By Elisa Penha

Please note. I wrote this article before Lydia Night announced she and Dylan Minnette had split romantically, and this piece was in no way influenced by said events– I have not added to it, and these remain my original thoughts, untainted by this news. It is crucial to respect the privacy of both Dylan Minnette and Lydia Night during this time. 

For as long as I can remember, I have been unhealthily attached to musicians. 

When I was nine years old, my mother brought my sister and I to an interactive David Bowie museum which, through a guided tour, took us through the many lives of Bowie. From his childhood to the inception of his musical career and all the impact which followed, I became engrossed in his narrative despite the uncomfortable plastic headphones digging into the back of my skull. I stared shamelessly, neck craned and wide-eyed at the colourful exhibits. By the time I left the museum, I was irrevocably and unchangeably in love with David Bowie. I immediately committed his discography to memory. I wrote his name in my school notebooks and surrounded it with gel-penned hearts and stars. I believed, wholeheartedly, that Bowie was my closest friend. In the back of my mind, I spoke to him. Creepy, no? Maybe not. Maybe my fanaticism for Bowie sounds painstakingly tepid and regular in the face of now commonplace rampant intensifying of online parasocial relationships with musical artists. Me believing I would marry Bowie at nine doesn’t seem so strange anymore against the backdrop of obsessive stalkers and needless social-media cyberbullying. 

To quote Irene Adler of BBC’s Sherlock: ‘D’you know the big problem with a disguise, Mr. Holmes? However hard you try, it’s always a self-portrait.’ Musicians, on top of their work, must work to market themselves. They curate bits and pieces of personality and attach keywords to a name so that we are left with an uncanny, barely human shell of a person, once we strip away the lyrics and melodies. Musicians live, breathe, and feel through their music—it is not an art form that can be detached from the artist in the same way something like acting or dancing may be. Even inauthentic music is a cathartic reveal—all disguises ultimately lead to a painted picture of the artist in question. 

The current state of the indie music scene is an apocalyptic one. It seems we cannot go one day without a midwest-emo-folk-punk-sad-man-with-a-guitar musical artist or band being outed as merciless predators. The gargantuan amount of allegations that have arisen are bordering manically comical and majorly terrifying. Who can we look up to if not the musicians and their raw lyricism—music which is supposedly created to garner a vulnerable community? For as long as humans have lived we have turned to music for comfort, and for just as long, this longing has been exploited. Musicians wield far more power over a hypnotized audience than most think and, as of late, have not been wielding this power responsibly. The cult-classic movie Jennifer’s Body of 2009 explores this greasy musical underbelly through its narrative—a well-meaning indie band arriving on the scene of a horrific small-town tragedy manages to channel the tragedy into song, weaponizes their hold on the town to lure in young girls towards their (very literal) sacrificial demise. The band assaults Jennifer by taking advantage of both her teenage naivete and their position as town heroes to take from her what they believed they are entitled to. 

 It seems easy to pick and choose—easy to weed out the good bands from the bad ones. Whenever I discover a new album, I have begun to enter the musicians into Google to see if their name is followed by the auto-suggestion “allegations”. If it is, I wearily and sheepishly un-add their music from my library as if it might undo the artists’ crimes. As if I can now hoist myself onto a high horse and ride off away from the problematic musicians, pretending I did not go to a The 1975 concert last week. Pretending it’s not the same thing whenever I see yet another video of Matty Healy kissing some girl onstage—the thousandth instance of an abuse of power mistaken for affection. I wish that was me, the comments say. I am such a fervent part of the problem, and it worries me. It would be deceitful for me not to admit this—everybody knows my favourite genre is midwest emo and everybody knows these bands seem to have the highest rates concerning age-gap relationships between artist and fan. It’s such an uncomfortable and shameful admission.  How am I better than a perpetrator? 

I can no longer trust the music I listen to, such as the music of Rex Orange County and The Neighbourhood. That which propelled me through middle school is becoming lusterless in the face of the multiple counts of sexual assault which hits both of these supposedly well-intentioned artists. I do not see how I am supposed to separate the art from the artist in cases like these when the art is the artist. It is the artist who I am seeing dance around on stage and the artist who saw their music through from beginning to end. The lyrics dull and crawl with the sins of the artists doing—I find myself unable to detach them sufficiently enough that I may enjoy it the way I once did. I used to be the most careless and go-lucky of fangirls. I found my home in the throes of Tumblr’s emo quartet—the conglomerate fanbase made up of My Chemical Romance, Panic! At the Disco, Fall Out Boy, and Twenty One Pilots—and I unabashedly proclaimed my devotion to all the musicians themselves. I called the artists by their first names and nicknames, as though we were old friends. I stuck photos of their faces on the corkboard above my bed. I spoke to them in their Instagram live streams as though chatting over coffee as if they would notice me. My daydreams were elaborate—my love was palpable. And no, it was not my overzealous nature that the artists were responsible for, but rather their own cultivation of this sort of relationship being widespread in the first place. There is good reason why this behaviour was incited—because it is what the musicians encouraged: fervid displays of vulnerability. A purposeful lack of boundaries was established in order to blur the line between fan and friend. This is what made it, and makes it, so impossibly easy for musicians to take freely from their audience, leaving the impression this was good and warranted. They move stealthily. They ruptured my innocence, and ran wild with it until I was no longer able to find solace in the faces behind my favourite songs the way I once did. 

My days of obsessive fanship are over. I’ve grown. I know more now—I know that men in music are not to be trusted; that if I give them my faith, they will charge interest for securing it and take much more of me alongside. But, still, I have a confession. My favourite band is Wallows. Wallows is the only band I allow myself to have any sort of attachment to anymore. Wallows is the only band where I follow all the individual members on Instagram. Wallows is the only band where I can confidently say I am a fan of more than just the music. I call them by their first names only. I watch their live streams—I know the fanbase inside jokes. 

Wallows is fronted by Dylan Minnette—an actor best known for playing the main character of the 2017 show 13 Reasons Why, and a brilliant musician. Dylan Minnette is charming, funny, and charismatic. He’s respectful and outspoken on the very issues I’ve outlined—Dylan Minnette did not think twice before publicly bashing the band SWMRS after frontwoman of The Regrettes, Lydia Night, came forward with her story about the abuse she endured from SWMRS’ lead singer, Joey Armstrong. Dylan Minnette condemned SWMRS not only on his own Instagram but the official Wallows account. It was a display of advocacy and proper use of a platform that is so sought after by social figures in our current internet climate. 

Dylan Minnette is the perfect celebrity. 

And I’m terrified he is going to fuck up. 

I am terrified the facade will fall on Dylan Minnette the way it has fallen for dozens of others. No matter how wonderful Dylan Minnette may be, something nags inside of me whenever I feel myself getting too comfortable laying my trust in him. What will happen if this turns into yet another inevitable trap I’ve set out for myself—if I once again make the mistake of believing there to be such a thing as one of the good ones? Is it not commonplace that abusers stem from the purest seeming hearts? The ceaseless pattern parading around musicians like an ominous grim reaper looms above me, warning me against getting too close. I do not wish to let my insecurity stifle the genuine love I have for Wallows—and for Dylan Minnette. I do not believe there is a bad person lying underneath his pearlescent guise, but I never believed there was a bad person lying underneath any of them. And perhaps the fault is mine. My too-trusting nature having been foiled one too many times, now wrapping its tendrils around the ever-blameless Dylan Minnette. He hasn’t done anything wrong and I beg that he continues this way. That they all do. We should be able to freely engage in music without racking our minds over the ethical queries of supporting rotten people. I want to believe in artistic integrity, and I want to know that the men who found themselves on the bases of being safe spaces follow through on their promises. 

I wish only for one final tether to keep my trust intact, and I’ve tied this tether fiercely to Dylan Minnette. Maybe it is irresponsible to give yet another celebrity such power, but I’ve done it anyway. 

All that’s left is to hope I’ve made the right choice.