We're only getting older, baby
on One Direction & Liam Payne
I remember the exact moment I started loving One Direction. I’d heard their music before—or, specifically, I’d heard What Makes You Beautiful, and I didn’t like it. But one day in the early 2010s, I saw the video for their song One Thing and it just…clicked. Suddenly, I got it. I got them.
For starters, it was a good pop song—buoyant and catchy. But the video was what hooked me. They were dressed in their little suits! They were having so much fun! They were doing a synchronized dance but they were making fun of synchronized dances!
I’m no stranger to loving a boy band (ahem), but I don’t have any illusion that the boy bands of the 90s/early 2000s were somehow better than the boy bands we’ve had since. I genuinely don’t understand it when people say pop music was better back then—I know this is motivated by pure nostalgia, but it’s also demonstrably false. John Hodgman says “I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the twinned, yearning delusion that (a) the past was better (it wasn’t) and (b) it can be recaptured (it can’t).” I understood, immediately and implicitly, that One Direction was different and better than either the Backstreet Boys or NSYNC, even if I wasn’t in their demographic.
They had a sense of humor and they encouraged their listeners to have a sense of humor about them, too. They didn’t fit into those neatly prescribed boy band roles of the bad boy or the cute one or the goofy one. They were all the goofy one! They were all the cute one! I guess maybe Zayn was eventually the bad boy but not then, not at the start. Look at him in his little suit. One Direction was making fun of the idea of being in a boy band, but they were also serious as a heart attack. They were the Backstreet Boys and also that Blink 182 video making fun of the Backstreet Boys, all rolled into one.
At the time I was in my mid-twenties, which seemed like an outrageously ripe age to be into a boy band. They felt so much younger than me, which is hilarious now because all of us, me and the boys, are in our thirties.
But I was far from the only woman my age who was into them—in fact, I had many, many conversations with people (mostly HelloGiggles writers) about them. They unlocked some kind of easy, primal joy in us, something that went far beyond their music. I didn’t spend my late teen years caring much about current pop music—I was too busy listening to music from the 80s.1 So in a way, this felt like a second teenagerhood, one where I was finally free to unironically embrace joy and fun and the lads being lads.
They inspired a kind of deep-thinking analysis that was very attractive to me and many other online women back then. Take, for example, this piece on their album Midnight Memories from writer Jane Hu (originally published on The Hairpin, RIP to both The Hairpin and that era of internet writing). I especially liked this quote about Best Song Ever:
“This is the perfect song to begin the album, and it’s smart as their first single release, too. The music video is inspired. I still cannot get over this line:
I said, “Can you give it back to me?”
She said, “Never in your wildest dreams.”
With this, 1D gives the chance for their fans to scream this “never in your wildest dreams” line back at them, when, really, they know WE WOULD ALWAYS SAY YES. My heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will yes.”
I do, actually, need my pop culture analysis to include a line from Ulysses. Something about One Direction lent itself to this high/low culture mix, which is obviously very attractive to me. If I can’t talk about Jonathan Franzen and Teen Witch at the same time, I don’t want it.
Not to say One Direction was camp, but…okay, it was kind of campy! In Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp (which, again, I refuse to reread even though it would undoubtedly improve my frequent mentions of camp…at this point, it’s just the principle of the thing), she mentions writer Christopher Isherwood’s The World in the Evening, a book that describes camp in quite a clear manner: “High Camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it, you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance.”2
What is that if not the point of One Direction? What is that if not the point of this entire newsletter, if we’re really getting into it? We took them seriously, and also we didn’t. We made fun out of them.
Before I’d really committed to my love of One Direction, I saw the Morgan Spurlock documentary about them with Cat. Cat was not and is not a One Direction fan; she just went with me because she’s my friend (this is also why we saw the Katy Perry documentary, which is excellent). At the time, I could not for the life of me think of Louis’s name. Niall, Harry, Zayn, and Liam we knew, but we spent the minutes before the movie started coming up with possible names for the band’s fifth member. We did not guess Louis. Cat gave me a Louis keychain that I keep on my desk as a sort of talisman.
I also made this my Facebook cover photo. It kind of says it all.
After Midnight Memories, they came out with my favorite of their albums, Four. It contains my favorite 1D song (Zayn’s solo in No Control).
It also has the best One Direction music video (possibly the best music video of all time), for Night Changes. This video dares to ask the question: what if you were on date with One Direction? What if Zayn took you out to dinner? Liam took you to a fair? Harry Styles tightened your ice skates? Louis took you driving through the sun-dappled countryside? Niall played Monopoly with you beside a fire while wearing a cozy sweater? This video is extremely self-aware and is maybe the best explanation of the One Direction appeal. You’d want to go on a date with One Direction even if it ended in Liam barfing in your fashion hat, Niall catching his cozy sweater on fire, Louis mouthing off to a cop. I actually cried watching this today.
And then Zayn left the band and I sort of drifted away. I didn’t really even listen to their last album, and I didn’t get back into them until after I had my son, at which point I would listen to Four all the dang time when I was feeling lonely and anxious. Even though they were already broken up by that point, something about the album just made me feel good. I listened to Where Do Broken Hearts Go on repeat while writing Things Jolie Needs to Do Before She Bites It.
When I saw the breaking news email from People.com (of course) that said Liam Payne died, I gasped so loudly that Hollis, in another room, asked if I was okay. I felt instantly sick. It’s not like I’d spent all these years thinking about Liam constantly, but I never even considered that he could die at the age of 31. I honestly can’t remember the last time I felt this upset about a celebrity death—it was probably Prince (I remember sitting at my desk job and reading that someone had died at Paisley Park and feeling panicked).
I deeply hate it when a famous person dies and people say things online about how that death symbolizes the death of their childhood or whatever. It feels remarkably callous to equate the very real pain that an individual went through with your, I don’t know, need for nostalgia. It does feel strange to think that the time I spent with One Direction is just gone, that the music will never be an easy escape again (if it even could have been). But what’s much worse than that is knowing that Liam Payne was a person who was the product of an industry that doesn’t protect young people, and that he was in pain and making terrible decisions when he died, and that he will never get a chance to turn things around. That’s what’s really heartbreaking to me—thinking about the sweet kid in those videos and that documentary and knowing that things went so wrong.
I would also really recommend reading this piece from the newsletter Restorative Romance, which gets into the complicated feelings around Liam Payne and the hurt he caused other people. It is easy but also completely untrue to categorize people as either wholly good or wholly bad—“there are compassionate and kind and helpful actions and those can and will exist in a perpetuator of harm.”
There’s really no point in me trying to explain this to you, because you either understand what it feels like to love a boy band or you don’t. I was listening to an interview with Jonathan Haidt (don’t even start) and he was talking about taking LSD (I know, I know), and he and the interviewer compared it to trying to describe the taste of ice cream to someone who has never had ice cream. That’s what loving One Direction was like. I don’t think you can understand it if you don’t already sort of understand it.
But some part of me really just had to type this all out, even though I had another post planned (the paid Alice post, which will be out later this week) and even though I realize this is a downer. Maybe it’s toxic nostalgia talking, but I’m still really sad about it. I’ll see you later this week. xo
Please don’t think this is my attempt to sound cool…sure, I was listening to The Smiths but also I was listening to A LOT of Culture Club and Wham!
Just so you know, I got this quote from Wikipedia. I did not read that entire novel just to write this One Direction post.
An absolutely beautiful tribute <3