Pretty much anyone who has spent longer than five minutes in my company will know that I am possibly the biggest Shakira fan on earth. Since I was six years old I’ve been in love with her distinct voice, magical realist lyricism, and her commitment to early childhood education in Colombia. For the past two years, I’ve been learning Spanish primarily to have a deeper understanding of her music. To put a long story short, I really love Shakira. It was this love that would eventually take me to stan Twitter, and my time there was nothing short of fascinating.
The problem for me as a Shakira fan in the UK is most people here only know Shakira’s biggest English language singles. Think Hips Don’t Lie and Whenever Wherever. This meant that my long-suffering family were always on the receiving end of my latest thoughts about Shakira and updates about her career. While they kindly entertain my excitement, I often have found myself wanting for a friend who loves Shakira as much as I do. This desire brought me to a corner of the internet we call stan Twitter.
What is stan Twitter you ask?
Stan Twitter is a term used to refer to the corners of Twitter that are populated by devoted fans. These highly devoted followers describe themselves as ‘stans’. The term comes from the Eminem song Stan, in which the titular character writes increasingly deranged fan mail to Eminem. From these origins, it has come to refer to someone who exceeds the dedication of a regular fan. Stans love their artist of choice with total reverence, and to them, their artist is never wrong (at least as far as the general public is concerned).
I was drawn to the space following Shakira’s Super Bowl halftime show in 2020. Following the performance Twitter was flooded with tweets praising Shakira. I noticed a lot of these tweets came from accounts with Shakira’s face as their profile picture. A few dips into their profiles and suddenly I was following people talking about all the things I wanted to nerd out about. Threads breaking down hidden meanings in the lyrics to Shakira’s songs accounts giving constant updates about Shakira’s career, and inside jokes only a true fan would know. I was engrossed in all of it.
Quickly I started interacting with other accounts and throwing a few of my own Shakira-related tweets out into the void. And then the pandemic hit. With a sudden abundance of time on my hands, I went all in on transforming my Twitter profile into a fully functional Shakira stan account. I was all in.
What’s it like to be a stan?
As the first lockdown dragged on I quickly started spending a lot of my day jumping between my two new online fixations, TikTok and stan twitter. I made fast friends with other accounts, connecting with Shakira fans in the US, Mexico, India, Morocco, Italy, and Brazil to name only a few places. I started learning the lingo and built a steady roster of react memes. It was fun. Honestly, it felt like I had a space to just be silly and talk about music I love.
Quickly I also learned that stan Twitter is a place where fandoms come to duke out blows against each other’s artists. At first, I thought these were funny, most of them were catty jabs and often fizzled out quickly. I learned which fandoms we were friends with (Britney Army and Mariah’s Lambs) and who were our enemies (JLo’s JLovers and Christina Aguilera’s Fighters). Meanwhile, in the Shakira community (known as the Wolf Pack), I learned about the key cliques. Just like high school, each stan community has their Regina Georges and their Janis Ians.
Early on in my time on stan Twitter, I was added to group chats and soon I was forming a close-knit group of friends. While I was reserved with how much personal information I shared with these online friends, a real bond grew with these other Shakira stans. I even ended up meeting a friend in one of these group chats who I now consider one of my closest. We met because of Shakira but ended up helping each other through difficult breakups and most of the pandemic. For most of the first two years I was on Shakira Twitter I was incredibly depressed, in a job I hated with an abusive boyfriend waiting for me at home. In those darkest of times, I had a little hideaway on my phone, talking to other fans about our favourite albums.
When did stan Twitter stop being fun?
What goes up, must come down. My initial experience with stan Twitter was not to last forever. As the Shakira community continued to grow, new characters made themselves known and often made the space less peaceful. Communities on stan Twitter will often engage in ‘stan wars’, this is basically a dumpster fire where two pop girlies are thrown into the ring together while their fans tear the artists to shreds. I saw a lot of them, I was active in a lot of them. While I always avoided blindly insulting the other artist, I did take more time than I should have to craft smart retorts to a tweet dragging Shakira and looking for ways to prove she was the better artist.
The reason people engage in these wars is because they want to prove how much they love their artists. There may also be a bit of having nothing better to do thrown in. You want to be seen to be doing your part to defend them and tear down any “opposition”. Frankly, it’s exhausting work. It’s also fine when the artist you’re up against is someone you don’t really care much about, but on stan Twitter anyone is fair game. Countless times Shakira stans have gone after Rosalia or Beyoncé, two artists I love deeply and have a lot of respect for. Seeing them torn down to uphold Shakira felt like the antithesis of what I love about her to begin with. Shakira’s music is all about uniting people of different backgrounds and walks of life, I’m sure she’d be embarrassed to see her fans speaking so unfairly about other women in the music industry.
As the culture of stan twitter has grown and evolved since the pandemic a greater and greater slant toward comparison and competition has formed. When I joined the space a large portion of my feed was centred around talking about Shakira’s music and artistry. Now as I scroll the app is flooded with tweets about her stats, how many units, how many streams, and how many Grammys. These accomplishments are important for sure, but they are not the core of what we love about the artist we stan. The culture of stan communities now heavily hinges on using these stats to prove their artist is the best. Nobody talks about the actual music anymore, only how well it performed to punch down on others.
Is stan culture promoting misogyny?
Within the Wolf Pack, I started seeing some significant cracks in the glass. A lot of Shakira’s stans, I have learned, are also her cruellest critics. Many stans develop a sense of entitlement over their artists, and if they make a choice they don’t a wave of vitriol is unleashed. It is one thing to have valid criticism and desires for an artist you love, but to attack them for a creative direction they take is not normal. Chappell Roan just spoke out on the entitlement fans have had with her in public. The possessive nature of stan culture means many stans feel they are allowed to speak about and treat their artist like someone they know on an intimate level.
It has always been my belief that as much as I love Shakira, it is not for me to tell her how to live her life or manage her career. She has maintained her relevance for 30 years, she doesn’t need a random person with a Twitter account telling her how to be a pop star. The bold and blunt attitude stans I saw had to her life and blind criticism of each move she made left me feeling uncomfortable and conflicted. These feelings only worsened with the way stans behave toward you if you say you like certain other artists. As a big fan of both Karol G and Beyoncé, many Shakira stans tried to suggest that somehow made me a bad fan or even some kind of traitor.
This is only compounded by the constant barrage of blind hate towards these women on my feed. So much of the hate I have seen has centred around the women in question’s appearances. I’ve seen many tweets of a transphobic nature calling women of colour men. More and more these tweets replaced ones celebrating Shakira and other artists. This rapidly led to my declining interest and engagement with stan culture.
Will stan Twitter always be toxic?
Like most things in life, stan culture could change, but it would mean a lot of work. As the stan space has continued to develop it has fallen deeper and deeper down a path of no return spewing hate against women in the music industry. It is also important to note that a significant amount of this hate comes from gay men, reminding us that unfortunately, misogyny is not rare within the queer community. Many people I know have slowly distanced themselves from the space, the close friend I made on Shakira Twitter being one of them. As more and more, let’s say moderate stans leave, the platform narrows more toward being hateful.
The reason most of us came to stan Twitter was because we wanted to talk to other people who love our favourite artists as much as we do. Unfortunately, this is not what stan culture is about today. When I connected the dots that the space was no longer serving me and was in fact hurting my mental health I got out. I am grateful for my time in the space in some ways, the friends I made and the insights I got into Shakira’s career will always make my time there worth it. I just hope that the next depressed Shakira stan looking for someone to geek out about her new album with finds a small patch of the community that is still fun.
