I wrote about the beginning of my deep dive into the history of the boy band One Direction a few weeks ago, as part of my post on the Michael Jackson movie, but of course, when I dip a toe into the YouTube waters I quickly get swallowed up and lose all sense of time and place, and that happened to me again. There’s something about the way the app vacuums up every shred of available material, without discriminating between the official and the random, that fascinates me. I remember back when I was trying to learn how to do library research in college and there was a whole science to choosing your search terms in order to access even a sliver of the material you were looking for. But now, with YouTube and Google AI, you could type nonsense words into the search bar and the algorithm would still vomit out more than you could possibly absorb in a lifetime.
Despite knowing how addictive it is, and despite knowing that the quality of the information is wildly variable, I was still easily seduced into the black hole, in large part because it’s so exciting to find all of this music (for free!) that used to be impossible to find. When I was a kid, I had to buy records or tapes in order to listen to the music I liked, or sit by the radio and wait for the D.J. to play my song, and now I can sit at Youtube’s feet and not only find all of the music I could ever want but find it curated into convenient lists of the best rock, pop, classical, or hip hop written a on random day in July.
I can’t remember where my One Direction journey started exactly, or if there was even a single starting point that led to the Harry Styles mania that now fills my recommended videos list. Maybe it started when I was looking for vocal exercises and found a voice teacher who did reactions to music videos, or maybe it started when I was watching all of the collected Glee videos online, skipping the plots and just mainlining the music, or maybe it started in the primordial ooze and I will never be able to find the beginning of that string. Suffice it to say, I have now watched too many videos about Harry Styles and his One Direction bandmates, including his latest music video, Dance no more, and I have some thoughts.
The Directioners (what the One Direction fans called themselves) made the band. They saw these five adorable teenage boys on X Factor in Britain, in 2010 or so, and they fell in love. Looking at the old videos now, I can see that there’s something incredibly endearing about a group of teenage boys climbing all over each other and making silly jokes and pouring water over each other’s heads. It reminds me a lot of the boys in my classroom. Girls might hug each other or sit on each other’s laps or whisper secrets, but boys wrestle and grab and seem like they are magnetically drawn together. And in a world where we are all so used to living in our own silos there’s a vicarious high in watching these boys come together and form a single entity. They didn’t actually know each other before they were put together by the judges on the show, but then they spent 5 years together (4 for Zayn, who left the band early), constantly touring and traveling and writing and promoting their music, and their lives, on social media.
This all happened at a transitional moment in social media’s development, when it changed from a convenient way to keep track of old friends or argue about computer operating systems into a universe of its own, with its own rules and fads and terminology. I don’t know if Harry Styles, at 32, counts as a Millennial or Gen Z, but his fans have a very Gen Z vibe about them – social media literate, sophisticated psychological terminology used to describe even the most mundane daily experiences, wildly curious and exquisitely jaded at the same time, and, most importantly, uncertain if life or thought can be said to exist if it has not been shared to social media.
As a, maybe inevitable, result of the constant coverage of their lives, fans started to imagine love affairs between the boys, interpreting every gesture to fit their generation’s gender fluid, sex-saturated view of the world. There are videos of some incredibly sweet interactions between these young men, so I can understand why fans wanted to believe there was something more going on, especially between Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson, who fans re-named Larry Stylinson, believing they were a secret couple kept apart by the evil record execs. Except, the boys’ love lives outside of the band were well-documented. Harry was famously attached to Taylor Swift for a minute and then to Kendell Jenner, and Louis often talked about his hometown girlfriend in interviews. It took me too long to realize that the fans had created this fantasy out of whole cloth, and by then I was shipping Larry Stylinson too, and the grief I felt at realizing that they weren’t really in love was palpable. It’s hard to know how much of an active role the boys played in creating these storylines for their fans, or if it came from the record company, or just from fan obsessions, but when Harry started to dress more flamboyantly many people took it as more evidence that he was secretly gay, despite the fact that being a gay pop star in the 2010’s was no longer the kind of secret someone would need to hide.
Interestingly, Harry Styles, of all the One Direction boys, seems to have made the most use of these internecine fan theories and obsessions to build his brand. He often seems to be winking at the fans, in his videos, in his interviews, and especially at his tour performances, which end up looking and feeling like a huge party with thousands of old friends coming together to share their own private jokes. I don’t know if Harry Styles feels like he has some control over the fan fiction, or if he just has an internal deflection shield that allows him to take in the love and ignore the dark underbelly of it, but he seems to be okay. Whereas Liam Payne, the fifth band member, who started out on X Factor as a painfully earnest fourteen year old, two years earlier than the other boys, and returned at sixteen just in time to be swept up in the One Direction phenomenon, seemed to have no deflection shield at all. He took in all of the good and all of the bad until he couldn’t tell the difference and couldn’t survive it.
As far as I can tell., the other three living members of the band also have huge and devoted fan bases, but nothing like the sexually-charged, obsessively analyzing love that follows Harry Styles. Part of it is probably because Harry had a reputation as a flirt from the beginning, which may have been earned or may have been manufactured, or both, and part of it is that he has just been making really good music as a solo artist and always seems to be working to become a better musician/dancer/actor/performer, evolving through his own different eras much like his erstwhile ex Taylor Swift.
I missed most of the One Direction/Taylor Swift/Justin Bieber-mania when it was actually happening, partly because I put off getting a smart phone much longer than other people, sticking to my flip phone for dear life until it was impossible to survive without a direct internet connection in your pocket. But I seem to be making up for lost time now, and there’s something compelling about how thoroughly YouTube’s endless supply of videos seems more real to me than anything happening in my daily life. Both the process of being swallowed up by social media, and the attempt to figure out what the hell just happened to me, seems like an important phenomenon to try and understand, since it’s going to be one of the dominant mental health problems for the next generation. Instead of reading articles or books on different subjects, most of the information we now consume comes through social media, where it is wrapped up in how we feel about the influencers who are giving us the stories, and those social media figures can seem to be closer to us than our closest friends, so we end up seeing everything through those relationship-lenses instead of from a comfortable distance. I can see how all of this stuff discombobulates me, so I can’t imagine how Gen Z and Gen Alpha feel about it, never having lived outside of social media’s grasp. I’m scared for them, but I’m also really impressed by their creativity and technological sophistication and confidence.
Which takes me back to the latest Harry Styles video. Back when they were in One Direction, the boys specifically avoided the dance routines that were ubiquitous in boy bands, in large part because they were not good dancers, but over time Harry has embraced more and more dance in his shows, and now in his music videos, which I love. Except, in Dance No More there’s an edge I can’t quite place, beyond his performance of gay-coded moves (despite the constant thrum of gossip about Harry’s engagement to Zoe Kravitz), where it feels like he’s saying both I love you and I hate you to his fans at the same time. And even though I’m not the target audience, I still feel the pinch. I’ve noticed that Harry has a tendency to play with opposites a lot – I hate you/I love you, I’m gay/I’m straight, I’ll tell you everything/It’s none of your business – and then he refuses to clarify any of the resulting confusion, saying, basically, it’s all open to interpretation, which may seem generous at first but ends up feeling manipulative. For example, When Harry hosted Saturday Night Live he addressed accusations of queerbaiting by kissing one of the male cast members, and then turning to the camera to say, now that’s queerbaiting.
I feel much calmer when I’m watching interviews of Louis Tomlinson or Niall Horan, because they are both very straight forward and seem to have less porous boundaries between their public and private lives than Harry, though they are clearly just as addicted to the kind of validation and connection and, really, love, that they receive from their fans. But the bottom line is the music, and the music is really good, from all of them. My favorite from Harry Styles is a song that seems to be about his older sister, called “Sweet Creature,” and my favorite from One Direction is probably “The Story of My Life,” but there are so many songs worth listening to.
Some music to try:
Harry Styles – Dance No More – https://youtu.be/-rkjE0xc730?si=wYwFtdfP0z_m85iD
One Direction – What Makes you Beautiful – https://youtu.be/QJO3ROT-A4E?si=QGIADIzb55BUfMRp
One Direction – The Story of my Life – https://youtu.be/W-TE_Ys4iwM?si=FOlXz4mNaOb_6Au4
Louis Tomlinson – Imposter – https://youtu.be/rzuD5szQhso?si=rVpYERbEZecErzYL
Niall Horan – This Town – https://youtu.be/ic1l36GrNOU?si=9k3Ep0-Nh45cORGW
Harry Styles – Adore You – https://youtu.be/VF-r5TtlT9w?si=TCmZU1PHGYF4Ddb4
Harry Styles – Falling – https://youtu.be/olGSAVOkkTI?si=FPgsUfM4wvBCvAMX
Harry Styles – Sweet Creature – https://youtu.be/8uD6s-X3590?si=bnJgBKn0B2RAUzwc
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
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