J. Cole performing in Inglewood, Calif., on July 11, 2017
Photo: Kevin Winter (Getty Images)

Rapper J. Cole’s new album, KOD, has reignited a recurring discussion about the appreciation of “real” hip-hop between his fans and the people who find him interminably boring.


While I am a big fan of J. Cole’s, I cannot call myself one of his “stans” because, while I love his music, I cannot bear the insufferable nature of his acolytes.

Stan (noun) Derived from the song of the same name by Eminem, a “Stan” is any overzealous maniacal fan who is obsessive about a celebrity, team or thing.

—Urban Dictionary

Which raises the question: Who are the worst stans?

Everyone has a favorite artist, team or person, but we all know people who take it too far. I’m not talking about the dudes who like Tupac so much, they will fight the DJ if he plays Biggie, or people who are rabid fans of a college they never attended. While perplexing to me, that doesn’t cross the line. What defines a stan is how much they bother you with it, and how much it bleeds into their real life.


Today we rank the top 10 stans of all time:

10. “This pussy” or “this dick” stans

There’s always one girl who is always talking about how her vagina feels like sunshine and squirts diamonds and angel tears. And everyone knows a guy who thinks his penis can cure world hunger and make you forget that he is an unemployed SoundCloud rapper who drags his finger across the page when he reads his own lyrics.

In both cases, they never live up to the hype. This is because they have an inherently flawed polling system. The people who give these stans a Yelp review are probably trying to have sex with them. Unless you have a control group or an independent, peer-reviewed study, I don’t believe you.

9. J. Cole stans

The problem with J. Cole fans is that they believe anyone who doesn’t like his music must not have the intelligence to understand his genius. In that sense, J. Cole fans are a lot like black wine aficionados.


Once black people get a graduate degree, their palates immediately become refined and they think they can taste “notes of oak” in a bottle of merlot. J. Cole is just a nigga who can rap kinda good, bruh; his music is not a fine shiraz.

But they will both put you to sleep.

8. The Beyhive, the Rihanna Navy and Cardi Beasts

The three superstars these groups of fans support are wig-snatching icons whose true believers are willing to pay the equivalent of the gross domestic product of a small Caribbean island nation for a 243rd-row seat at one of these divas’ concerts.


And when their stans call themselves “ride or die,” they mean it literally. If you told a member of the Beyhive they could ride in the back of a limousine with Beyoncé, but the driver would eventually drive off a cliff, killing all the passengers in a fiery crash, they’d be cool with it as long as they had time to get a few Snapchat selfies with Queen Bey for the front of their funeral programs.

7. Jesus Freaks

I am neither anti-Christian nor anti-religion. In fact, some of my best friends are Christian. I have had Christians in my home, and a nice Christian family lives next door to me. There is, however, a difference between Christians and Jesus freaks.


Jesus freaks don’t just love Jesus, they love people knowing that they love Jesus. Especially if they just got “saved.” Any time you bring up a topic, they twist it into a religious statement by hollering “But God” or “for Jesus” at the end of sentences:

Her: No, I can’t go to the party. I have church. I could have been dead and in my grave, BUT GOD!!!!


Me: Weren’t you just “dropping it low” at the club last week?

Her: Yes, but now I’m dropping it low FOR JESUSSS!

Here’s my only problem with Jesus stans who want you to know the “good news”:

Don’t you think everyone has heard about Jesus by now?

6. Phone Stans 

I will admit that if I send a text message,and a green bubble pops up–signaling that the person on the other end is not an iPhone user—I think less of the person I’ve texted. Not in a “You like sugar in your grits” type of way. It’s more of a high school, “I’m a senior and you’re a freshman” type of way. I know it doesn’t make sense, but people are like that about their phones.


Phone stans are worse.

If you sit with a person who loves Android phones, in five minutes you will know all of the things their phones can do that an iPhone can’t, while iPhone adherents love their phones as more than a communication device—it’s an accessory.


I know all of this because I am an iPhone stan.

A couple of years ago, I left my phone in a Washington, D.C., cab while trying to give a cabdriver directions to what may or may not have been a strip club (I haven’t confirmed this with my sources). The next day, the people at the AT&T store tried to sell me a much cheaper Android. I just stared at them like they were at my mother’s funeral trying to sell me a new mama.


I may or may not have cried in a fetal position going through iPhone withdrawals all night until I got a new phone. I’m a real journalist, so I can’t confirm that. I’ll have to check my sources.

5. Woke-ups

I said I wasn’t going to use the “h-word” anymore, but nothing is worse than people who just attended an Umar Johnson lecture or watched Hidden Colors for the first time and now they have this fetishized ...


Wait, I lied. There is something worse than newly woke black people:

Newly woke whites are incredibly annoying.

That’s why I avoid white people wearing Black Lives Matter shirts or safety pins. They use all the buzzwords like “privilege,” “unpack” and “Diaspora,” and they want to talk about it all the time in the most awkward situations. 


Look, Miranda, I don’t want to talk about critical race theory at this wedding reception. Go away. Plus, I feel the same about white woke-ups as I feel about people’s pet pit bulls.

She might not bite, but I’m not taking any chances.

4. White Dog Lovers

I once heard an episode of the podcast Radiolab where they were tracing the origin of a tick that rendered people incapable of digesting meat. Before they realized that patient zero encountered the tick while picking strawberries with her boyfriend, the woman theorized that she may have acquired it because ... wait for it ...


She often slept in the bed naked with her dog!

I won’t make any jokes about how wypipo are willing to kiss their dogs in the mouth, knit sweaters for them or allow them to eat off their silverware. This can be summed up in two sentences:

White people love dogs. Black people love their dogs.

But not that much.

3. Jordannaires

If you listen to some people, Michael Jordan scored 84 points a game, never had a bad shooting performance, and only participated in team drills and Bible study.


Michael Jordan fans can’t accept the fact that anyone before or after him was better. In their eyes, Kobe Bryant was a Great Value Jordan and if LeBron James wins 192 rings, he will still never measure up. While Jordan was definitely the greatest player of his generation, there are two truths a Jordan fan will never admit:

  1. The dunk from the free-throw line that won the 1987 Slam Dunk Contest was just a’ight.
  2. Wilt Chamberlain is the greatest basketball player of all time.

2. Atheists

Imma go ahead and put all non-Christian people in this category. I couldn’t tell you which of my friends are Baptist, Presbyterian or African Methodist Episcopal, but your atheist friends will always let you know how stupid you are for believing in God. It’s the first through 10th commandments of atheism.


Even worse than nonbelievers are the ones who believe in a “higher power” because they’re “spiritual but not religious.”

Even worse than those are the ones who believe that you’ve been boondoggled into believing in a white Jesus because Christianity was given to you by white slave masters to further capitalism and keep Negroes docile. If you remind them that the Apostle Mark headed a church in Africa 1,500 years before slavery came to America, they will only respond, “But still … ”


Even worse than those people are the No. 1 stans of all time:

1. Vegans

Even though I am a second-string vegan (I only eat animals that don’t eat meat), a vegan is worse than an iPhone user who only listens to Beyoncé and just got saved. If you don’t know whether you have any vegan friends, you don’t—because 6 minutes and 12 seconds is the world record for the longest time a vegan has gone without mentioning their veganism.


You could win the silver medal in gymnastics after getting your Ph.D. in subatomic nuclear genetics while being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for winning a televised rap battle against J. Cole, and a vegan would somehow steer the conversation to how disciplined they are because they don’t eat meat.

If you want to know the answer to everything in life, talk to a vegan, because veganism cures everything. High blood pressure. Gout. Heart disease. Acne. Erectile dysfunction. Cancer. Your football team losing. The situation in the Middle East. LeBron’s hair loss. In fact, if white people discontinued consuming animal flesh, we could cure racism.


The only downside to not eating meat is that vegans can’t give oral sex.

I think that’s how it works.

I’ll check my sources.


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