This doesn't appear to be a thing you can easily do anymore now that social media has sort of supplanted it, but I used to email members of bands that I really liked when I was between the ages of ~12-16, so this would have been around ~~2003-2007 or so.
The band members wrote back with a surprising frequency, and were extremely polite and grateful for fanmail. I remember that I had a fairly in-depth email session with Justin Pierre, the lead singer for Motion City Soundtrack, where I asked him about how he comes up with songs and what touring was like.
Now, obviously, there's reasons that kids should absolutely not ever do this, because there's a lot of really crappy humans who might try and exploit the kids or do otherwise horrible things, but I was lucky enough to where that never happened to me, and everyone who wrote back to me was very professional and seemed flattered that anyone liked their music enough to write a fan email. I think email was still a new enough thing to where most people weren't writing fan emails.
It's something I reminisce about occasionally, and while I don't really agree with any of Reagan's policies, I will acknowledge that him writing back to this kid was genuinely a kind of cool thing to do.
ETA:
Before anyone goes judging them, I should point out that my parents did not know I was doing that, and would likely have told me to stop if they did, precisely because they would have been afraid of me being coerced into something horrible as a minor. I don't think they realized at the time that it was even possible to directly contact band members via email.
I continue to reach out to at least one independent band or artist each year, even now in my mid-30s. Around the end of each year, I review my top artists and songs to see which truly resonated with me as part of my life's soundtrack. Whether through email, SoundCloud, Facebook, LinkedIn, or VK, I take the time to express my appreciation for their work—sharing which songs touched me and why. Amazingly, nearly every artist responds. One memorable instance was when an artist, who hadn’t produced music in over a decade and was going through a tough divorce, told me a year later that my message had inspired him to return to music and embrace life anew. Your engagement with musicians can have a profound impact, perhaps even inspiring them to rediscover their passion. Keep reaching out and sharing your love for their art—it truly makes a difference, no matter your age!
Whenever I go out to see live music, I always make it a point to let the performing artists know they had a great set, even if the music itself isn't for me. In a world consumed by negative engagement, it's a small yet disproportionately effective way to keep the human spirit alive.
Seems OK to me and I would be fine with my kids doing the same. Risk for email is very low, especially when the child seeks out an adult, opposed to the other way around.
Ironically, my elderly father does the same thing today! He cold emails ivy league professors and writers from the WSJ, and I'm always surprised on how engaged they get with corresponding. They send preprints, lab data, and all kinds of followup.
Professionally it really works well as well. If you have a good rap and interesting questions you can connect with interesting people.
Think about it, most email is a pit of despair. Interesting human contact is rare.
Years ago I was working with a client on a really obscure bug with a storage system. I emailed a dude from the manufacturer who posted on an listserv about some similar-ish scenarios.
We emailed a few times and he ended up calling me. Turned out he was on the east coast for a conference an hour away and we ended up meeting up at the customer site unofficially, and he realized that whatever we were doing was outside of their test coverage in error. We both learned a lot and stayed in touch for a few years.
In the 90's I used to listen to Ian Masters' radio show Background Briefing which was a very pointy-headed, left-leaning examination of various issues.
At the time it was just a show run by a very competent host out of a public radio station in LA (KPFK - not an NPR affiliate). I think it has expanded since then.
Several times Ian said he was surprised to usually get a "yes" when he asked some relatively high-profile journalist, think-tanker, or university professor to be interviewed on his show. (Typical interview was 15-20 minutes of airtime - not just a sound bite.)
Basically, these folks seem to be surprisingly willing to chat when cold-called by an interested person.
In 2015, I found the phone number to radio host Jesse Lee Peterson's office, and around the same time had seen a clip of him saying that the "biggest mistake America ever made was allowing women to vote". I called the number to leave a message that I thought he was an "ignorant, sexist moron". [1]
The intern that answered the phone said "do you want to tell him yourself?", to which I quickly said "yes".
Jesse answered the phone, and I said "hey, Jesse Lee Peterson, I think you're an ignorant moron".
He replied back with "do you want to say this on the show tomorrow?" to which I said "absolutely". A producer reached out to me via email, and the next day I spoke to him on the radio for about 20 minutes. I doubt I convinced him or any of his listeners of anything, but at least I got to say my piece, for a lot longer than I thought I was going to.
While I still think he's an ignorant and sexist moron whose opinions have only gotten more radical and scary, I guess I'll give him a little credit for being a bit open to alternate arguments.
[1] Even if you disagree, don't try and convince me otherwise here, because you will not convince me otherwise in this case. If you don't know who he is, I advise that you don't Google him if you don't want to get depressed.
Similarly I've done research on some of the more obscure older games, and cold emailing developers when I find contact info has resulted in a suprising number of successful correspondences.
Yeah, I recently got a response to a cold email to Dr. Karl Friston. Definitely a fanboy moment!
Regarding the risk of a minor doing this kind of outreach, 90% of all child abuse happens with someone known to the child and/or their guardian, and I doubt many of the remaining 10% are just waiting around for a child to contact them first. I'd say reaching out to people you admire is a useful enough skill that it's definitely worth honing as soon as there's an interest, though of course involving one's parents in the process is a good idea.
I don't think it's really that bad for kids to do this, nor for parents to let their kids do this. Obviously parents should supervise somewhat to make sure that the kids aren't being manipulated by some predator, but otherwise I think it's fine. The solution to "there are bad people in the world" isn't to shut out the world, it's to watch out for bad people.
Yeah, fair; I guess what I was getting at is that kids shouldn't do stuff like that unsupervised, especially really young kids. If it's just politely interacting with a singer, that's fine, but if the conversation gets too bad that can shut it down.
Completely agree, I think that's a very reasonable precaution that doesn't really "restrict" the kid, but hedges a bit against the famous person doing anything inappropriate. I also feel like nearly any famous person who isn't a creep would understand as well, within some degree of reason.
My wife as a teenager wrote a letter to a romance novel author, sincerely asking about the fates of some characters. I thought the author was a legend, she responded she just writes the books for money and doesnt think about it at all afterwards. Lol
> Now, obviously, there's reasons that kids should absolutely not ever do this,
And what are they?
FYI: Teaching children to live in fear (as you yourself clearly are) and to be afraid of strangers is wrong. You should instead be teaching them how to tell a good stranger from a bad one.
They’re in the rest of that sentence that you abruptly cut off while quoting, for some reason. You’re free to disagree, but leaving them out then acting like they aren’t there doesn’t feel like arguing in good faith.
> FYI: Teaching children to live in fear (as you yourself clearly are)
Furthermore, this is incredibly judgemental to lob at a (presumed) stranger. You shouldn’t assume someone’s life from a snippet on a comment on a random forum.
You whole argument could have been distilled without attacks to:
> Teaching children to live in fear and to be afraid of strangers is wrong. You should instead be teaching them how to tell a good stranger from a bad one.
It's reasonable to presume that a long-term implication of inculcating a "never talk to strangers" mentality into young children is the gradual decline of social trust, potentially leading to the collapse of civil society generally.
I think a t least some of the intense polarization, "culture war" acrimony, paranoia, and institutional dysfunction we're seeing today is attributable to the coming of age of people who were raised this way.
I really think this is a pretty large extrapolation from me saying "don't let your kids talk to random celebrities on the internet", claiming that what I suggested will lead to some kind of moral decay.
I agree that I probably should have clarified (and have in a few sister threads, you can find it if curious), but I don't actually think it's 100% analogous to say that being cautious when talking to famous people is the same as "don't talk to strangers". There's a pretty huge power differential between a kid and someone that they really admire vs some random stranger, and there is probably at least some degree of selection bias of people who pursue positions of power and have the desire to abuse it. I don't have kids, but if I did I probably wouldn't let them hang around a lot of people who actively pursue power completely unsupervised, e.g. basically any politician, religious leaders, etc.
You can call it paranoia if you want, but I think it's just being aware of selection bias; I probably wouldn't let a kid into an Incel Support Group for the same reason, because there's going to be selection biases towards justifying horrible stuff, even if a vast majority of incels are just dorky dudes who probably wouldn't do anything inappropriate to a child.
Most famous people are just average humans, and are perfectly professional and courteous, and I feel like I did at least kind of mention that in my original post when I said that nothing bad happened to me, but I don't think that implies you just throw caution to the wind and just let kids reach out to every stranger they want. I also don't think it's leading to a moral decay to think that parents should supervise very young kids on the internet.
> Teaching children to live in fear (as you yourself clearly are)
Well I don't (and can no longer) have kids so there's not much risk of me teaching children anything other than computer science at a school, and considering that I was the one sending the emails before, I don't think that I'm "living in fear".
I mostly agree though, I shouldn't fear-monger, most people don't suck. I guess I was just saying that because I've seen enough true-crime and creepy Hollywood casting couch and child exploitation that I just felt the need to put a bit of a disclaimer. Obviously those are generally outliers (that's why they're noteworthy enough to make into a documentary or something), but I do think it's probably a good idea to supervise/monitor kids' outgoing emails, especially very young kids.
I don't think it's "teaching them to live in fear" to give some very basic safety precautions, but I acknowledge that I didn't make that clear in the original post.
> there's reasons that kids should absolutely not ever do this, because there's a lot of really crappy humans who might try and exploit the kids or do otherwise horrible things
I know you're just making a CYA disclaimer, but that's not an effective approach to creating future adults. It just produces old children.
Good on you for doing this and hopefully your parents would have assisted you in staying safe (and polite) rather than stopping you.
After reading a sci-fi novel I really enjoyed, I emailed the author to let him know how much I appreciated his imagination, and received a rather lovely reply.
Absolutely didn't expect it, but it was really nice to get.
(Adrian Tchaikovsky, and his Children of Time series).
I was wondering if he was a real, individual human being because that author writes far more text in a short period of time than anybody I've ever seen.
I really liked Cage of Souls, it was like a Jack Vance revival. And it's always fun to reach Tchaikovsky and Alastair Reynolds books back to back.
Look up Georges Simenon (Maigret novels). Some people just write fast. Simenon used to write his novels in a week, and that isn't particularly unusual.
It certainly varies with genre, and the short writing periods tend to be more common in genres where people write series and the genre has very specific expectations (e.g. romance, crime mysteries) and where huge levels of originality isn't needed. NOT suggesting that is the case for Tchaikovsky.
I've written two novels, and when I first get myself to sit down and write (that's the hard part), I fairly consistently write 2k words an hour. A 200 page novel is in the 60k-65k word range, so 30-33 hours of writing.
If I could get myself to sit down and just write more consistently, I could churn out a lot too (of course whether it'd be good enough and/or commercial enough is another matter - most authors sell peanuts).
That ability to make themselves sit down and write with some degree of consistency is the most impressive part to me with authors who produce a lot, but that probably reflects what I personally find hardest (my second novel took three weeks from synopsis to first draft, and another four of editing; I'm now two years and 40k words into my third novel despite having planned the plot out in detail)
> I was wondering if he was a real, individual human being because that author writes far more text in a short period of time than anybody I've ever seen.
I've wondered the same thing about Stephen King. I figured it'd be easy enough for him to put out outlines and then make edits after others he trusted to write in his style wrote most of the words.
Stephen King has talked about his writing process. No outline, it just flows straight from his head from the first page to the last, and he goes where the story takes him.
I also really liked Cage of Souls. It seems like most of the people I know who have read any Tchakovsky have just read the Children of Time, and not any of his other prolific work.
I didn't get into his medieval insects one, but if Cage of Souls is the one with the jungle prison, that was really good, reminded me of the Book of the New Sun, except with less obscure words.
> there's reasons that kids should absolutely not ever do this
In the same way kids should never go outside on a sunny day because there is an exceptionally small chance that they could be struck by lighting? Back in my day writing letters like this was part of the elementary school curriculum.
Haha, I used to harass bands I loved as well. Like you, I got mostly positive and polite responses. I suppose my emails were constructive and kind so they appreciated it and reciprocated to some degree.
I learnt a fair bit about music from some of these exchanges. It was good fun. A relic of the old internet says I guess. These days you’d just look for content on YouTube or something instead. Still awesome in its own right, but different.
Before even then, when Cliff Burton (Metallica bassist) died in an auto accident, I wrote some physical mails to his parents expressing my sympathy. I forget how I got their address, but regardless they wrote back - by hand! and we had a few back and forth physical mails. Nice folks, and totally genuine.
People should never, ever write letters? You're kidding me. What is going to happen over the mail?
When I was a kid I wrote letters all the time to anyone I met and kept up some good correspondences. I felt it really enhanced me as a character and grew my literary skills.
Anyways the point -- I'm sure -- is moot as no one does that anymore, I'll bet.
I was speaking mostly with the concern that the famous person may try and solicit nudes from the kid, which is bad for obvious reasons.
I will acknowledge that I was speaking a bit too broadly, I have clarified a bit in sibling threads. I do think it’s a perfectly reasonable precaution, especially for very young kids, to ask them to CC the parents.
I still do this by shooting fan mail to indie game developers after I finish a game that I particularly enjoyed. 100% response rate so far, and always a pleasant experience for both parties.
These are like 19 year old memories, so they’re a bit hazy and I cannot seem to find the emails, but he mostly said he took inspiration from history with drug addiction, and that he usually starts with the melody.
The band members wrote back with a surprising frequency, and were extremely polite and grateful for fanmail. I remember that I had a fairly in-depth email session with Justin Pierre, the lead singer for Motion City Soundtrack, where I asked him about how he comes up with songs and what touring was like.
Now, obviously, there's reasons that kids should absolutely not ever do this, because there's a lot of really crappy humans who might try and exploit the kids or do otherwise horrible things, but I was lucky enough to where that never happened to me, and everyone who wrote back to me was very professional and seemed flattered that anyone liked their music enough to write a fan email. I think email was still a new enough thing to where most people weren't writing fan emails.
It's something I reminisce about occasionally, and while I don't really agree with any of Reagan's policies, I will acknowledge that him writing back to this kid was genuinely a kind of cool thing to do.
ETA:
Before anyone goes judging them, I should point out that my parents did not know I was doing that, and would likely have told me to stop if they did, precisely because they would have been afraid of me being coerced into something horrible as a minor. I don't think they realized at the time that it was even possible to directly contact band members via email.