “armies” orchestrated online sabotage at GOP events.

During Black Lives Matter protests that same year, they flooded police stations with K-pop videos asking for information about protesters. During this year’s Brazilian presidential elections, Harry Styles fans campaigned for PT’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on portals dedicated to the singer.

Stigma haunts this type of community. Fans, especially women, are ridiculed for expressing their passions. “I don’t hide it, I post it myself. I know what people think, but I don’t care,” says Gabrielle.

According to two of the portal’s administrators, Bruna and Luiza, the origin of the involvement is more in machismo than in the exaggerated attitudes of Harry Styles fans. “A man who is obsessed with football, who goes to every game and watches the home games, that’s good. For a woman to be a fan, to go to all the shows is already too much,” says Luiza.

“It’s easier to label these girls as hotheads. They are seen as irrational savages, never as people who want to be part of a community,” says researcher Maria Sherman.

Even though the camp involves perrengues like spending the night in the rain in a tent, using the restrooms at the nearest mall, and taking security risks on Avenida Francisco Matarazzo, the young girls can’t wait for Styles’ show .

Even after a long effort, they say the adrenaline of seeing an idol so close is such that they don’t even feel tired. After this Tuesday’s show, they return to camp to secure the same schedule for the next shows on the 13th and 14th.