Parasocial Pistol
The most tender place in my heart is for strangers/ I know it’s unkind but my own love is much too dangerous – Neko Case
If the Oxford English dictionary defines “parasocial” as an adjective — “designating a relationship characterized by the one-sided, unreciprocated sense of intimacy felt by a viewer, fan, or follower for a well-known or prominent figure (typically a media celebrity), in which the follower or fan comes to feel (falsely) that they know the celebrity as a friend” — what does that mean for those of us who live it as a verb? Why do some people get hooked on this kind of thing early and then grow out of it, or stay hooked, or never get hooked at all?
For me, at first, that imagined possibility of closeness felt very true: My small heart invested in TV characters rather than the kids on my street, who thought fun meant trespassing on residential construction sites and only reading the books assigned by teachers. I was afraid of the situations my neighbors got into as much as I was afraid of what they’d think of me when I hung back, watching from the margins. So I didn’t bother trying. I crushed out on Schneider because he was handy and on Doc Bricker for being smart; wanted to be Dyna-girl so I could hang out with Electra-woman, and wondered which Charlie’s Angel I’d be. These were the 1970s and ’80s, pre-internet versions of a parasocial life. These characters didn’t know me, couldn’t love me back. But they couldn’t reject me, either. They were more colorful, three-dimensional versions of the characters who required more work on the page. They were flashier but they were still safe. As a lonely little nearsighted big-mouth girl in suburban New York, at some point I just decided that their stories could as well have been mine, or would be one day.*
The transition from little kid to music nerd is pretty visible here, with the unplugged Show ‘N Tell shelved beneath the new turntable.
Soon, though, came something even more compelling: songs. My teenage sister sang the Rolling Stones’ “Dance Little Sister” to me and I complied; my preteen brother taught me the words to “Casey Jones” by the Dead so that I would sing them to our father and he’d fly off the handle. Then came albums: For what must have been my sixth or seventh birthday, I received a turntable, a Shaun Cassidy LP, the soundtrack to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (the one with the Bee Gees and Peter Frampton) and not one but two copies of Billy Joel’s 52nd Street (it was Long Island, after all). And while “Big Shot” is still one of my go-to karaoke bangers** I am forever thankful that what came next was meeting a couple of fellow outcasts with whom I could discover alternative radio***. Because once I had my own songs and albums to fall in love with — and flesh and blood people were a little less scary, though no less dangerous — I could fall in love with the music makers as well and, eventually (ideally) all the people they’d ever made music with, too. To be clear, this is parasocial love of which I’m speaking. I would eventually fall in love with actual musicians — and they with me — but that is a story for other pages.
* I still get crushes on TV characters but it's usually their romances or friendships that get me now.
** Karaoke reference number one.
*** It wasn't just a station, it was a lifestyle.
Presented without comment.
In any case, I am not quite sure that the Oxford dictionary has got it completely right. Because parasocial love of music thrums with intimacy, its makers leaving trails by which you can know them if you can’t help but try. And so I have followed emotion and story like damp bread crumb notes and heart-shaped beats: My Hebrew School friend Sarit went punk in ninth grade and got the lyrics to “Holidays in the Sun” put up on the high school cafeteria TV sets as a joke; then at teen nights at dance clubs we’d stomp around to “Rise” and I’d realize, wait, that’s the same guy singing; then my stockbroker cousin scored tickets to see INXS at Radio City Music Hall when I was a high school junior, just turned 16 and too old or too cool to like them or something✝ but Public Image Limited opened and John Lydon threw condoms at the audience and I bought a black tank top with a neon pink and yellow PiL logo design; then I wore that shirt a year later to a party in the dorms, my first one upon arriving at college in swampy central FL, and an older guy named James came up to me and said “nice shirt” and therefore changed my life. Far south of Long Island, miles from the scared kids who ran Sarit out of town on a rail for being too different, my difference was suddenly not such a handicap — it was a kind of parasocial currency. My pals and I would go down so many musical rabbit holes in subsequent years that the memories become a symphony, road tripping and tape-trading Sonic Youth and the Church and Miles Davis and the soundtrack to Dogs in Space✝✝ with its Gang of Four and Brian Eno and Boys Next Door.
Now, it’s 2024. And thanks to the internet I know that John Lydon nee Johnny Rotten admires Trump and considers himself “anti-woke” and, thanks to my own scholarship and cynicism, that the Pistols were really just a proto-meta-edge-lord boy band. Sarit is now, essentially, a Real Housewife of Long Island; my college friend James isn’t on social media so I can’t see him drinking himself to death; and as I wrote down notes for this I realized that my stockbroker cousin may very well have been grooming me with those tickets to that sold-out show — it was kind of a date and I would later find out he has a dark history. But I was so swept away by the music that night that he didn’t have a chance.
So, yeah, I felt bad when John Lydon’s wife died last year. I felt bad for his loss. This summer I went to see his former bandmate, Jah Wobble, perform a dub version of their classic album Metal Box in a musky Masonic Temple in Hollywood. And this Halloween my spouse will play Sid Vicious in a Sex Pistols cover band (with someone else dressed as Glen Matlock playing the bass lines somewhere “offstage”) and I’m gonna dress like Nancy Spungen✝✝✝. I am 52 years old. I live far away from my immediate blood family and don’t bother much with the extended bloodline. I can’t remember what year my grandmother died but these songs, these stories, these parasocial throughlines just stay in my mind. And somehow they seem to always have my back.
✝ What did I know? I didn’t appreciate Michael Hutchence when he was alive and now I am doomed to watch my younger friends do “Never Tear Us Apart” at karaoke and feel dumb about it.
✝✝ Yes, I began to appreciate Michael Hutchence by then but, still, see above.
✝✝✝ In the time since I started writing this and when I finished it, the Sex Pistols tribute band got canceled; TBD what that means for my Halloween costume.
But so what? What does it mean to find strength, love, and guidance in songs and artists in a world where I can comment on instagram posts and see a little “heart” that says the music maker likes it? When I can pay $5 a month to Patreon and read all the hot, steamy behind-the-scenes production studio action✝* of an artist whose work I’ve adored for years? When #MeToo and related movements have everyone, regardless of their parasocial status, pondering the line between artist and art? When I have real friends, lots of ‘em, many music makers among them? How does one hang back on the margins when the margins are so sloppy and/or abstract?
And what is the right ratio of band badges to vintage brooches in this day and at this age?
It was my partner’s and my parasocial relationship with a couple of podcasters that originally boarded me on this train of thought. Podcast hosts seem to want this kind of intimacy — they are easily chatted with on social media channels, they blatantly hang out while they know you’re listening. But they don’t know the two of us. Once I got on this train, it started ripping through the landscapes of my life like a regular commute during which I’d just never bothered to look out the window: How did this love of art, this emotional attachment to makers of it affect me the first time I became friends with a music maker? The first time I dated one? The handful of times that I tried to become one myself?
I have interviewed artists on the radio and for print. I have embedded in music at least a half-dozen ways, and losing myself in the songs is still a spiritual prize — one that sometimes feels achieved too cheaply if I got in on the list. So how does a lonely little suburban girl, now hiding in the body of a middle-aged, middle-class, extroverted woman, make sense of these decades spent one step, speaker, and stage away from idols, knowing they are false and loving them anyway? How does this parasocial currency work, anyway?
It seems like I made a choice, at some point, to keep an objective distance. To make a verb out of something that should have been an adjective. Sometimes it seems that this choice has defined my whole life. I think I am ready to try and tease out what that definition means.
✝* It’s actually rarely steamy unless the studio is literally in the southern hemisphere.
