Best Song Ever
Thoughts on Liam Payne and One Direction
Hi welcome to my most breaking post as I am writing about news that has been with us for barely 48 hours.
Wednesday’s confirmed death of One Direction band member Liam Payne was shocking news at first (shout out to my coworker who broke the news). We stood and said “oh that’s wild” and then moved on with the day as some celebrity passings go.
But the news didn’t wash over as it sometimes does with similar news, the passing of public figures. The more time I sit with it, I really think this has rattled me in a way I am often ambivalent about when it comes to the cycle of breaking-news-celebrity-death-then-everyone-posts-to-their-Instagram-stories.
As you read on, know that I consider myself a big fan of One Direction. BUT, I do not know a lot about One Direction aside from the music. I was not a tumblr girlie shipping each permutation of Liam, Harry, Zayn, Niall, and Louis. Admittedly I often cannot even discern their voices on songs.1 I’m learning.
Among my peers, One Direction was never a serious band. They were formed on a talent show. They were a boyband when millennials were nearing post-college adulthood— gross. They were “for girls” in an age when social media existed so that we could punch down to their fans, a different time from when *NSYNC toured the world and their fans (me) could just exist without the shame.
I never got the chance to see One Direction live in concert. Not in the right place at the right time for the right price, perhaps. Or maybe I didn’t have the same Ticketmaster prowess I have today. The one detail that sticks in my mind is that the last time I attempted to buy tickets, they were stopping through Los Angeles at the Rose Bowl on September 11 of that year and… ya know something just felt weird about that date.2
It’s not healthy to live with too many regrets but I firmly believe never seeing them before their “hiatus” is one of my biggest regrets, at least culturally. Until this week, it was always easy to soften the blow knowing/praying/The-Secret-ing that we’d get some giant reunion tour in 10, 15, 20 years.3
Pop music is always so closely associated with summertime but One Direction always gave fall vibes, despite their outdoor-stadium-filling anthemic songs. For five straight years in 2011-2015, 1D released an album in mid-November and for a few of those years (okay, I was a bandwagon fan, not on board until midway through their tenure) I would take the entire 5-6 day travel window on Thanksgiving to be off book on the latest 1D offering. Sorry to the dry turkey but there are more important things to be grateful for. I suppose the reunion tour could still happen in the future, but now it will always be missing something. And so when I shuffle through all of the One Direction in my music library this week and probably through the fall season, I’m processing the loss of something not even real, a future cultural experience that never actually existed.
I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that this news will bring together Harry, Zayn, Louis, and Niall sooner rather than later for a type of tribute performance (one may even think at February’s Grammys, though the Recording Academy never even gave them a nomination, despite now giving Harry his flowers), and maybe that will be the best thing to soften this mix of grief and regret.
In the meantime, I am nothing if not charitable about culture, so here’s an extremely-non-exhaustive list of five-star songs I recommend if your only entrance into One Direction is “What Makes You Beautiful”.
The last things that broke me were reading the statements from each of the boys, especially reading the nicknames they had for each other. Followed by seeing seeing a clip of Maggie Rogers talk about Liam’s death on stage on Thursday and then proceed to sing a snippet of “Night Changes”.
Except for Louis, whose voice gave “Sporty Spice” of the group. If you know you know.
This anecdote is in fact on my dating profile. I will not make this mistake again.
It’s important to note that seeing the Backstreet Boys in 2018 was one of my favorite concert experiences ever. Some groups just have that star power forever.