British singer Harry Styles’ concert in São Paulo is this Tuesday, but fans have been camping out in front of Allianz Parque in the west of the city since last year. The goal is to secure a spot near the railing separating the audience from the stage where the idol will be standing.
By October, 120 fans took turns waiting in three tents for the gates to open. The weekend before the show, the number of camps grew.
A fan of former One Direction member Rafaella Arruda Costa, 24, bought a ticket to the event’s premium track in 2019. was moved to this Tuesday.
The camp has existed since June 27th. In the Arruda Costa tent, 60 people take turns from 7am to 1pm, from 1pm to 7pm and from 7pm to 7am. There is even a ranking system among the regulars those who work more shifts are rewarded with a better position in the queue.
The idea arose from the chaos queuing for another exOne Direction show, Louis Tomlinson, which was performing in Brazil in May. Even though Arruda Costa queued a day earlier, Arruda Costa didn’t make the starting lineup. Contacting other frustrated fans led to recruitment to Styles’ concert camp. She wanted to sleep away from the Alliance starting in October, but news of more camps being set up put her plans on hold prematurely.
The fan, who introduced himself as Amy, 23, also from Arruda Costa’s tent, “vowed she’d never go crazy like that”. But it did. “A lot of people don’t understand that you can go on with a normal life,” says the young woman, who balances camp with college, an internship and a Styles business.
However, the proximity of the concert increased the tension in the queue. Arruda Costa says he suffered threats from fans who couldn’t camp outside and now wonders if that early queue is fair. On Saturday afternoon the number of stands grew.
The sacrifice of row sleeping is common among fans. That’s what another fan impersonating Gabrielle did in 2014 at the age of 12 to secure a good spot at a One Direction concert. Today, at 24, she is jointly responsible for the Harry Styles Brasil portal.
The page, 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, learned about One Direction in English class at school ten years ago. Gabrielle, Tamiris, 24, and Vanessa, 22, have been dating the musician since reality show The X Factor in 2010, when the boy band that Styles became famous was formed. Bruna, 26 years old, the oldest administrator of the portal, is the only one who met Styles in a solo career.
According to Maria Sherman, author of the book “Larger than Life” on the history of boy bands, this type of group is characterized by the target group young women. “Boy bands can be BTS doing a trap and hip hop sound, or the Beatles singing ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ What unites them is that they are young men performing in front of a mostly female audience.”
The author explains that the appeal of a fandom, the name given to the group of fans, is the sense of belonging. Being in a fan community allows for sharing of shows, releases and news.
The fan Maria Eduarda defines the passion for the hit star as a lifestyle. “Like my friends buy cars or start a family, I prefer to go to concerts,” he says. “I started so young that I can hardly remember my life before that.”
Fans play an integral role in these stars’ career growth. Canadian singer Justin Bieber began posting videos on YouTube and rose to fame through the efforts of his fans. In the same way, it was thanks to the “directors” that the song “No Control”, rejected by the group’s producers, became the informal single of One Direction, which produced amateur clips.
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, the behavior of online fans determines the functioning of social networks themselves. Memes like “Come to Brazil”, a phrase repeated to the point of exhaustion by Brazilian fans, hashtags and GIFs, it all started with fan communities.
“Groups that subscribed to bands like the Grateful Dead and the ‘XFiles’ series had a kind of premotivation to use the internet and networks. Fans are always the first to emerge on new platforms launched onto the internet because they already have an instinct that seeks tools and aids for fandom,” says Tiffany.
The same organizational capacity shows up outside of music, and fan bases show up as politicized groups. In the 2020 US election, “Armies”, fans of BTS, orchestrated online sabotage at GOP events.
During the Black Lives Matter protests that same year, they flooded police checkpoints with Kpop videos asking for information about protesters. During this year’s presidential elections in Brazil, fans of Harry Styles promoted the PT’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on the portals dedicated to the singer.
Stigma haunts this type of community. Fans, especially women, are ridiculed for expressing their passions. “I’m not hiding it, I’m posting it anyway. 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 implication lies in machismo rather than exaggerated attitudes by Harry Styles fans. “A man who is obsessed with football, goes to all the games and watches the games at home is fine. A woman who is a fan, goes to all the concerts, that’s too much,” says Luiza.
“It’s easier to label these girls as savages. They are seen as irrational savages, never as people who want to be part of a community,” says researcher Maria Sherman.
As much as camp is associated with Perrengues, like spending the night in a tent in the rain, using the toilet at the nearest mall and taking security risks on Avenida Francisco Matarazzo, the young girls can’t wait for Styles’ show.
Even after the long effort, they say that the adrenaline of seeing an idol so close is so great that they don’t even feel tired. After this Tuesday’s show, they return to camp to guarantee the same schedule for the next shows on the 13th and 14th.