Everything I Need I Get from You

by Kaitlyn Tiffany

Whenever I rent a car–which is a medium-low amount, but slightly more than “only vacations” as I haven’t own a car since 2009—I like to engage with…pause for effect…terrestrial radio. My shorthand for the fun to be had in spinning the dial is “local flavor,” though hypermergers have nationally standardized radio into corporate müsh in much the same way as anything else. Still…local flavor, huzzah!

Anyway, the week before I picked up Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It we were tooling around the east coast in the first rented Ford that I ever enjoyed driving, and a Harry Styles song came on the radio. Even I know he’s a name to recognize, though I wasn’t sure if he was an actor, singer, or just benign celebrity-neé-celebrity, and I wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a “brown-haired handsome man” lineup, but whatever song was on the radio in August of 2022 was pretty good. I told my wife in a pseudo-olde tyme way (mostly to disguise my cultural ignorance), “Hey, this Harry Styles fella is pretty good. Isn’t he from something?” I’m unclear in my memory if she knew he was from the pop boy band One Direction or if we just sort of sputtered to the conclusion that he was a vaguely famous from reality TV or an inherited-wealth scion or something. Whatever his genesis, the conclusion in our family was: “He’s pretty good at the musics!”

Why is this relevant? Well, if you know as much about Everything I Need I Get from You as I did, then it wouldn’t seem that way. The title itself is a cool as hell title for a subcultural study, and it gives away the game in such an interesting way; if a reader has even a modicum of inside knowledge about One Direction, Harry Styles’ erstwhile boyband, you’ll recognize it as a track. But if within you you lack even the faintest whisper of One Direction lore, there is no way to prepare for an entire book about the fangirls of, for, and by One Direction. It certainly caught me off guard.

Contained within the book is the depth and breadth of the internet, brought down to pinpoints. The concept of “fangirl” seemed a vast sea to navigate, but it was more constrained than the last few internet culture books I’ve picked up; after reading (and loving) the survey course that was Lurking, having such a specific and demonstrably niche synecdoche was appealing. The first time I realized that One Direction was not an example that we were going to move on from but the core touchstone of the book, I thought it was pretty wild to never mention it in the title or subtitle. But it did mention it—I was just too culturally ignorant to recognize the reference. I wonder if the people that have sort of slammed it on certain online bookseller-turned-monolith-owned book review websites for “tricking” them into reading about One Direction would one-star Rosencrantz & Guilderstern Are Dead for not being more explicit about being Hamlet-adjacent. Anyway, I think Everything I Need worked, and its titling is pretty cool.

There is history to music fandoms shaping the internet further back than modern boy bands—things that seem integral to internet culture studies writ large that I don’t recall reading about before:

In The Virtual Community, Matthew McClure, the WELL’s first director, identifies two major growth spurts for the board: the first was word of mouth among Bay Area computer professionals and journalists; the second was the Deadheads.

As I mentioned in Lurking–which, forgive me, I will keep referring back to because the substance and style of that books is incredibly similar to this one, and having read them back to back I cannot tease them apart in my mind–the nostalgia that predominates the internet is no longer focused on the era of WELL. As a member of what I can only imagine is a small subset of people that never used the WELL but have read enough to have internalized the acronym (no wikipedia this time, brain!), finding out that The Grateful Dead fandom footed the bill for the proto-internet community is a big deal. It is foundational, and outside of the conversant fluency I now have about one of the biggest musical acts in the modern world, its probably the factoid from this book that will stick with me the longest.

follow @ohthatsraspberry for good twitter

Beyond the swerve of discovering I was reading a book that functionally was about One Direction (which I will say one more time that I thought was both a bold and interesting move, reminiscent to me, an old man videogame dork fangirl, of the Metal Gear Solid 2 “you play most of the game as Raiden” move which was also vilified before “people” realized it was cool) AND the fact that using One Direction as a reference point to bridge the incredibly wide impact of fangirl/fandoms on the internet was quite effective, the book itself was pleasant to read. The amount of personality the author chose to show on the page was an easy inroad to an esoteric subject matter–she really brought herself into the narrative, an embedded reporter as well as stand-in for archetypal fangirlhood. She fills in specific details that make it easy to follow along with her life–a frigid, wet New Years that I also spent in NYC, a childhood a specific radius from Syracuse, NY that was eerily similar to my own geographic history. These details ground her, outside of the sphere of fandom, as a person beyond the caricature of a sole extreme interest.

And we’ve all got them, I hope, these sole extreme interests. Otherwise, things tend to be, well, boring. I think the first portion of the book was some of the most heartbreaking, where the rut and routine American girls face in their daily lives is foregrounded:

The midcentury sociologists who invented subcultural studies even literally considered rebellion the province of middle- and working-class young men, spending their postwar discretionary income on weird outfit and aggressive haircuts; girls–who at the time were screaming over the Beatles or sitting at home watching soap operas with their mothers–didn’t jump out as a compelling subject for study. Or, these activities did not seem subcultural. They looked generic.

Maybe women who grew in the Beatlemania era would recognize themselves. Maybe women now still do. So much of the “putting away of childish things” language seems to have fade from modern American adulthood: “Thankfully,” I say, as I sit atop my mountain of unplayed videogames and write my hobby blog about books I read for fun. But as a male I was always afforded that luxury of habits and hobbies—I dare say I can’t bring to mind the “teeny bopper” equivalent of adult men screaming themselves hoarse at a college football game, nor them being excoriated on CBS News. Tedious. Pretty sure those sports stars don’t write their own songs, either, fellas.

Infatuation is irrational but it can be a precursor to introspection. The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time. Screaming at pop music is not direct action…but what screaming can and does do is punctuate prolonged periods of silence.

“The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time.” As far back as college, I was teased for saying about a scene from a movie or a line from a book, “[blank] was so good, it made the whole experience worthwhile.” I am my own cliché, but here it is. “The experience of bodily joy is an invitation to reconsider the conditions that hold you away from it most of the time.” Excerpted, this line does work. It crashes hard into the mind, and it sits there. In the context, it is heartbreaking. Imagine hundreds of thousand of people—perhaps mostly women—enjoying themselves fully in front of One Direction or Bruce Springsteen or ICP or whatever they like. And then the screaming stops, and they are subsumed by the role of mom, wife, daughter, lady, girl, woman.

I have my own fangirl situation

stream her new album Surrender, out now!

As a book about a subcultural study of the internet, Everything I Need works. As a book about One Direction, Everything I Need puts in overtime. As a book about the hierarchical position of women in culture—both online and in the physical landscape of modern and post-modern America—Everything I Need covers, well, everything you need.