It just makes you feel really good : a narrative and reflection on the affordances of musical fandom across a life course

Abstract

The study of how music may be important to health and well-being can be seen as an increasingly broad and interdisciplinary field. As issues of health and well-being are routinely understood within the wider context of life style and cultural engagement, musical experiences far outside the professional practices of music therapy and music medicine are now seen to offer “potent and preventative measures to enhance psychophysiological well-being reaching into almost every aspect of life”. Such shifts grow in part from the integration of more expansive definitions of health that underlay the field. Here health is a concept emphasised variously as a “quality of human interaction and engagement”, or “a quality of human co-existence”, a ‘performance’ of processes by which ‘self’ is realised into the world—mentally, physically and socially; whilst musical experiences have been suggested as an ‘immunogen behavior’, that is a health performing practice. This in turn has widened the scope of music and health studies to include any mode of musical participation that holds the potential to promote well-being. Consequently there is a growing interest in how ‘ordinary’ people in ‘everyday’ settings use music to facilitate health, and how self-made musical experiences are used “to regulate emotional or relational states or to promote well-being”, this “lay-therapeutic musicking in everyday life” being considered an important area alongside more specific professional practices. This paper seeks to contribute to this discourse through an exploration of the experiences of being a music fan, a particular form of musical participation that may hold a variety of implications for an individual’s health, well-being and quality of life.