If you can stand it, I’m going to describe a six-second video.
It goes like this: the British boy band One Direction is onstage, on tour, in the summer of 2015. You can’t actually see them—the camera is too far back in the crowd. You can only kind of see one of them, the then twenty-one-year-old Irish singer and sometime guitar player Niall Horan, bottle-blond in a black T-shirt, blown up on a stadium monitor and washed out into a bright white mess owing to a crappy cell phone camera attempting to record another screen. You can hear a downbeat in a sweet if unremarkable ballad about young love from the band’s fourth album, Four, and then you see Horan wringing his hands as he steps to the mic to sing the line “We took a chance.” It comes out wrong and we’ll never know why. The a is an o. He does not usually do this. He usually sings “chance.” Odd, but you wouldn’t necessarily notice or care if it weren’t for the fact that—in the tiny space between this phrase and the next—you then hear another voice, coming from at least several yards behind the camera and begging, credulously, in a molar-crunching scream: “What the fuck is a chonce?” She must know. She won’t. The end.
This video was posted originally on the Twitter-owned short-form video app Vine shortly after the concert, and was adopted as the One Direction fandom’s latest and greatest in-joke. It was reblogged and retweeted, the footage was downloaded and reposted. Within a few weeks of the first upload, Harry Styles acknowledged the moment onstage, singing his line of the song as usual, then tossing to Horan for his part, and muttering into the mic, “But don’t say ‘chonce.’” At that, the crowd screams as if they have just found out they’re alive. On Tumblr, fans shared this clip—with all-caps “ASDFGHJKL” and similar expressions—and from then on, there were clips of Horan at subsequent shows, nodding and laughing as tens of thousands of people sing at him, in unison, “chonce.” Though Vine has since been shuttered, “WTF is a chonce” persists on YouTube, where the comments years later are one-note: “Why do I still find this funny even though I’ve seen it millions of times?” The joke is not funny, but it is for insiders, and it has a special bittersweetness to it because the original footage was taken just a few months before One Direction’s final public performance.
The internet’s ephemera is often better left unexamined, not just because so much of it ends up having a disgusting or depressing backstory, but because so much more of it is impossible to explain at all. One Direction was known for its onstage mishaps and physical accidents, made funnier by their contrast with the band’s otherwise meticulously managed and physically grueling stadium tours. There are entire supercuts of Harry Styles falling over in catastrophic fashion, and of sophomoric pranks that involve two or three of the band members ganging up on another. Yet “chonce” became the single-syllable talisman, clung to even after everything was all over.
Four years after the first clip went viral, I scrolled past a tweet from an account with the handle @isasdfghjkls:
me::(
niall: we took a chonce
me::)
I retweeted it, even though the majority of the people who follow my Twitter account would have no idea what it was referring to.1 It was a plain statement of fact—they could edify themselves if they wanted to live better. “We took a chonce” is so dumb—so pure a joke at the expense of someone who can take one and would love to—the weight of life lifts off of my shoulders when I’m reminded of it. Watching this video smacks me with a lingering hit of dopamine, like a gumball-machine-sticky-hand landing on a windowpane. When I need to, I can watch “We took a chonce” and experience what some people feel when they put their faces in front of a seasonal affective disorder lamp. What a different sort of person feels when they jog. If it so happens that we arrive at a dystopian future in which always-on screens are embedded directly into our retinas, I’ll spend every crowded train ride and mandatory all-hands meeting and one-year-old’s birthday party washing my eyes with “We took a chonce.” That’s the only way I can describe what One Direction does for me without saying something as useless as “I love them.”
Even now, the serendipity of the Tumblr feed leads me to treasures: a watercolor painting of “WTF is a chonce?” in curling bridesmaid script; a flyer with tear-off strips at the bottom that read “Chonce”—get it? Take one!—supposedly hung up by a pair of friends in their local bowling alley. “The only problematic thing about my fav is he can’t pronounce ‘chance,’” reads another post reblogged into my feed. “Other than that he’s a chill little sun drop that loves sports.”2 A commemorative T-shirt cost me a mere $19 plus shipping on Etsy—“WTF is a chonce?” printed in white bubble letters, on pale blue. If you’re the type of person who still peruses Urban Dictionary, you might notice that “chonce” is defined there: “An alternative for the word ‘chance.’ Commonly used by One Direction’s Niall Horan.”
A coldly assembled consumer product, One Direction was an idea that Simon Cowell takes credit for having while serving as a judge on the British reality competition TV show The X Factor in 2010. The five individual boys he met on the show were too bland and young and poorly dressed to make sense on their own, so he pushed them together and made them into a litter of commercially viable puppies. They released their first single in 2011, in the moment that social media was revealing itself as our new shared reality. It was the year teenagers started getting Twitter accounts, which happened just as Tumblr started selling advertising, which was around the same time that Instagram launched and exploded and was acquired by Facebook, while YouTube was cleaning up its design so that young people would have an easier time falling into algorithmic wormholes. One Direction fans—who seemed mostly to be young women—were mocked for embracing a boy band, an inauthentic thing pieced together for money. They also used, as the means of their expression, a collection of websites that profited off them yet again.
“Women are the internet, and the internet is women,” the editors of n+1 announced to start their winter issue in 2013.3 “Supposing the internet was a woman—what then?” the writer Moira Weigel asked in Logic in the spring of 2018. The loose, woven structure of the internet, which enables things like whisper networks, reflexive personal sharing, and complex storytelling, has been more useful to women and marginalized groups than it has been to men, Weigel suggested. Men have always had easy access to other, more streamlined types of communication. But she cautioned readers not to romanticize the internet. It’s home to bad actors and misinformation, both given reach they would not have otherwise. It’s also where women are expected to perform tasks they’ve always been expected to perform, she noted: posing, preening, affirming, doing things for other people in exchange for the feeling of being loved. Women are the ones fueling the engine “for the accumulation of vast piles of capital,” Weigel wrote, and they are not the ones generally benefiting from it. “Yet the internet also provides tools that can be used as alternatives,” she pivoted. “In this sense, the internet is ambivalent. Fortunately, inhabiting ambivalence is something that women are good at, having had to practice it for so long.”4
Any examination of online fandom has to be approached with the same ambivalence. The cultural phenomena of fandom and the internet are braided together—one can’t be fully understood without the other. Both, in providing structure, have also produced chaos. Both, in providing meaning, have sometimes oversupplied it. Yet fans’ role in shaping our present culture, politics, and social life is often overlooked, and the roots of this oversight go back decades. When listing off pivotal subcultural movements, hardly anyone would think of fangirls. The mid-century sociologists who invented subcultural studies even literally considered rebellion the province of middle- and working-class young men, spending their postwar discretionary income on weird outfits and aggressive haircuts; girls—who at the time were screaming over the Beatles or sitting at home watching soap operas with their mothers—didn’t jump out as a compelling subject for study. Or, these activities did not seem subcultural. They looked generic.
Yet a fangirl still exists in contradiction to the dominant culture. She’s not considered normal or sane; her refusal to accept things the way they are is one of her defining characteristics. She is dropping out of the mainstream even while she embraces a thing that is as mainstream as a thing can get. Publicly, the fangirl wastes money and refuses to make her time useful. With the advent of social media, she started publishing thousands of messages to idols who would never read them. The constant, ambient disapproval of the general population can sequester fangirls joyfully, in semiprivate spaces with like-minded and creative groups of fast friends; or dismally, in semiprivate spaces that are still open to scorn, and therefore lean on self-policing or outward-facing aggression to protect the boundaries of a sensitive community. All of this happens on platforms with a financial incentive to produce more and more of it, but not necessarily to foster its best and most inspiring characteristics.
The labor of fans, which makes no sense because it is performed for free, can confuse even friendly onlookers. In 2011, Maciej Cegłowski, founder of the bookmarking site Pinboard, was one of the first technologists to notice the business opportunity fans represented.5 He saw that fans of various TV shows and film franchises and musical groups had created elaborate tagging systems on rival site Delicious, and he saw that Yahoo’s corporate takeover of Delicious, and YouTube’s subsequent takeover of the shell of that Delicious, had ended in the destruction of many of the tagging features that were so important to them. Fans lost the ability to build up vast collections of tags, sort them, and search them, which had been critical to the project of keeping open records of a fandom’s history as it developed. So, in a stroke of genius, Cegłowski offered them the opportunity to do that somewhere else. He published a mass-editable Google Doc and asked all kinds of people, who wouldn’t typically have any say or hand in the construction of the platforms they would later be expected to use and generate profit for, to come in and tell him what features they would need if they were to make Pinboard their new bookmarking home. The Google Doc “ended up being fifty-two pages long,” he recounted breathlessly on his blog. “At times, there were so many people editing the document that it tucked its tail between its legs and went into a panicked ‘read only’ mode. Even the mighty engineers at Google couldn’t cope with the sustained attention of fandom.” The Google Doc had rules, color codes, a full index, and a promise not to write any fanfiction about Cegłowski unless he gave the okay. “The editors of this document were anonymous, but they somehow seemed to know each other,” Cegłowski wrote. He titled his account of the whole affair “Fan Is a Tool-Using Animal,” and concluded it with praise for what he saw as a DIY, punk-y energy: “Fans transgress. Fans never sold out, man!”6
Cegłowski’s praise of fandom as a practice became a more common perspective throughout the 2010s in part because of pro-pop trends in music criticism and pro-girl trends in marketing, but also significantly because of the way highly visible online pop music fandoms played to and existed within the media’s imagination of liberal politics, as well as its fascination with the overt goodness of youth. The everywhereness of fans was remarkable; they seemed to accomplish anything they wanted. But fans are not magical, nor are they a unified group. They are people. Online fandom can be progressive, and it can also be reactionary; it can foster creativity, and it can also smooth away individuality; it can create new tools and compel fascinating action just as easily as it can provide the dull, repetitive skills required for activities like media manipulation and harassment. The One Direction fandom has done all of this, and it has meant all sorts of things to all kinds of people who share one particular affinity but might not necessarily share much else.
Often described as the third British invasion—post–Spice Girls and post-Beatles—or part of a new 1990s-like boy band boom, One Direction was unlike either of those phenomena. The closest thing One Direction has to a predecessor is not any transatlantic act from a previous century or the tightly choreographed boy bands of the generation prior, but Justin Bieber—discovered on YouTube in 2007, made famous by young women on MySpace, elevated to stardom by the relentless tweeting of millions of people who had boundless affection and plenty of free time. Bieber’s first album, My World, released in 2009, debuted at number six on the Billboard charts. One Direction released their first single in September 2011 and arrived in the United States in February 2012. A few weeks later, Up All Night made them the first British group to enter the U.S. charts at number one with a debut album. (It took four years for Beatlemania to hit the United States, and even longer for it to spread globally.) Their next three albums did the same, which had never been done by any group at all. “We all sat and watched the film of the Beatles arriving in America, and to be honest, that was really like us,” Harry Styles said in 2014. “None of us think we’re in the same league as them music-wise. We’d be fools if we did … Fame-wise, it’s probably even bigger.”7
Five boys: for the time being, they all dress approximately the same, like mall kids who have only ever seen zip-up hoodies and loose khaki pants. Harry Styles is the youngest, with a baby face and the liveliest hair; he is the focus of tabloids and gossip accounts because he is often publicly dating. Liam Payne has the second-floppiest hairdo and a sweet obsession with rules, as well as an expressed fear that nobody will ever love him separately from his fame. Niall Horan is the Irish and fake-blond one, with the most boyish sense of humor—a love of farting and pulling down pants. Nominally, he knows how to play the guitar. Zayn Malik is the most interested in asserting that this is not a regular boy band, it’s a “cool” boy band, and he is regarded as the mysterious one, possibly because he is quiet and possibly because the media is inclined to cast the band’s sole Muslim member as the odd one out. Louis Tomlinson is the oldest, the least often spotlighted singer, the one with a longtime unfamous girlfriend, and the class clown, pulling pranks and shouting swear words.
Before One Direction, becoming a pop star took time, sacrifice, restriction, discipline. The boys of NSYNC lived on $35 per diems under the thumb of a notoriously manipulative and coercive manager who also stole tens of millions of dollars from the Backstreet Boys and wound up in prison.8 The Jonas Brothers, the next iteration of the boy band idyll, were the Disney-approved version, expected to give moving testimonials about their commitment to remaining chaste and drug-free.9 One Direction had a punishing touring schedule and a strict album a year as contracted deliverables, but they were never beholden to the traditions of the genre in quite the same way—they were always permitted to eschew choreography and matching outfits and conversations about purity rings. They were “anarchic,” Cowell said in their 2013 documentary.10 They had tattoos. They had sex. They even smoked! Niall Horan, unfamiliar as he was with the way Irish slang would translate in an American cultural context, was filmed shouting at some photographers at an airport that they were a “shower of cunts,” which became another fandom catchphrase.11 This was all allowed, it seemed, mostly because it was what the fans wanted.
By the time One Direction reached the United States, they were the biggest subculture on Tumblr, a platform designed to let affections snowball through a dizzying system of additive reblogs and visual stockpiling. Each member of the band had well over 1 million followers on Twitter. Within a few years the platform was defined by the rivalry between Justin Bieber and One Direction fans, and the passions of fandom were impossible for regular users not to notice. In 2015, a four-year-old tweet from Louis Tomlinson—“Always in my heart @Harry_Styles. Yours sincerely, Louis”—was retweeted enough times for it to become the second-most retweeted message in the site’s history—edging out Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection victory tweet but falling short of Ellen DeGeneres’s Oscar selfie.12 At that point, it had been retweeted over 700,000 times. A number that’s now more than 2.8 million. (More on that never-ending story later.) This was a habit of the mythmaking One Direction fandom, which enjoyed selecting and recirculating key moments of its own history even as it was still unfolding. Another was from Niall Horan, in January 2010: “applied for xfactorhope it all wrks out,” he tweeted six months before he’d even heard the words “One Direction” himself. The fans dug it up after they’d made him famous, and by the time I started going to One Direction concerts, it had become common—maybe even played out—to print poster-size enlargements of the tweet and wave them at Horan if he looked your way in the crowd.
In public, fangirls were a joke: a ball of hysteria, so noisy! On the internet, the joke was on everybody else. The Rihanna Navy moved over from a small co-run blog to a Twitter account called @RihannaDaily in 2009, the same year that the biggest fan accounts for Beyoncé and Lady Gaga appeared. At the time, Twitter had not yet decided what to be. These early Twitter-using fans often came from the cultural powerhouse of Black Twitter, or from insular fandom spaces like LiveJournal and Yahoo Groups, and initially found themselves in small, tightly knit clusters, discussing the movements of their heroes in circular conversations. They came up with the internet-age semantic convention of using an abstract plural pronoun even when speaking alone. As in, “We have no choice but to stan.” As their circles grew, they realized they could disrupt conversation and funnel attention at will, taking over the Trending Topics sidebar whenever they had a whim to. Eventually, they settled into a rhythm—Tumblr was the confusing and therefore secluded site for longer-form conversations and strategy sessions, while Twitter was the faster-paced site for a public-facing display, where they showed off their numbers and their no-limit capacity for posting.
When One Direction lost in the finals of The X Factor, its nascent fandom mimicked what previous fan groups had done but made it bigger and faster. “They lost The X Factor but won the world,” fans repeated to themselves like a mantra, willing the dream to life. From the beginning, their efforts hinged on direct participation from the stars they were centered on, which the One Direction boys provided in the form of intimacies, inside jokes, and regular online conversation—they disclosed how many hours they’d slept, the type of cereal they’d eaten and at what time, the game shows and cheesy film franchises they watched to turn off their brains. They spent so much time talking to their fans in blurry behind-the-scenes livestreams and casual, crackling Twitter threads that some fans were genuinely shocked when they were unwelcome at Niall Horan’s nephew’s baptism.13 They’d never been uninvited before.
For me, One Direction arrived just in time—like being yanked out of the crosswalk a second before the bus plows through. Or like waking up from a stress dream and realizing that your teeth have not fallen out: Thank goodness, and why was I so scared?
I was nineteen, home for the summer, working in the mall food court. I loved school, but I hated the event of college, and couldn’t find a place to insert myself in a fraternity-dominated social landscape. Most Saturday nights, I would put on something ugly, drink two beers in a fraternity annex and wait for someone to say something I could throw a fit about, then leave. I watched so much television my freshman year, I received a warning email about exceeding my limit for campus internet usage. I hadn’t kissed anyone, and I’d made only a handful of friends I wasn’t sure I even liked. At the same time, I was obsessed with a coworker at the mall who was older and generally cruel. I’d driven home most weekends just to make minimum wage elbow to elbow with him, pulling weak espresso shots and drizzling caramel syrup over whipped cream. When I wasn’t doing that, I was stewing on Tumblr, scrolling through moody imagery and photos of feminist-lite prose tattooed into rib cages. The year was a bad one for me in general, and I didn’t have any idea why I—the gleaming try-hard of suburbia!—was suddenly failing at essentially everything.
But I still liked the feeling of being taken care of by my parents, sinking back into the arrangement of being one of four children, all girls, taken on outings and lectured for this or that. I still wanted to be a child, and to enjoy childish things. It was August, and the heat was insane. We weren’t a summer activities family, apart from the travel soccer leagues we played in every year, but we were a movie theater family. So my mom’s minivan took us to a matinee showing of the One Direction documentary This Is Us. My younger sisters were already fans, but I wasn’t. I didn’t care about anything except the air-conditioning and the snacks and the fact that I wouldn’t be paying, driving the car, or trying to be charming. I could just slump, maybe sleep, and occasionally wake up to ask someone to dump some more popcorn into the paper napkin on my lap.
Here’s what I saw at first: five boys, impossible to differentiate. Boring. The songs blend together. There’s too much shiny brown hair. But then, for whatever reason, One Direction decides to go camping. This is a physical comedy sequence—why would these boys know how to set up tents? (Liam does know, because competence is his signature.) When it gets dark, they sit around a fire and talk about how they’ll “always be a part of each other’s growing up,” and will probably stay friends forever. Then Louis says something incredible, which is that he anticipates someday being forgotten by most of the world, but that he hopes to be remembered, by “a mom telling her daughter” about the band she loved when she was young. “They just had fun, they were just normal guys, but terrible, terrible dancers.” At that, I felt a jolt. My covetousness of approval from men my age, maybe, or my sort of saccharine interest in intimate lifelong friendship, or my deepest desire, which was for nothing to fundamentally change—some combination of these things produced an outsized reaction to a twenty-one-year-old boy describing what he wants as the legacy of his time on earth: to stay in touch with his boys, for women to recall him sometimes as they age. It’s not any easier to explain than other kinds of infatuation. In fact, it’s harder, because it wasn’t as if I’d developed a crush— in fact, I generally found Louis the least charming of the five. I’d only been enchanted by this one little idea of his, tossed off so casually.
It took a while for it to sink in. But a few months later, I sat in a high school friend’s car in a parking lot outside of a Red Robin in Ohio, near the small art college where she was studying graphic design. We were dehydrated and exhausted, depleted from a night of celebrating both Halloween and her twenty-first birthday. It was a weekend together that was about to end—I was going to get on a Greyhound bus back to a college campus where I still loved no one and was making no progress toward building an identity for myself that wasn’t tied to sitting in cars in parking lots of chain restaurants with people I’d known all my life. On the radio, One Direction was singing about their mothers and sisters. My friend was already a big-time fan, so she knew whose vocal part was which. She picked them out quietly, forehead on the steering wheel. “The story of my life, I take her home, I drive all night to keep her warm,” Harry Styles shouted— as she informed me. “The story of my life, I give her hope,” he said next. If I focus, I can put myself back in that car and feel the hot rush of gratitude and surprise. I can see my oldest friend’s hand on the dial, turning it up without comment while our waves of nausea passed.
One of the more evocative pieces of modern art I have seen in my life was posted to Tumblr shortly after One Direction’s final performance together.14 It started as an illustration from a 1967 issue of the DC comic Young Romance, the one showing a woman in a purple turtleneck with a close-cropped auburn bob, holding red manicured nails up to her lips while two long tears stretch down her face, out from under a pair of sunglasses. Reflected in her shades, usually, are two images of a couple kissing—she’s torn up about it. Romantic jealousy, captioned “Can any man really be trusted?” But in this Photoshopped version, the image that bounces off the plastic is a GIF of Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles hugging.
This was an act of public affection the two had abstained from for several years at that point, hoping to discourage the popular fandom theory that they were secretly in love (“Larry Stylinson” in shorthand). But apparently moved by the significance of the night and the moment, they gave in to feeling and embraced. In this remix, the woman’s tears are of surprised joy rather than romantic betrayal. “I remember the whole fandom feeling so happy,” the artist, Maëlys Wandelst, told me when I emailed her years after she posted the image.15 She’d made it in Photoshop in under an hour while sitting in bed. It was just a hug, but now it is the hug. The hug, the hug, the hug. Scroll through Tumblr long enough and you’ll see—there’s only one hug that needs no further identification. (Even the day before the hug’s anniversary is celebrated every year on Tumblr, with well wishes of a happy Hug Eve.) The darker elements of the story are missing from the meme. You can’t see how the Louis and Harry fanfiction community was subsumed by the Louis and Harry truther community, or how a conspiracy theory unfurled over the course of several years, incorporating new villains at random. At one level, looking at this image is a pure and singular sensory experience, like carbonation. It reminds me of having a crush. But looking closer, as part of the subculture that would really understand it, it reminds me of years of conflict and paranoia—it reminds me that something as beautiful as One Direction, brought to the internet, can somehow produce years of conflict and paranoia.
This is not actually a book about One Direction, for a couple of reasons: I don’t think they’d appreciate it, and, as much as I love them, they are not so interesting. (They are boys, and we are the same age.) It’s not a book about Twitter or Tumblr or the hundreds of years of technological innovation that brought us to free GIF-making software either. What I would like it to be is a book that explains why I and millions of others needed something like One Direction as badly as we did, and how the things we did in response to that need changed the online world for just about everybody who spends their time in it. The people, many of them young women, who catapulted One Direction from reality show failure to international pop stars did so with methods that had never been seen on such a scale before, and with a dedication and single-mindedness that defied easy understanding. They catalogued every wince and wink for years on end. They sent threats of violence to girlfriends and to journalists. They were warm and witty and generous, sharing in-jokes and spare dollars for iTunes downloads. They were cruel and stupid; they schismed and broke down. Like many of us, they had a habit of needing more than they could get, and of giving too much of themselves in spaces where they were unlikely to be rewarded.
One Direction fans, locked in a never-ending death match with Justin Bieber fans, pioneered the idea of a Twitter stan war. On Tumblr, they created new language, spoke in code, and popularized the core phraseology of our time, including “I want [X] to run me over with their car.” The artifacts of their elaborate conspiracy theories published daily to Tumblr read stranger than a Pynchon novel. They invented new methods for getting what they wanted, which included such methodical and bureaucratic techniques as teaching international acquaintances how to fake American IP addresses and thereby accrue Spotify and YouTube streams that would count on the Billboard charts.16 They were driven by passion, but also by a desire for control. Because of their role in promoting and financially supporting the artists they love, these fans have maintained a creator’s hand throughout those artists’ careers, treating them as collaborative projects. They take responsibility for every setback and share in the thrill of every success.
When I sat down in front of my Tumblr dashboard as an adult, looking at it for the first time as a reporter rather than a participant, I wrote two questions: How did fans use the internet to create and accrue a new kind of power? And then, What are the characteristics and limitations of that power? These questions cut at multiple levels; the way individuals experience fandom in their personal lives is much different from the way fans experience a community together, which is different from the way we all experience fandom, in its collective version, at its most visible and insistent. One Direction arrived at the same time as commercial social media, and they rose at the same time as a new wave of anxiety, isolation, and fractured attention. Their success in that context doesn’t strike me as a coincidence, but the mystery of how so many people were able to find happiness through watching them and talking about them deserves documentation. So, too, does the unfortunate side effect of that joy, which is its commodification—fanfiction websites cut deals with major film studios, brands trade merch for tweets from major fan accounts, “fan” is at this point an industry term for “consumer.” If fangirls seem powerful, that power still comes from taciturn platforms that want them almost solely for the ease of selling ads that align with their interests—it can be taken away at any time. See Tumblr’s acquisition by Verizon, which led to mass purges of “NSFW” fan content and is only a recent example in a long history of censorship in fan spaces.17 Or the way moderation systems on Twitter and YouTube implicitly and explicitly favor rich copyright holders over those who might appeal to principles of fair use, placing strict boundaries around the way fans are permitted to communicate.18 As one-dimensional “girl power” rhetoric and corporate feminism have once again succeeded in leeching real meaning from the women’s movement, pop stars have also appropriated it for their own use, to charm greater allegiance from fans by embracing an extremely narrow idea of what it means to support women: supporting the beautiful women they’ve turned into stars, defending them on the internet by lashing out against anybody who would criticize them.
What can we expect under these conditions? Within the current arrangement, with full command of the tools now available, with the best possible understanding of the promise and limitations of the platforms that presently exist, years ahead of everyone else, fans wield a specific and fragile kind of power. What do we all stand to lose if it slips out of their grasp? And if they manage to hold on to it—well, what then?
My favorite One Direction song is from the band’s fifth album, Made in the A.M., released in November 2015, shortly before the start of their indefinite hiatus. It’s called “I Want to Write You a Song,” and it is earnest to the point of being nearly unpleasant. It really teeters on the edge. It’s the discomfort of an adult writing a love letter in crayon, and I like it mostly because of the way it explains to me, in clear terms, my most enduring and childish hopes. “I want to write you a song,” Niall Horan informs me matter-of-factly. “One to make your heart remember me.” This is sort of the classic definition of a lullaby. “Any time I’m gone, you can listen to my voice and sing along.” Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson would like to write me a song as well—and lend me their coats, or so they say. “So when the world is cold, you’ll have a hiding place you can go.” Liam Payne is going to build me a boat—it’s so my heart won’t sink. This is all so generous, it’s hard to believe I deserve it. The twist, as revealed in the song’s chorus, is that I might. “Everything I need I get from you,” the four of them say to me in turn. (Zayn Malik left the group with a farewell Facebook post, eight months prior to this song’s release.)
Of course, this is too much. This is not a normal thing to say. This would not be a very mature thing to feel. It’s pretty twisted, actually, playing as it does on the existence of an uncountable number of parasocial relationships, and each time I hear it, I think about the teenage fear I was swimming in when I went to see that documentary. But I also think about how much fun I’ve had, and how many times I’ve been surprised by what I’ve seen. For every disappointment or flare-up of viciousness, there have been days and days and years on end when most people who love One Direction feel only that, and it leads them to a desire to create things: art, writing, music, community, funny videos of people screaming. “One Direction reminds me that love, joy, giddiness, even hysteria are crucibles of intelligence,” the novelist Samantha Hunt wrote on The Cut the year that song came out. “There’s a darkness in this light music that stirs thoughts of life.”19 If I’m really honest, I like One Direction because their music reminds me of myself. I’m nineteen and I’m not nineteen; I get to hold the two images side by side and think about the ways in which I’m changing and the ways in which I will always be the same.
“I Want to Write You a Song” is a promise and an apology. Dripping with proactive nostalgia, it seems to admit that this is the last time we will be written a song, even though members of the band have always publicly insisted that they are only taking a break, embracing an opportunity to nurture their individual strengths and pursue divergent artistic interests. It’s the coded language of the end of a romance—keenly felt but ultimately untrue. I’ll care about you forever. This will always matter as much as it does now. It can’t and won’t! It’s fitting because One Direction is just a band: special to the people who love it, ordinary to everyone else. The song, sweet as it is, has a cool remove to it that inclines me to believe that the performers agree. This music will not be remembered as particularly innovative. These stadium tours will be eclipsed; these chart records will inevitably be broken.
The legacy is something else: the people who took the paragon of a commercial product and made it the foundational text of a new kind of culture. Their indefatigable belief that the dull, senseless pain of modern life could be undone—the world remade in the likeness of a pop song.