This is the myth of One Direction:
In 2010, Harry, Louis, Liam, Niall and Zayn entered The X-Factor as solo contestants. Individually, they were good but not great. They were kicked off the show. And then the divine hand of Simon Cowell stayed their banishment from reality television paradise and said, “What if you all came back, and the five of you sang together?”
They were strangers to each other when this happened: five teenage boys from mostly lower-middle class towns in England and Ireland. They weren’t the only band Cowell put together that season. They were underdogs and goofballs, bad dancers. They were plucked from obscurity and brought together by fate.
They didn’t even win their season, actually— someone named Matt Cardle did, and I’m sure he can tell you how much good that did him. Because winning, as it turned out, didn’t matter. Winning might actually have hurt their careers, because it would have made them products of the machine instead of the two-time almost-also-rans.
Instead, they became ones we got to save ourselves.
This is the truth of One Direction: they feels like ours in a way that no other boyband ever has. Hanson and the Jonas Brothers are accidents of genetics and upbringing, and ‘Nsync and The Backstreet Boys were masterminded in Orlando dance studios long before they were ever presented to the public. One Direction happened in front of our eyes, and it kept happening because we demanded it. It happened because we saw those boys, lonely dreamers, and decided it was up to us to make their dreams come true.
I say we, but I had nothing to do with the early days of this phenomenon. I was twenty three and twenty four as One Direction swept through X-Factor and then on to record their first album, Up All Night. I remember seeing a zillion pictures of them in the “Popular” tab on Instagram and thinking, god, boybands look like babies these days. I remember screaming along to What Makes You Beautiful on the radio in the car with friends and thinking, “Who even sings this incredibly stupid, catchy song?”
The Instagram thing turned out to be indicative, actually. X-Factor had the band creating reams of digital media every week, the show itself combined with required extras, what have become known as the Staircase Videos, coming through official channels while the boys, true millennials (guided by the instructions of savvy handlers), used things like twitcam and yfrog to document their experiences from the inside.
This fostered a deeper personal connection between band and fans, a sense that we had unmediated access to them. They wanted us in their lives not just when they were on stage, performing, but when they were home in bed, hiding from their families, bored and maybe a little bit lonely. They were reaching out for connection. They were just like us that way.
Being themselves has always been One Direction’s strongest currency: the not-dancing thing, for starters, but also their unapologetic partying, their tattoos, their habit of talking over one another endlessly in interviews, like could give a shit if anyone watching will be able to hear a goddamn word anyone is saying. And in those early days, they were themselves: what the hell else did they know how to be?
In the years since they’ve internalized the particular doublethink that fame requires: the knowledge that everyone is always watching, and that you have to know that, but that you also must always seem to behave as if you don’t. Act natural. It’s harder than it looks, if only because doing it is, by definition, making effort invisible.
One Direction grew up into it, acting natural. They are very, very good at it.
In fact, they are always on their best behavior. Harry Styles once got a tattoo because an artist had shown up somewhere and his customer hadn’t. You can read the story two ways: Harry didn’t want the artist to feel bad, or like he had wasted his time, which is sweet. But, and, or, Harry knew that after he left the room that artist could give someone a story about them. One Direction has a tattoo artist on call just in case they want ink done. What an indulgent, luxurious waste. So he made sure that didn’t happen.
“Up for it?” Louis sometimes asks the other boys on stage, as if the answer could ever be no.
It’s hard to say how clear the band is, internally, on the weirdness of their lives. They’re so insistent in interviews about their normalcy. “We’re bad planners,” Liam said whenever anyone asked about what they thought they’d get up to during their indefinite hiatus. As if they were just lads; as if any of this could have happened if they weren’t able to make plans and stick to them. The answer does two things, though, deftly, because Liam is a professional: it deflects the question, and it reinforces his status as a regular dude. Celebrities say no comment. Lads say, “Fuck, man, I don’t really know.”
The thing about the interview process, though, particularly during album promo season, is that you get the same questions asked again, and again, until a more complicated truth emerges. Finally Liam told Ryan Seacrest, “We’ve had our lives planned out for the last five years. Which is kind of like not having a plan at all.”
And a plan is different from a series of exigencies, I guess, which is truly what they had in their run as a band: get an album out so you can promote it so you can record the next one so you can get it out and promote it so you can, so you can, so you can keep on being famous, which is unquantifiable, and making money, which isn’t. Making music sometimes seems like a tertiary concern in the midst of all of this machinery churning. Not that the music is not good, or that it doesn’t matter to the boys themselves, but in the larger scheme of One Direction, the music is only one a piece of a much larger puzzle.
Which is why Made in the AM is so.
It’s so good, first of all, and it didn’t have to be; they could have turned in an hour of indifferent pop and let stagnancy start to stale out their fanbase. Also, though, it’s so personal. The band has talked kind of exhaustively in interviews about how songs are about what you need them to be about or they’re about something the public doesn’t know and can’t guess or how they’re about a lot of things, but it’s not hard to draw certain straight lines between what’s been going on in their lives personally and what’s ended up here musically. Whether or not those lines direct us to anything true isn’t exactly the point. The fact that One Direction is letting us draw them is.
Because what Made in the AM is, ultimately, is emotionally honest. Authenticity is a slippery word, but I think it’s fair to say that if the boys perform it in interviews, they inhabit it on the album. AM is complicated, and it’s tired, and it’s vulnerable. It’s not the work of myths or legends or heartthrobs or idols, aimed at the top of the charts and the undivided love of everyone’s heart. It is not acting natural. It is not acting at all.
Made in the AM is the work of four dumb human boys and their team trying to make something that acknowledges change, and invites it, even. It’s an album about doing what all boys do, eventually: betraying their youth, and growing all the way up. It’s steeped in the themes boybands aren’t allowed to touch, mostly: Loss. Fear. Hurt. Change. Uncertainty. Insecurity, and not the cute kind. Made in the AM lets itself be seen in unflattering light.
The kingdom of boybands is an elysian field of love and youth, unchangeable, eternal. Made in the AM, true to its name, reminds us that nights break and morning comes, that there is ending— but, crucially, also, that there is after, that what feels like the earth cracking open underneath your feet might just be the landscape shifting and resettling. To become something new necessarily requires shedding old skin and leaving it behind. Made in the AM marks the point of transition: One Direction letting us see what it looks like as they let go of mythic, blessed boyhood, and start to face up to the chaos and uncertainty of admitting that we don’t always know what the hell comes next.
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