15 September 2011
One Direction only finished third in the 2010 series of The X Factor, but by the following year’s series had become the biggest boy band on the planet. What’s more, they did so by returning the boy band idiom to the concept of teenage joie de vivre, far from the maudlin wedding-anniversary ballads of Westlife. And one of them now alternates with Taylor Swift as World’s Biggest Pop Star. This only goes to show that you people know nothing about discovering talent, and all our music decisions should be left to Simon Cowell. We’ll have plenty more opportunities to consider the oeuvre of 1D and its solo members in the chart years to come, but here’s where we meet them first.
Whatever your residual feelings on Cowellism in particular and boybanditry in general, I think most people were well disposed towards One Direction’s likeable energy. The actual songs, though, tended to be derivative, borrowing familiar riffs, hooks and intros from old people’s records. ‘What Makes You Beautiful’, for instance, doesn’t need the Malibu-beach setting in the video (below) to have you recognise the opening notes from Grease singalong hit ‘Summer Nights’. That much is fine by me, and the track surfs its wave of sunny boptimism effectively.
What makes ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ stick in my craw, though, is its lyrical slant: the male as gatekeeper and arbiter of female self-worth, commodified in physical and cosmetic terms. “You’re insecure”, goes its opening gambit, gleaming in the gaslight, before setting out the route to happiness: “If only you saw what I can see / You’d understand why I want you so desperately”. This is textbook advertising psychology (make them feel bad, sell them the dream, and they’ll buy the product) as much as hoary old sexism; after all, the pop culture industry is part of the same patriarchal capitalist paradigm, and no one ever lost money by making women feel shit about themselves. Spit on me, 1D!
