Celebrities Who Were Way Too Reachable on the Early Internet
Thanks to the proliferation of stan culture and our collective incapability of maintaining an “inside thought,” the internet is a fraught place to be a celebrity. As a result, most of them just don’t do it, leaving their social media presence to a team of interns while they enjoy their money in peace. In the ‘90s and ‘00s, however, nobody knew why it was a bad idea to have a public personal email address or show up on your own fan forums. They also probably hadn’t fully reckoned with the truth often learned rudely that the internet is forever.
Douglas Adams
The legendary author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series was the foremost literary authority on the internet before the internet existed, so it didn’t seem weird at all at the time that he logged onto his own fan forum in the early 2000s to ask if anyone knew who wrote an article going around that was attributed to him or had a really specific Jimi Hendrix recording. “It’s for the BBC!” he explained. A cursory Google search doesn’t reveal what Douglas Adams wrote for the BBC about Jimi Hendrix, so if you find out… don’t let us know. We’re not as friendly as Douglas Adams.
George R.R. Martin
The guy everyone yells at about Game of Thrones has maintained what he insists is “Not a Blog” since 2005, when he first explained on LiveJournal (!) that “sometimes I want to add stuff that does not fit conveniently into any of the established categories” on his website. “Political commentary, for instance. Last election, I had a couple of political messages on my site that really irritated some of my visitors (and pleased even more, but never mind). There were various reasons for that, but one was that I stuck the commentary onto the page called ‘About A FEAST FOR CROWS.’ It was suggested that if I wanted to talk about politics, I should have a separate page for that.” He was too busy to regularly update a politics page or even a general blog, he said, hence his foray into intermittent public diarying to keep his fans informed of all his little musings, none of which they ever got mad about ever again.
Courtney Love
The internet was a real boon for music’s most beautiful banshee, for it meant she could yell at anyone she wanted at any time, even if it meant they could yell back at her. She quickly became known in the mid ‘90s for an AOL page of rants so poorly punctuated and hard to parse that some didn’t believe it was genuine until she was banned from the service for bad language, back when they could still do that. She made no secret of her email address, which she answered whether you were a reporter or an actual porter, and even got into intense feuds with weird randos. In that way, she really was a social media pioneer.
Trent Reznor
Speaking of ‘90s music icons, for a period of about seven months in 1991 and ‘92, Trent Reznor had a weird, wild ride on the “Modern Rock” message board included with Prodigy’s internet service (no relation to the band, sadly). When he first appeared to give some nice little updates on Nine Inch Nails’s upcoming album, he was bombarded with accusations of impersonation and actually banned briefly until he proved it was really him. The hostility didn’t disappear, though, and he was straight-up bullied off the platform by May. Nice to see things haven’t changed.
David Bowie
The biggest internet pioneer of the 20th-century music scene, however, was David Bowie, who not only created his own internet service provider but regularly showed up on his own official fan forums under the least secure of aliases. He was possibly even more candid than Courtney Love, too, responding freely and extremely Bowiely to fans and critics alike. In one memorable post, he told a disgruntled fan who was disillusioned by an unpleasant encounter with a jogging Bowie in the ‘70s that his “entire creative output in the ‘80s” was engineered to make the fan “feel stupid as I released three albums — each worse than the one before it. I decided to humiliate you in your circle of friends. As a matter of fact, I began composing ‘Glass Spider’ in my head as I jogged.”
RIP to a real one.
