Why Do People Hate One Direction

Whilst reality TV gives a lot of ordinary people their 15 minutes of fame, in a few rare cases it manages to create lasting success for the individuals concerned. One such rare case concerns UK boy band One Direction, who after finishing a creditable third in the 2010 series of The X Factor have gone on to become one of the biggest pop groups in the world; by 2012 they were worth around $50 million to their record label, and said label’s CEO expects that figure to double over the course of this year. On top of their two albums to date, they are due to release a film in the immediate future (it might already be out- I don’t keep track), and there can be doubt that their veritable army of scarily impassioned, dedicated ‘directioners’ have propelled the five young men who make up the band to unfathomable fame and prosperity.

However, it hardly needs to be said that this wave of ultra-enthusiastic support for the band has not been universal by any stretch of the imagination. Outside of their primary market of pre-teenage girls, and particularly amongst young men*, the prevailing attitude towards One Direction swings between apathy at best to vitriolic hatred at worst. In some circles, they rank second only to Justin Beiber as objects of hatred that represent, in the eyes of these people, everything that is wrong about modern music.

Why should this be? After all, whilst people all have certain types of music they like, even a hardcore heavy metal fan would not begrudge the world the existence of, say, The Pogues, and there would, from a completely neutral perspective, seem to be little reason for the open hostility that gets directed towards One Direction’s brand of pop. It certainly doesn’t get directed towards all pop acts; just for a couple of examples, Queen were a pop group a lot of the time and have been accepted into the pantheon of musical greats, and Lady Gaga, despite (and in some ways thanks to, since they give her individuality) her various theatrics and non-universal appreciation of her music, is at least afforded some respect by the majority of the musical world.

One potential theory that at least serves as a jump-off point in investigating the general ill-feeling towards one direction might be the image and behaviour of the band themselves. Much of their success, it should be noted, comes from the image the band members present; they are all well-behaved, apparently friendly, straight-laced middle class white boys, possibly the single least offensive description imaginable and one that renders them endearing to both fans and their fans’ parents. Not only that, they are all (and I mean this in the most platonic sense possible) at least reasonably good-looking young men, adding an amorous aspect to their fans’ appeal. This is not in the mould of what one would consider your typical rock band to be (images of sweaty, skinny, partially naked men with long hair bouncing around a giant heap of amps and yelling obscenities spring to mind), and an element of some people’s dislike of the band is probably rooted in their being a bit too straight-laced. Some would argue, and I kinda agree with them, that their being relatively normal teenagers (by music industry standards at least)is probably good for them as people, but their presentation of themselves fits so into the safe normality of suburban, inoffensive living that it puts them straight in the firing line of rock music’s traditional ‘escape the system’ mentality. But that’s not enough on its own; as the antics of Justin Beiber and Miley Cyrus have proved recently, pop singers often attract far more abuse when they try to play the rock ‘n’ roll bad boy(/girl) than when they stay with a ‘safer’ image.

OK, let’s tick off a few other factors. One Direction pull off that oft-hated habit in musical circles of not writing (most of) their own music, and it’s fair to say that most of the songs they do sing are pretty banal, formulaic and aimed solely at repeat-delivering the same pseudo-romantic pop ideas to their aforementioned audience of teenage girls (although a) one could think that either one of those two points partially negates the other and b) anyone who’s heard REM’s Star Me Kitten knows that writing dumb lyrics is not just the preserve of pop groups). Their habit of performing covers of more famous songs has drawn them ire from overly protective music fans who have some idea that they are ruining ‘their music’ by ‘stealing them’, but this is exactly the same logic used by opponents of gay marriage and is frankly not valid. Some dislike their manufactured, reality TV origins (all originally editioned for The X Factor as soloists, before being encouraged to re-audition as a group by a judge), which is perhaps a slightly  fairer niggle if you don’t like that sort of show than the some people’s annoyance the fact that none of them play an instrument (whilst performing that is; they include in their number a guitarist and pianist, I have discovered), but claiming that this means they have no talent is a little invalid because they are not trying to be musicians. Other people claim they have no talent because they can’t sing, but reviews of their live shows reveal that they do comprise five genuinely capable singers. The issue here is that their recorded music, the stuff that finds its way onto iPods and radios, comes sadly complete with autotune and other bits of digital trickery, making their sound unnaturally smooth and free of the blemishes that, to me at least, give music character. I profoundly dislike autotune and its ilk, if only because it shows a profound lack of respect for the performers’ skill, but even this is not, I believe, people’s biggest cause of hatred. That, I think my investigations have found, lies in the Directioners.

I am sure that, as with most large and easily generalised groups of people, the vast majority of One Direction fans are basically OK people who happen to enjoy the music produced by the band, which is hardly a war crime. They are, it is true, predominantly squealing teenage girls which can be a touch annoying to overhear, but again this is hardly their fault. However, even a little One Direction-related digging will quickly reveal the existence of hardcore ‘Directioners’, whose almost terrifying level of deification of the band is combined with an air of self-superiority to match the worst of indie-rock hipsters and an unfortunate familiarity with the internet and its ability to help deliver anonymous and astonishingly aggressive abuse. Those fans who are not privy to every minute detail of the band members’ existences, so I gather, are readily derided and put down by this hardcore group, and anyone found publically admitting they don’t particularly like their music can expect an array of abuse ranging from mere insults of their intelligence and sexual orientation to desires for the death of them and their loved ones. The irony is of course that it is this behaviour that encourages much of the abuse received by the band and their fans, and provides one of the most significant reasons for people’s dislike of One Direction.

That and the fact that the band members care for their appearance, which apparently gives material to the homophobes.

*Actually, in researching this topic I discovered that probably the biggest source of hatred for One Direction comes from fans of The Wanted. I was going to comment on this, but then realised I have better things to do with my time than read up on another band I don’t much like.

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“Have you ever thought that nostalgia isn’t what it used to be…”

Human beings love nostalgia, perhaps strangely. For all the success of various self-help gurus and such telling us to ‘live in the moment’, there are few things more satisfying than sitting back and letting the memories flow over us, with rose-tinted spectacles all set up and in position. Looking back on our past may conjure up feelings of longing, of contentment, of pride or even resentment of the modern day when considering ‘the good old days’, but nobody can doubt how comforting the experience often is.

The real strangeness of nostalgia comes from how irrational it is; when analysing the facts of a given time period, whether in one’s own life or in a historical sense, it is hard not to come to the conclusion that the past is usually as bad as the present day, for some different and many of the same reasons. The older generations have, for example, have always thought that current chart music (for any time period’s definition of ‘current’) is not as good as when they were a teenager, that their younger peers have less respect than they should, and that culture is on a downward spiral into chaos and mayhem that will surely begin within the next couple of years. Or at least so the big book of English middle class stereotypes tells me. The point is that the idea that the modern day is worse than those that have gone before is an endless one, and since at no point in history have we ever been rolling in wealth, freedom, happiness and general prosperity it is a fairly simple process to conclude that things have not, in fact, actually been getting worse. At the very least, whilst in certain areas the world probably is worse than it was, say, 30 years ago (the USA’s relationship with the Middle East, the drugs trade, the number of One Direction fans on planet Earth and so on), from other standpoints it could be said that our world is getting continually better; consider the scientific and technological advancements of the last two decades, or the increasing acceptance the world seems to have for certain sections of its society (the LGBT community and certain racial minorities spring to mind). Basically, the idea that everything was somehow genuinely better in the past is an irrational one, and thus nostalgia is a rather irrational idea.

What then, is the cause of nostalgia; why do we find it so comforting, why is it so common to yearn for ‘good old days’ that, often, never truly were?

Part of the answer may lie in the nature of childhood, the period most commonly associated with nostalgia. Childhood in humans is an immensely interesting topic; no other animal enjoys a period of childhood lasting around a quarter of its total lifespan (indeed, if humans today lived as long as they did in the distant past, around half their life would be spent in the stage we nowadays identify as childhood), and the reasons for this could (and probably will one day) make up an entire post of their own. There is still a vast amount we do not know about how our bodies, particularly in terms of the brain, develop during this period of our lives, but what we can say with some certainty is that our perception of the world as a child is fundamentally different from our perception as adults. Whether it be the experience we do not yet have, the relative innocence of childhood, some deep neurological effect we do not yet know about or simply a lack of care for the outside world, the world as experienced by a child is generally a small, simple one. Children, more so the younger we are but to a lesser extent continuing through into the teenage years, tend to be wrapped up in their own little world; what Timmy did in the toilets at school today is, quite simply, the biggest event in human history to date. What the current prime minister is doing to the economy, how the bills are going to get paid this month, the ups and downs of marriages and relationships; none matter to a childhood mind, and with hindsight we are well aware of it. There is a reason behind the oft-stated (as well as slightly depressing and possibly wrong) statement that ‘schooldays are the best of your life’. As adults we forget that, as kids, we did have worries, there was horrible stuff in the world and we were unhappy, often; it’s just that, because childhood worries are so different and ignore so many of the big things that would have troubled us were we adults at the time, we tend to regard them as trivial, with the benefit of that wonderful thing that is hindsight.

However, this doesn’t account so well for nostalgia that hits when we enter our teenage years and later life; for stuff like music, for example, which also is unlikely to have registered in our pre-teen days. To explain this, we must consider the other half of the nostalgia explanation; the simple question of perception. It is an interesting fact that some 70-80% of people consider themselves to be an above-average driver, and it’s not hard to see why; we may see a few hundred cars on our commute into work or school, but will only ever remember that one bastard who cut us up at the lights. Even though it represents a tiny proportion of all the drivers we ever see, bad driving is still a common enough occurrence that we feel the majority of drivers must do such stupid antics on a regular basis, and that we are a better driver than said majority.

And the same applies to nostalgia. Many things will have happened to us during our younger days; we will hear some good music, and ignore a lot of crap music. We will have plenty of dull, normal schooldays, and a couple that are absolutely spectacular (along with a few terrible ones). And we will encounter many aspects of the world, be they news stories, encounters with people or any of the other pieces of random ‘stuff’ that makes up our day-to-day lives, that will either feel totally neutral to us, make us feel a little bit happy or make us slightly annoyed, exactly the same stuff that can sometimes make us feel like our current existence is a bit crappy. But all we will ever remember are the extremes; the stuff that filled us with joy, and the darkest and most memorable of horrors. And so, when we look back on our younger days, we smile sadly to ourselves as we remember those good times. All the little niggly bad things, all the dull moments, they don’t feature on our internal viewfinder. In our head, there really were ‘good old days’. Our head is, however, not a terribly reliable source when it comes to such things.