It is important, when considering throwing a family-size wheel of brie at the singer Pink, to meditate on the logistics involved. The first is buying the brie: this alone will have taken some plotting, finding a place that had whole uncut wheels of brie, refrigeration, etc. Then there’s getting the brie there: in all the excitement of getting ready, the outfit changes and the gins-in-tins, the group photos and the sing-a-longs, there is – always – a wheel of brie, which is too big for a tote bag and grows heavier by the minute. You need to be near the front, and to get the brie to Pink, you have to choose to do it during the right song (a ballad rather than a bop). And then of course there is the decision that starts it all off: at Pink this weekend, at a gig I bought tickets to months ago and have been growing in excitement for ever since, I’m going to take a big brie and throw it to her. That is not a normal decision.
2023 has been a good year for pop stars being thrown things on stage. During her BST Hyde Park residency Pink received both the wheel of brie and a small bag of an audience member’s late mother’s ashes. (“This is your mum? I don’t know how to feel about this.”) Lil Nas X paused a Stockholm gig after a fan threw a sex toy mid-performance. (“Who threw their pussy on stage? What’s wrong with y’all?” was the frankly quite measured response.) Less amusingly Bebe Rexha was taken to hospital for stitches after she had a phone thrown at her on stage in New York last month, and country singer Kelsea Ballerini had to pause a gig in Idaho last week after being hit in the face with a bracelet thrown from the crowd. Legitimate artist safety concerns aside, it must be asked: why, in 2023, is there such a trend for yeeting things at performers?
I’m no expert but I’m really good at guessing things, and so I think this answer is a combination of three coexisting trends. Firstly, the elastic back-and-forth of fan and artist closeness that boomed during the peak of social media (and led to the current ferocious energy of stan culture) has started to gain its controlled distance again, and fans are struggling to reconcile that artists who spoke to them directly a few short years ago are letting someone from “their team” do all their tweets and grid posts again. It was easier to go to date 25 of a 70-city show and think you were getting a unique experience when the artist would send a badly formatted tweet a couple of hours after the encore, but this isn’t really happening any more, and with TikTok video from every angle of the arena going online before the performance has even ended, you really do know what you’re getting before you turn up. The only way to guarantee you had a different gig from the half million other attendees this month is by throwing a pocket pussy at the Old Town Road guy.
My eye black and blue now but much better!!!! Thank you!!! https://t.co/FBv9oG5NcG pic.twitter.com/InQwWLfqfM
— Bebe Rexha (@BebeRexha) June 23, 2023
Secondly, this does feel like a natural endpoint for ravenous fan culture, because so much of being a superfan screaming yourself hoarse in a stadium is feeling like you uniquely understand the artist and you uniquely know everything about them and their fame, and a lot of that is to do with knowing lore. Pink holding up a bag of ashes and saying, “I don’t know how to feel about this”, immediately goes into the Pink lore book, for instance. Being a Pink fan now involves knowing that that happened. Being the person who handed Pink the bag of ashes? No one will ever hand Pink cremains like you did. You and her are bonded over this, for ever.
Then, of course, there is the fact that everything is now a meme. We know Pink got a brie because we have footage of it happening; we know Lil Nas X stopped a song because there’s footage of it happening; we know Matty Healy sucked a fan’s thumb at the start of the 1975’s tour because there was lots and lots and lots of footage of it happening. Some artists have managed to neatly parlay this into their brand (Charli XCX signing poppers and a douche during various 2019 meet-and-greets, Phoebe Bridgers being handed a sword, which she later commemorated with a tattoo). Adele joked this week at her Vegas residency, “I dare you throw something at me, I’ll fucking kill you” before – hypocritically, if you ask me – turning a T-shirt cannon on the crowd.
There’s no way this ends well – as the Ava Max slapping incident from last month showed, more needs to be done to stop people scrambling on stage mid-show, and in a year’s time it will be simply impossible to take a big brie to Hyde Park with you – but for now, this feels like a very modern moment in fandom. We ran “throwing your knickers at Tom Jones” through AI and this is what came out. Enjoy it before it goes.
