I Was A Bright Eyes Fangirl
Like many, many 15-year-olds, I was obsessed with Bright Eyes in high school — a teen angst cliché. But I never grew out of my obsession.
This is the story of my Bright Eyes fan blog.
My Bright Eyes fandom peaked when I was 21. In 2012, my best friend and college roomie of four years abruptly friend-dumped me halfway through our senior year. To put it bluntly, I was shattered. I lost most of our mutual friends in the friend-breakup, and with just a few months left before graduation, I couldn’t join a brand new friend-group. Suddenly, I had no social life, a lot of free time — and a Tumblr account.
I’d joined Tumblr in 2010 and had mostly used it to reblog pictures and GIFs and for the occasional TMI feelings-spewing. But I followed a few Bright Eyes blogs, and I loved them. At the time, Bright Eyes Tumblr was a beautiful mixture of obsessive fandom and irreverent hilarity. Here’s one example: Conor Oberst’s (that’s the man behind Bright Eyes, for the uninitiated) birthday, February 15, was an unofficial Bright Eyes fandom holiday. Everyone logged on at midnight and spammed photos, quotes, songs, videos and GIFs to celebrate. My favorite post was a photo showing all the ingredients needed for a Bright Eyes birthday cake — whiskey, cocaine and tears. I can’t find it now, but trust me: It was amazing.
After my friend-breakup, I joined in. Instead of photos and quotes, my blog had a mission: I would find all the literary, religious and historical allusions in Bright Eyes lyrics and decode them for my followers. It was called The Annotated Conor Oberst in a peak expression of my English major geekiness.
“She said the best country singers die in the back of classic cars” — BAM, it’s Hank Williams Sr., dead at 29 in his Cadillac. “It’s the sum of man, slouching towards Bethlehem” — Hi, Bright Eyes Tumblr, let’s talk about William Butler Yeats and Joan Didion! “Strive for understanding over being understood” — That’s the Prayer of St. Francis!
Somewhat surprisingly, Bright Eyes Tumblr loved me. One of the biggest bloggers took me under her wing, reblogging me and promo-ing me, and soon, my follower count hit four digits. At a time when my IRL social life was deader and sadder than it had been in years, my online social life was thriving. I worked on posts between classes and on weekends. I had online friends and an online rivalry. It didn’t make up for my lost friendship, but it helped, a lot.
A few months after graduation, I moved to New York and something amazing happened: Conor Oberst went on tour, first by himself, then with his punk band Desaparecidos, then by himself again. I went to every show in New York and met some of my Bright Eyes Tumblr friends in real life.
Before a Desaparecidos show in early 2013, I met the girl who ran my favorite Bright Eyes blog and who’d supported mine. On Tumblr, I’d always thought she was the coolest, funniest, most creative person — and in person she was all that and more. After the concert, we walked in the rain to a nearby bar and kept drinking, talking, in complete earnestness, about how much Bright Eyes meant to us. It’s one of my favorite Bright Eyes memories. After another show in summer 2014, a roadie who was friendly with Bright Eyes Tumblr took a few of us to the afterparty and I got to briefly meet Conor Oberst and take a photo with him.
It turned out that I had joined Bright Eyes Tumblr at its height. In late 2013, an XOJane commenter wrote that Conor Oberst had raped her when she was 15, and her comments were reposted to Tumblr and went viral throughout the fandom before spreading to music blogs. Eventually, the story made international headlines, and Conor Oberst sued the accuser for libel in response. The accuser eventually retracted her statement and made a public apology — maybe because her Internet history of catfishing and faking her own death had come to light.
During all this, Bright Eyes Tumblr fell apart. People fought over who to believe. Many of the biggest bloggers deactivated their blogs, freaked out after being linked to as sources on The Guardian or Buzzfeed. I stopped blogging, but didn’t delete. After the apology was released, I began posting again, very occasionally, but my biggest fandom days were over. I had to seriously rethink my relation to the fandom: the accusations and how sick I felt when I heard them made me realize that although I’d tried to distinguish between the art and the artist, I hadn’t done a very good job of it. Plus, Conor Oberst has made it very clear that he hates social media — he told Rolling Stone that he’s working on a screenplay he described as “an allegory about how the Internet is destroying humanity.”
I still listen to Bright Eyes, I still go to shows and my blog is still up. I answer questions that arrive in my inbox and I’ll occasionally even make a post when I hear a lyric in a new way. It will never be as active as it was, but I don’t think I’ll ever delete it. It’s a memorial to the online fandom that embraced me when none of my real life friends did.
This past summer, I attended Conor Oberst’s Gov Ball After Dark show at the Music Hall of Williamsburg. I went by myself, but I felt part of a community when — everyone drunk, everyone unembarrassed — we all scream-sang along with perhaps the most teenage angsty lyrics of them all, from “Laura Laurent”: “You should never be embarrassed by your trouble with living, because it’s the ones with the sorest throats, Laura, who have done the most singing.” I left elated and with a fellow fan’s number saved in my phone as “Kelly Bright Eyes”.
The communities forged by music, by teen angst and nostalgia for teen angst, by over-obsessive fans with Internet connections — one way or another, they live on.
