For the Love of God Let's Stop Abusing the Phrases "Stan" and "Troll"
Funny that you should ask but, no. It’s too bad she doesn’t know anyone involved in the music she could before throwing it out to all of twitter.
Before “Stan” became an irritatingly ubiquitous, overused and increasingly meaningless slang word and concept he was an unforgettable character in the Eminem song of the same name.
In “Stan”, one of the finest epistolary offerings hip hop has to offer and one of Eminem’s most haunting, incisive and enduring singles, the character of Stan is an obsessed Eminem devotee whose love of the hip hop icon dangerously transgresses mere fandom and becomes something much darker and more dangerous.
The song takes the form of increasingly angry letters Stan writes to his hero not just seeking but angrily demanding a genuine friendship, not just the vicarious buzz of worshipping a pop idol from afar.
I am of the mindset that Eminem is perhaps the most overrated rapper in hip hop history but “Stan” is a work of genuine power and conviction. It’s an achingly sad character study about a mentally ill young man vibrating with all-consuming rage that a rapper who represents his entire world doesn’t care enough about him to give him a phone call or send him a letter.
Stan’s unmistakably homoerotic anger escalates in intensity and ferocity until he’s drunk with his pregnant girlfriend in the trunk as part of a murder-suicide. The song ends with Eminem finally writing back to Stan but it’s too late. The deeply depressed single father has killed himself and his girlfriend in a fit of homicidal rage.
It is, as you might imagine, an exceedingly dark song. But it’s also deeply empathetic, a wonderfully humane exploration of loneliness, toxic masculinity and obsession. It’s what Fred Durst’s The Fan desperately wanted to be but most assuredly was not.
Though it surprisingly did not crack the top 40, the song went on to have a cultural significance wildly disproportionate to its modest chart success. Nas gave the song a new life when he used its title as shorthand for a super-fan in his Jay-Z diss song “Ether”, where he accused Beyonce’s husband of being a Stan of both himself and Notorious B.I.G.
I Stan Ansel Elgort. No, I don’t. That would be fucking obnoxious.
In the ensuing years “Stan” went from being an unforgettable character in a brilliant and important hip hop song to being an insult employed by Nas in a similarly culturally important track to being a phrase thrown around willy nilly to describe excess enthusiasm. At this point “Stan” is essentially a synonym for “fanboy.”
In 2017 the Oxford dictionary added “Stan”, defining it as “An overzealous or obsessive fan of a particular celebrity.” I’ve long been annoyed at how meaningless the phrase has become so I was tickled as well as irritated to find the phrase in the Twitter bio for the official feed for “Team Warren” and “Warren Democrats”, Elizabeth Warren’s grassroots effort to continue her campaign for change after dropping out of the 2020 race for the Democratic Presidential nomination.
The @TeamWarren twitter bio raves embarrassingly, “Welcome to our grassroots movement! The place for plans, @ewarren stans, and big, structural change. Official campaign account.”
I’m going out on a limb and guessing that whoever had the misguided gumption to insert the phrase “Stan” into an official, blue check-verified Elizabeth Warren-related campaign twitter feed did not do so because they’re so unhealthily obsessed with the 70 year old Massachusetts Senator that they wrote her a series of increasingly violent, unhinged fan letters culminating in a murder-suicide.
A bunch of people who REALLY love Cardinals great Stan Musial, oddly enoug.
No, I suspect that whoever posited Team Warren/Warren Democrats as a haven for Warren “stans” did so because they thought it was a hip, internet-approved, vaguely memetastic way of saying that they think Warren is a swell lady and would make for a super president.
I also think that Warren is a swell lady, and would make for a super president and it embarrasses me to see the word “stan” in such a bizarre and inappropriate context.
It’s sort of like how “Troll” went from having a very useful, specific context referring to internet assholes who profess to have extreme positions and opinions solely for the sake of antagonizing people online to shorthand for zinging anybody, anywhere.
Words need to mean something specific to have value. That’s why two of my least favorite words are “thing” and “interesting” because they’re so broad that they can mean next to anything. Donald Trump’s hair and George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” are both things and are both interesting even though otherwise they have nothing in common.
So let’s stop abusing “Stan” and “troll” because when a phrase is violently divorced from its initial context and its meaning becomes fuzzy and broad it ceases to useful and becomes just another mindless buzzword .
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