If you want to see a song hit the top of the Billboard charts, it’s not enough to just listen to it. You should also bookmark a master post of every radio station in the United States (and the United Kingdom, and Ireland and Mexico and Italy and Ecuador) that takes requests via Twitter or online contact forms and petition them to play it—politely, followed by a thank-you, but over and over. You should pull open half a dozen YouTube tabs each morning and leave them churning in the background of whatever it is you’re compelled to superficially spend your time doing. You should print out flyers with QR codes and plaster them all over your town. You should buy the song on iTunes as many times as you can afford it, juicing the numbers by sending gift downloads to everyone you know. You should tweet and tweet and tweet. You should feed the song through the Shazam app over and over, asking “What is this?” despite the fact that the song is by this point more familiar to you than your own pulse and, however much you love it, more grating than your own voice.
If you don’t live in the United States—the only country whose streaming numbers count toward Billboard chart positions—you could figure out how to convince the streaming services that you do. On Tumblr, instructions for how to game the system are easy enough to come across. All you would have to do is delete Spotify from your computer, download a proxy server or a VPN, turn it on, change your country to the United States, sign up for a free Spotify account, and fabricate an American zip code—or so the instructions say. From there, everything is taken care of for you. Someone else has already created a playlist with the song on it at least five thousand times. You can just hit play. Is this illegal? Perhaps. But it’s common practice among fans, many of whom see it as a way of inverting expectations of what a pop music fandom can be. Though the critique of the music they love is that it demands nothing but passive listening and tacit acceptance of played-out storylines and chemically engineered hooks, their diligence is a counterpoint: they are still breaking something. When Harry Styles fans employed these tactics to juice the numbers for his first solo single, “Sign of the Times,” in 2017, I asked a fan named Tessa why she was doing it. “I got involved because I love the DIY attitude,” she told me. “It’s taking things in your own hands as a fandom.” It was even, she ventured, a bit “punk.”1
There’s no reason to interrogate whether One Direction is actually punk, but it is fun to point out a couple of similarities, including the fact that neither were merely widely observed phenomena—they were scenes. The scene in One Direction’s case was online rather than downtown or in basements, but it had its own language and culture and signifiers of belonging. There were other tactical and creative similarities between this pop music fandom and the musical undergrounds that came before. The wealth of music zines in the 1990s, for example, came from geographically dispersed, passionate, lonely outsiders who both gushed over and critiqued their idols on handwritten pages. They were not for profit (in fact they lost money), they were collaborative (participatory, transformative), and they were decidedly amateur. They weren’t always political, but they were serious about wasting time. They labored unproductively or counterproductively on something that most people considered emphatically dumb. “Creating a zine can define work—and the sense of time that accompanies it—in a way that is markedly different from that which is common in daily labor,” the historian and activist Stephen Duncombe observed in his 1997 book Notes from Underground. He also remarked that stealing images and words from various sources, cutting them up, and putting them somewhere else was an act of rebellion in itself, and a way for the rebels of the day to make “the mass media speak their own underground language.”2
One Direction fans’ relationship with the entertainment industry is adversarial, but mostly because they think they could run it better. Literally: in 2015, there were two separate fan efforts to buy One Direction out of their record label contract. Both were widely covered by a bemused press, who wondered how fans could claim to have stumbled upon a copy of the band’s management contract, and who would know how to look for a buyout clause, and was this effort as implausible as it sounded?3 The fans who did it were responding to the obvious misery of Zayn Malik—who had recently left the band—and to the grueling tour and recording schedule they feared would eventually break the remaining members of the group. They reasoned that they would need $87.7 million to make it happen, and they further reasoned that with the number of One Direction fans in the world, if everyone contributed two or three bucks, this could be accomplished quickly. If they were in charge, One Direction would be permitted to slow down, and therefore One Direction would remain healthy enough to never stop.
The general attitude of One Direction fans—both during the band’s existence and during the solo careers of individual members—is that entities like “management” and “the industry” suffer from a lack of imagination. What fans have in mind is not just commercial success for the stars they love, but the more complicated aim of bringing One Direction to the world, in service of the world, and to prove, in turn, something about their own taste and intelligence. The internet lets them make One Direction into a shared project in which we are all involved—in which every living person is considered a candidate for becoming involved. Whether someone makes money off of this at some point is incidental to that aim, and whether the media chooses to take it seriously or not, it will be compelled to observe it, and when your friends say this boy band isn’t very good, you’ll invite them to argue with millions of people who have nothing else in common and can’t all be wrong.
After Zayn Malik’s unexpected departure from the band—he dipped out with a terse Facebook post in March 2015, a day on which the internet screamed and screamed in unison and I drove around my college town in the rain playing “You and I” on a loop—One Direction’s record label opted not to release any more singles or music videos from the last album he appeared on, the band’s fourth album, Four.
This irritated a certain faction of fans who had hoped to see a big promotional push around “No Control,” a sexy eighties-rock banger cowritten by Louis Tomlinson and Liam Payne and various other people. It featured Tomlinson on lead vocals in a chorus for the first time ever—a big deal for those who had selected him as their favorite from the beginning and had so far received very little validation of this choice. It also featured a bunch of graphic lyrics about morning sex. (“I don’t want to wash away the night before / And the heat where you lay / I could stay right here and burn in it all day,” for example.) While everyone on Tumblr was moping about Malik’s departure and what already looked to be the band’s looming demise, a then twenty-three-year-old London-based fan named Anna Franceschi shared a proposal: “I would like this fandom to gather together for a project I thought about while I was coming back home on the overground on a working day,” she wrote. “The project is releasing No control as the first One Direction DIY single.” Sony wasn’t going to do it, so logically, the fans should do it themselves. “We should decide a date as the release, promoting it through twitter and tumblr and facebook,” Anna suggested. “This fandom is born and raised throughout these platforms, promoting the band just like when they were kids at The XFactor shouldn’t be hard at all.”4 She tagged the post “#sorry it’s just a silly idea” and “#it would be nice [though].”
A team assembled on Tumblr overnight. The professionals—referred to in shorthand as the collective “1DHQ”—were dropping the ball. They were failing at their most important task, which was bringing One Direction’s most openly vulgar song to every corner of the earth. The fan-organized “social media exposure campaign” would kick off “immediately” and end with a massive effort hours before the Billboard Music Awards. The ultimate goal was not entirely clear, but the energy was electric. “1DHQ is like that lazy partner you were paired up with for a school project, so you have to do the whole thing yourself,” one fan joked.5 And with that, Project No Control was off the ground.
Instructions for supporting the project circulated on Tumblr and Twitter throughout the week: fans planned to buy the song on iTunes as many times as possible on their invented release date, May 17, and then came up with the idea of gifting the song to fans who didn’t have credit cards. Everyone who participated was expected to keep “No Control” on repeat on streaming services, request it on the radio, keep it trending on Twitter, Shazam it repeatedly, submit it as a write-in candidate for Billboard’s “Song of the Summer,” create fan art for it, and boost each other’s efforts constantly—obviously. “This momentum cannot stop after tomorrow,” one fan wrote the day before the unofficial release. “Otherwise it will completely flop, and we’ll be completely run over by the release of ‘Bad Blood.’ We need to keep this up for at least a week.”6 They made Google Forms to pair up people who were willing to buy an extra copy of the song with people to give it to and encountered a major problem almost immediately: there were too many people willing to buy the song multiple times and not enough who were signing up just to receive it. “I had the idea of buying 30-40 gift copies for fandom members who couldn’t do so for whatever reason, and then suddenly loads more people started stepping up and volunteering to sponsor copies too!” one fan wrote. “WE HAVE A PROBLEM THOUGH. Loads of sponsors, not enough recipients!”7 That issue didn’t last long. The next day, requests for gifted copies were pouring in from Albania, Iraq, Indonesia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Poland, Thailand, and anywhere else you can think of. The organizers needed sixty-seven copies of “No Control” for Indonesian fans alone.8
“No Control” reached the top of Billboard’s Trending 140 chart—a ranking of songs that were most talked about on Twitter—and fans successfully lobbied more than sixty radio stations to start playing it, including BBC Radio 1 and Z100 New York. The eerily sentient Tumblr account for Denny’s even got in on the promotion: in response to a fan question about how the restaurant chain felt about “No Control,” it replied, “it should be the next single.”9 When the band appeared on The Late Late Show with James Corden, Corden brought the campaign up, saying, “I have received so many tweets from your fans about this that I fear if I don’t ask you about it, they might kill me.”10 In June, One Direction added the song to their tour set list and performed it live for the first time in Brussels, Belgium. At a tour stop in San Diego in July, Louis introduced the song, saying, “We want to thank every single person in the ‘No Control’ campaign, that was sick. Incredible, incredible, again, thank you so much.” They played the song as part of their set for Good Morning America’s summer concert series that August, and two weeks later it became the first non-single to win a Teen Choice Award.11 Discussing Project No Control, the BBC Radio 1 host Nick Grimshaw used phrases similar to the fandom’s own. “They’re taking it all into their own hands,” he said. “This is like punk all over again.” LA Weekly ran a headline heralding One Direction’s transformation into “a DIY band.”12
I came across “gifting blogs” when I was working as a social media manager, scrolling through Tumblr looking for interesting viral content that could be repackaged into more viral content—it was the golden age of viral content. When I first talked to the fans who, at that time, were collecting money to gift copies of Harry Styles songs, they explained to me that it had once been a painstaking process. Gift organizers used to spend weeks making spreadsheets and setting up matches.
But a fan known only as Becca came up with an automated solution to erase this problem. She started working on it in August 2015, when fans were gifting copies of “Drag Me Down,” the lead single from One Direction’s final album, and the system officially debuted with the release of “Perfect” that October. There was one form for signing up to give a gift and another form for signing up to receive one, each feeding into separate pages of a spreadsheet. The simple code that she wrote would group the data by country and then, as she explained it to me, “walk down each side looking for an open spot. The first open gifter spot gets paired with the first open receiver spot and the match is noted on each side. Once it gets to the end of the file and has gathered all the new matches, it gets the gifters and sends an email with the emails of the people they should gift to.” There was no money being exchanged, so she was never nervous about the system being scammed. But it could send out seventy-five emails per minute, so she did sometimes get nervous about blasting out typos or other errors. The system has been used a few dozen times; new projects can be “generated with the push of a button, and then running matches is a push of a button, so over the years it’s been low maintenance.”13
Becca’s system was also used for the April 2016 fan campaign Project Home, which was a continuation of Project No Control, this time promoting a bonus track from One Direction’s final studio album, Made in the A.M. These gifts always came with specific conditions. Matches between “Home” gifters and recipients were facilitated on a rolling basis, but gifters were asked not to send the song out until April 29, “for maximum chart impact.” Those who received gifts were asked to redeem them by May 5 or they would be surrendered and regifted to someone else, again to “maximize the impact of our project on the song’s chart performance.”14
This project failed to sway any of the people who were legally or financially in charge of One Direction’s career. To this day, it’s a source of pain for many fans that “Home” was never released as a single, and never received a music video beyond the amateur one they provided for it. This is just one of many sustained beefs fans have with the choices made around the promotion of One Direction’s work—the beefing has become, in itself, part of the performance of One Direction fandom, and clinging to old wrongs is a way of hanging on to the experience of being a fan of One Direction long after they stopped making music. Five years after the band’s last album came out, one fan announced on Twitter that she would “never” stop pressuring Ben Winston—the director of many of One Direction’s music videos—to release the “finished(?) and buried” music video for the song “Infinity.” “It had been started but not finished,” he wrote in reply, to the surprise of fans. “Label changed course.”15 That response was retweeted more than thirteen thousand times, and the replies are full of all-caps outrage. They are very direct: “JUST HAND IT OVER. WHATEVER IT IS.”16 Release what you have! This is not hard! How about you just share access to your Google Drive! “ben have u seen the [videos] this fandom makes?” one of the top replies asks. “we don’t care if its not edited chile we’re shitty editing connoisseurs.”17
When fans undertake high-lift projects, they don’t tend to assume that they’ll be 100 percent successful. They get something out of the exertion in any case. In 2017, when I talked to fans who were trying to boost Harry Styles’s debut single, “Sign of the Times,” to number one on the charts, most of them knew that it was not going to work.18 The maximum that any of them could listen to the 5-minute, 20-second track was 270 times in one day. It would take thousands of fans really committing and following through on a promise to stream without respite for the effort to have any real effect, but only a few hundred people even liked the Tumblr post with the instructions about streaming. The Harry Styles Promo Team account created for the purpose of promoting “Sign of the Times” was eventually suspended from Twitter. The song debuted on the Billboard chart at number four.
But by this time, doing “promo” was a ritual, and failure was not exactly failure—superstition demanded that the process continue despite the results. If they didn’t do it, Styles might feel it somehow. “The primary goal is just to support the individual members of the band as they release solo material, and to let them know that we’re still here as a fandom and looking forward to hearing their new material,” a fan named Chris told me at the time.19 “We’re just being supportive of him and of each other.”
The identity of the fandom was reliant on continuing to do this. In the same way that fans transform One Direction’s image with fanfiction and fan art, they transform their own image by playing with expectations and flouting the rules. Media presentations of punk music scenes or underground art movements or, in this case, a legion of so-called screaming fangirls give these groups a sense of collective identity, even and especially if the groups disagree with the way they’re depicted. This is true for all kinds of subcultures. “Derogatory media coverage is not the verdict but the essence of their resistance,” the sociologist Sarah Thornton wrote in her 1995 book Club Cultures, a history of dance clubs and raves.20 As much as Project No Control was about promoting a One Direction song out of love for One Direction, it was also about refuting the media’s portrayal of what One Direction was, and who the people who loved them were. The song was adult, lovingly and sarcastically referred to by its promoters as a “boner song.” (Part of the chorus is “Waking up / Beside you I’m a loaded gun!”) The call to action wasn’t just to bring attention to one song; it was to bring attention to the fact that the band members were adults and serious musicians, and that the fans were adults now, too.
There’s a story I’ve been telling anybody who will listen—and because it makes no sense, that’s no one. It’s about the mystery woman who passed out thousands of pictures of a pregnant Harry Styles on several college campuses in Utah in 2019.
The mystery woman who passed out thousands of pictures of a pregnant Harry Styles on several college campuses in Utah in 2019 is known around Utah Valley University as “the Harry Fairy.” My tour guide through this saga was Olivia Diaz, a student journalist at UVU who spent months on the story. She was twenty-six when we spoke, and she’d grown up on Tumblr. She had a familiarity with the Larry Stylinson agenda—the imaginary romantic relationship between Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson—from whatever had been reblogged onto her dashboard over the years, and she was a casual fan of One Direction when the band was at its peak. “It was a big deal for me when they came out with the song ‘Olivia,’” she said. “I was very excited about that.”21
Diaz was an education major and the editor of the arts and culture section of the university paper. One day, waiting outside a lecture hall for her next class to start, surrounded by students doing what students do—stare at phones, stare at laptops, stare at each other—she saw a woman with a high, messy bun dash through the space dispersing small pieces of paper all around her as she went. “I can’t stress enough how tiny they were—they were like two inches by an inch and a half, they were so little,” she remembered. “I figured, This club is giving out free food or there’s an event on campus, but someone picked one up and I looked over and there was this picture of pregnant Harry Styles.” She thought about it all through class—pregnant Harry Styles!—and decided it was a story, even though, strictly speaking, at the time it wasn’t. Then one day, Diaz was walking to her car and a mysterious woman dashed past her through the campus parking lot. “I didn’t think anything of it, and then I got in the car and there was a picture stuck in my car,” she said. “I was like, Oh my gosh, that was totally her.”
So she pitched the story. “As Halloween approaches, there’s something spooky happening at UVU,” she wrote in the campus paper a few days later. “No one knows how or why, only that everywhere you go, there he is. That dazzling smile, that artful tattoo sleeve … the one hand perched on top of a full, pregnant belly. It’s Pregnant Harry Styles.”22 In writing it, she became invested in it. As Halloween approached, it did start to feel that there was something spooky happening at UVU. Diaz had easily figured out that the image came from a 2015 tweet captioned “First exclusive baby bump photo of the mother of Louis Tomlinson’s child.” But there was no other information. It seemed like the flyers could be a joke—or propaganda—about Larry Stylinson, and it also seemed like the flyers could have no explanation at all.
Not long after, a couple of other editors for the paper were hosting an informational booth at a club fair. A mysterious woman approached them—bun high as ever, sunglasses covering her face indoors, as usual—and blew a handful of pregnant Harry Styles right in their faces. Diaz spun the saga into a YouTube docuseries that involved questioning a volleyball coach, a janitor, and the student body president. There were disappointments, dead ends, red herrings. The newspaper filed a request to get the security camera footage from the club fair and tried to use the blurry images to deduce who the Harry Fairy might be. “We got a couple of imposters DM-ing the newspaper’s Instagram saying they were the Harry Fairy,” she told me. From Twitter, she learned that the photos had been distributed on other college campuses in the state, including Brigham Young University. “There was this girl from BYU who actually came in and did a video interview and said she was part of a street team for Harry Styles, that the photos were part of a PR campaign for his upcoming album. She was like, Oh, everything will make sense when the album comes out. And it came out in December and of course had nothing to do with anything.” (That girl was also not the Harry Fairy.) Then the campus shut down because of COVID-19. There were no more interviews. No more leads. No more tiny pictures of Harry Styles everywhere. They were pretty sure they had finally figured out who the Harry Fairy was—by zooming in on a T-shirt she was wearing in the security camera footage, which happened to have the logo of a student organization on it—and Diaz wanted to confront her in a final installment of their documentary video series about the chase. But too much time had passed and nobody else was invested anymore. “It couldn’t happen,” she said. “It’s a cold case.”
Actually, no matter how much time had passed, at least one other person was still invested. I was living alone. It was a pandemic. I was drinking martinis out of jam jars on my fire escape and hoarding cans of fruit cocktail in case things got so bad it would become impossible to buy dessert. I wanted in on a mystery. I thought about the Harry Fairy if I saw a piece of paper on the ground. Homemade flan for sale? Oh, I wonder how the Harry Fairy is doing. Canned food drive next Sunday? Oh, that would be a great way to distribute tiny photos of a pregnant Harry Styles. I started messaging UVU students on Instagram, pretty much at random— anybody with long hair who belonged to the student organization that Diaz had connected HF to. For the most part, these teenagers did not even open my messages, which I guess I understand. But one day in August, I watched the docuseries again and realized that I had missed something completely obvious—the Harry Fairy had given the student journalists a burner email address with which to contact her. I had no idea if it was still active, but I wrote to her in a bit of a frenzy. She responded with an email that began with a laugh in all-caps, nine “HAs” long.23
I asked if I could call her immediately, worried that if I didn’t talk to her within an hour she would disappear forever. She agreed. She picked up the phone. The Harry Fairy, who wanted to remain anonymous, insisted that there was no profound explanation for the photos. I was nervous while I was speaking to her because she seemed totally unperturbed, almost pitying of my interest. Her voice came through as friendly and a little froggy, girlish but low and surprising, like Gigi Hadid’s. When she was in high school, she’d been a One Direction fan herself. She’d seen the photo by chance, part of an inside joke among friends. She’d loved it. “I saw it and I wanted everyone to see it,” she said. “I wanted everyone in the world to see it, you know?”24 As a teenager, she’d used her parents’ printer to run off thousands of copies of the image, distributing them around her school and around neighboring high schools she traveled to for track meets. When she got to college, she kept going. She used almost all of the free printing credit given to her by the school and printed thirty-five photos per page. Over the years, she estimates, she’s printed tens of thousands. She planted the photos at her own college, and at nearby BYU, where she convinced some students to let her use their IDs to access the library printers. She drove up to Salt Lake and spread more. With a friend, she traveled to Las Vegas and hit the University of Nevada. There are pregnant Harry Styles photos everywhere she’s gone, she told me. “I always have a pouch with me and wherever I go I just leave a few. It’s my little bread-crumb trail.”
Talking to her, I felt like I’d been sent to the seaside to put the color back in my cheeks. When it was my full-time job to write about fandom, I’d leaned on the tech angle. I’d said, These are the first people to think of faking an IP address for such a goofy reason. But the Harry Fairy was handing me something else. Even alone, even in secret, there must be a reason to do what we do. When the student paper started investigating her, she thought it was funny at first. Then she got confused. What were they investigating? The images speak for themselves.
Whenever someone approached her on campus, having figured the mystery out, she denied it. “I wanted the focus to be more on the Harry Styles picture than it was on me,” she told me. Her favorite place to plant Pregnant Harry Styles is in places where he won’t be found for weeks or months or even years—hidden corners, or in between the pages of dusty library books. “Someone will find it in however long and be like, What the heck, who put this here?” She laughed. “It’s kind of everywhere. That’s what I want it to be, I want it to be everywhere.” And that’s how it was for me when I saw the flyers. I thought, What the heck? I wondered, Who put this here? I laughed about it for months, thinking, Why would anyone do this? Could they even tell me if I asked?