Sincerely yours, Stan: how Eminem invented modern fandom
The rapper’s new film, Stans, explores the world of obsessive fans – and the toll they can take on their idols.
There aren’t many people who can claim to have single-handedly shaped the English language. The rapper Eminem (real name: Marshall Mathers) is one of them. In 2017, the Oxford English Dictionary added a new word, stan, meaning “an overzealous or obsessive fan of a particular celebrity”. By then it had been in casual use for more than 10 years and there was no doubt about who had invented it.
Stan came straight from Eminem’s brain, from his 2000 hit of the same name. That song told the disturbing story of a man called Stan who is fixated on Eminem, compulsively writing letters and growing angrier as they go unanswered.
The narrative reaches a horrible climax when Stan kills himself and his pregnant girlfriend in a bid to capture Eminem’s attention.
Stan was fictional but the phenomenon he represented was not. There really are many people who believe, like Stan, that they are “just like” Eminem and crave a connection with him — and many more who feel the same way about other artists and build their identities around their fandom, from Swifties (Taylor Swift) to the Beyhive (Beyonce).
Stans, a new documentary co-produced by Eminem, takes a closer look at his fans through interviews with a select group of them (Eminem himself also appears in the film). It’s an intimate picture of modern fandom and, in an age when even politicians build their success on social media followings (hello, Maga movement; hello, Nigel Farage on TikTok), you could argue that no force in the world is more powerful.
Paul Rosenberg, another of the film’s producers, has managed Eminem since the start of his career in the late 90s (he’s the Paul on some of Eminem’s album skits, where he plays a comedy authority figure version of himself). “To have the vision to write Stan, to capture the whole essence of fandom, and at the same time make an entertaining story and a hit song – it’s so brilliant,” Rosenberg says when we speak on a video call.
On the same call, Steven Leckart, the film’s director, says he wanted to show how smartphones and the internet have transformed fandom since the Noughties. “Now you can see the artist at any hour, you can listen to their music at any hour, you can go down this vast rabbit hole of information that wasn’t available when we all were becoming fans 25 years ago,” he says.
“The song Stan is about a fan reaching out via physical letters. How does that change now you have these devices?”
The Stans in the film cover the whole span of Eminem’s career and fanbase. There’s Ramon, a Stan since 1999, who dived into the “wormhole” of the early internet to discover Eminem’s origins in the Detroit rap battle scene. Zolt, a Stan since 2001, was so obsessed that he begged his mother to bleach his hair to match Eminem’s trademark peroxide yellow look. Slightly alarmingly, he says that the difference between him and Stan is that “I never killed my wife … well, I don’t have a wife”.
“A true diehard fan understands that I am just a regular person,” he says in the film.
Nikki, a Stan since 2000, at one point held the world record for most tattoos of a single artist thanks to her collection of Eminem ink – she has 15. And the teenager Kripa, a Stan since 2015, talks emotionally about how Eminem’s music has helped her through a tough adolescence in a home scarred by parental discord. We watch her open and read her own unsent letter to Eminem. Touchingly, it starts: “Dear Mr Em …” Leckart wanted to present all these stories “without judgment, as part of this fabric”.
One of the Stans interviewed describes Eminem as an “unwilling cult leader”. That isn’t quite true; one of the things that made Eminem so compelling from the start was the way he presented himself, and his sociopathic alter ego Slim Shady, as the emblem of America’s secret seething core.
As he rapped in The Real Slim Shady: “There’s a million of us just like me … who dress like me, walk, talk and act like me.”
But playing a nihilistic cartoonish version of yourself becomes a problem when your audience demands that you live up to it. In the documentary, Eminem describes how fans started throwing drugs on stage during live shows – not a particularly helpful thing if, like Eminem, you were already teetering on the edge of substance abuse. “The guys weren’t going to just take whatever people would throw at them,” Rosenberg says, “but it was everywhere and it was encouraged.”
Alongside the cartoonish nihilism, Eminem was also rapping about intensely personal things: the poverty and violence of his Detroit upbringing, his experience of being viciously bullied, addiction, bereavement and familial strife (especially his fraught relationship with his mother, Debbie). There was a confessional side to Eminem’s music that, as his long-time collaborator Dr Dre says in the film, wasn’t part of hardcore rap’s vocabulary in the late ’90s.
“That level of vulnerability is one of the strongest pieces that connects him with his fans,” Rosenberg says. “When we were making the movie I thought we were going to get some interesting stories but I didn’t expect it to get as deep and as personal and as emotional as it did.” One Stan talks about how Eminem’s music consoled her after the death of her young nephew; another describes how Eminem inspired him to tackle his own addictions.
For the star at the centre of all this emotion this can be, Rosenberg says, a “super burden”. Writing Stan was an attempt to set some boundaries in a way that stars today are still struggling to manage. Eminem’s fans seem to have understood the message.
There’s a great moment in the film when one Stan reflects on how much she yearns to meet her idol and you can see the conflict on her face. “That’s not what he wants but, at the same time, it’s all I want,” she says. It’s a perfect summary of the fan’s dilemma.
As for Eminem himself, he seems like someone who has found some peace with his celebrity. “A true diehard fan understands that I am just a regular person,” he says in the film. That’s true inasmuch as anyone is just a regular person but, as Stans shows, he’s also an exceptional talent: a rap innovator who charted the map for 21st century fandom in all its weirdness and power.
Stans premieres on Paramount+ on August 26.
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