By
Sasha Frere-Jones, NewYorker editor
One Direction, five amiable young men under the age of twenty-one who came together in England, on the set of “The X Factor,” has taken over America. The band’s record, “Up All Night,” which was released in March, became the first début album by a British group to enter the American charts at No. 1. “Up All Night” has sold more than a million copies, and more than five million digital tracks. In December, the band will headline at Madison Square Garden. It is the newest standard-bearer of an old form: the boy band.
During “The X Factor” ’s 2010 season, all five members were competing in the solo category, when the show’s producers urged them instead to form a band. They took this advice but finished third. In a convincing simulation of surprise, Simon Cowell, the series’ creator, said he was “gutted” about the band’s failure to win. No worries, boys—Cowell promptly signed One Direction to his Syco label and set about producing the various commodities that would bear the name One Direction, including, as of now, three books.
After its reality-show appearance, the band built up a large online presence, with nearly six million Twitter followers to date. The group’s TV performances circulated widely on YouTube before there was a single recording credited to the group.
Does this success herald another boy-band gold rush, like the one in the nineties? In the U.S., the main rivals were ’NSync and the Backstreet Boys (who are set to release a new album); across the Atlantic, the alpha teens were Take That and Westlife. Those groups spawned individual careers: after ’NSync dissolved, Justin Timberlake became a deft recording artist and a passable actor. The gifted Robbie Williams left Take That to become a devilish pop star; in 2010, the band reunited with Williams, recording a remarkably successful album called “Progress.”
Like its predecessors, One Direction has been compared to the Beatles, mostly owing to its remarkable chart success. But the comparison is misleading. In a way that was not possible even fifteen years ago, let alone fifty, American tweens had access, via the Internet, to the fresh faces of Harry Styles, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, and Liam Payne for months before their band’s album release. “We have to laugh it off because the Beatles were iconic,” Payne demurred once, slightly too accurately, when asked by Australia’s Sunday Telegraph about the resemblance.
The Internet isn’t the only change. The nineties cohort of boy bands performed music that was rooted in American R. & B. “Girlfriend,” ’NSync’s final single, was remixed as a collaboration with the R. & B. visionaries the Neptunes. In contrast, One Direction and other chart-topping bands are evenly split between guitar-heavy pop rock and generic club beats for drunk people to flop around to. This makes for a dramatic stylistic shift. “We’re five lads in a band,” Payne said. “Boy bands aren’t all about dancing and being structured and wearing the same clothes.”
Not only is this statement a dismissal of twenty years of unison dance routines and syncopated beats; it also signals One Direction’s desire to take its place in Britain’s lad culture, which has historically rejected boy bands, preferring rowdy acts like Oasis. Lads are now in boy bands, and they need not dance.
What One Direction really sounds like, though, is a bunch of girls. The band plays a form of pop rock made popular, in the past ten years, by women. In it, details are either eliminated or enlarged to barn size: there are big hand claps, huge dropouts that spotlight a single word, even sirens. Syncopation is replaced with a big, thumping global four-four beat. This sound was popularized by P!nk’s “Don’t Let Me Get Me,” from 2001, and reached its height in Kelly Clarkson’s magnificent single “Since U Been Gone,” from 2004, which was written by Lukasz (Dr. Luke) Gottwald and Max Martin, a Swede who is the most important teen-pop songwriter of the past twenty years. The current trendsetter is Katy Perry, whose album “Teenage Dream” has spawned a series of hits—several involving Gottwald, Martin, or both—that may eventually eclipse Michael Jackson’s “Bad” for the number of No. 1 songs from a single record. Perry’s influence on One Direction extends to “Up All Night” ’s title song, in which Styles sings, “Katy Perry’s on replay, she’s on replay.” Then the guitars lurch in for the chorus, following Perry’s formula of club-plus-rock, for those who missed the message. That chorus has all five band members singing, “I wanna stay up all night and jump around until we see the sun,” a perfect tween line that allows for the younger set to score their sleepover and talk the night away; older fans can interpret it differently, if they like.
Teen-pop royalty appears elsewhere on the album. Rami Yacoub, a protégé of Martin’s who also worked on ’NSync singles, is credited as a writer on several tracks. And Kelly Clarkson is one of three writers on “Tell Me a Lie,” a less rosy song, which nods to the slice of the demographic nursing its first broken heart.
Cowell has positioned the band brilliantly. Well aware that “prepackaged” is a pejorative label, and that audible Auto-Tune has become a commercial liability, Cowell has used shows like “The X Factor” and its progenitors, “Pop Idol” and “American Idol,” to valorize actual singing ability. The five boys in One Direction can sing quite ably, which lends them a crutch of authenticity to lean on. In interviews, Styles has said that the band members have been writing songs in hotels and airports, because they don’t want to sound like they’re performing work for hire, produced by some “forty-year-old man.” Indeed, the long list of professionals credited on “Up All Night” are mostly younger than forty, though they also aren’t in One Direction. The three songs written by the band have outside co-writers, and none have been released as singles. The group’s Twitter and Facebook audience has been praised by industry participants as some kind of D.I.Y. phenomenon, as if the social-media accounts weren’t being promoted with the resources of corporations like Hasbro, which will soon release a group of One Direction action figures.
Source:
NewYorker
