Excerpt from “Don’t Forget Where You Belong”
The following is an excerpt from a Creative Non-Fiction essay written in the Fall of 2020 for a VCU MFA CNF Workshop. It has previously never been published (the same excerpt exists on my Substack — samanthamerz.substack.com). It is about One Direction and how deeply personal fandom is to fans of boy bands, with small nods to my own journey.
Enjoy.
“Don’t Forget Where You Belong”
On the night of August 8, 2015, I cried no less than four times while watching One Direction perform in a football stadium filled with 60,000 other fans in Baltimore, Maryland. My memory, hazy now five years on, relishes in the beauty of the scene, letting the kinetic electricity coursing through the atmosphere envelop me in the swell.
Encircling me are fans of all ages and backgrounds. In a row behind me, there is a father with two younger girls, aged roughly between 11 and 13. They hold in their hands a homemade sign, painted and expressing their love for Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, Liam Payne, and Zayn Malik. On this man’s face is a smile, still visible in the scattered illumination projected on the audience from the stage lights. Even though his arms are crossed over his chest, he watches the show, bobbing his head, occasionally turning to his left to see his two young girls experience happiness in its most pure form. I like to think that he remembers this day fondly, realizing that the girls’ experience wouldn’t have happened without him.
To my left are a few young women between the ages of 17 and 22, adorned in fashionable crop tops, shorts, and sneakers, enthusiastically jumping in place and singing lyrics back to the stage at the top of their lungs. Their individual voices unify with the masses to create a powerful, enthusiastic echo that reverberates through the arena. When watching back live videos of these shows, the most poignant moments fall on the shoulders of the members stopping and listening to what is erupting around them. I may not be a performer on a stage, but I have always imagined that this is one of the best sounds in the world. Fans singing back with so much earnestness and urgency that it feels as if the world would collapse and fall into ruin if these words never left their mouths.
Stretching up through the highest tiers of seating, to my left and right, and across the entire length of the field are thousands of fans. Their features are indistinct to my eye, but each possesses a personal story, a history, a love for this band. Some are holding signs, most holding phones and cameras, but all are feeling accepted, loved, and seen in this moment. Each of them are vying for something that feels intimate and personal, despite the unlikeliness of that in a crowd this large. Regardless, they still yearn for that brief moment that they can call their own.
And then there is me. Standing in Section 124 at the end of the row, with a perfect view of the stage, just 10 rows back. 27, single, working retail at a local toy store, almost unable to come to this show, dressed in clothes that would probably be considered “too young” if I happened to look my age. I am by all accounts not a target member of this specific demographic.
What was I doing there? This wasn’t “made” for me. I worked at an independent record store for eight years straight. I had already lived through the TRL heydays of Boy Band Mania. Where did I fit into this equation? What made this band, this night, and this experience so special? Why did it matter so much that I ran over a mile and half in an anxiety-motivated stupor, afraid I was going to miss the show?
**
Boy bands have been made to look like they have been scientifically crafted in a lab by music executives to harness the full luminescent power of teenagers who practice uninhibited idol worship. When I was growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Total Request Live no-scoped and capitalized on fandom by creating a culture of celebrity that allowed fans to see their favorite musicians outside of the music video or televised performance. They were given a chance to appear “as themselves” while still being cool, suave, and collected in a space that was made for fan consumption. Who didn’t want to tune in every weekday after school from 3 to 4 PM to watch Carson Daly interview Britney Spears, *NSYNC, Backstreet Boys, and Destiny’s Child? I was not allowed to watch any of it, thanks to my mother’s overly pious and zealous “Dark Ages” restrictions enforced in our household. It became a covert mission after school to go to my next-door neighbor’s house and gain my pop culture education.
The music of the late ‘90s had cornered the market on bubblegum pop songs, each perfectly written, curated, and packaged to be sold to the public in the shape of handsome, multi-talented (mostly white) young men. They sang songs about longing, lost love, and hopes of future affairs with some mythical unknown Someone. If you were like me, you longed to be that new burgeoning love interest. Every love song was about you, with them singing and confessing their deepest feelings of ardor in front of millions around the world, and like anyone, you wanted to think that they sung for you and no one else.
The beauty of being a boy band fan is that it remains a uniquely private, yet publicly shared experience, emulated among millions from around the world, regardless of age and gender. The unifying force was a piece of music written for some ridiculously handsome group of young men that was digitally etched into the underside of a shiny CD that you popped into your boombox. That song would play through speakers that were never loud enough and you sung the lyrics in the solitude of your bedroom, swooning and sighing. The song’s pulsating tempo bore rhythms, beats, voices, and sentiments that made you feel alive, electric. It may have been part of a sexual awakening, part of something that made you feel comfortable with yourself. Even though the members of the band didn’t know what you looked like, or where you came from, or your past, you felt loved and embraced by the soundwaves that emanated from your speakers and into your ears.
I never really had the opportunity to embrace my boy band fanaticism as fully as my peers did. My mom’s “no secular anything” led to me sneaking over to a friend’s house to watch music videos and learn dance moves by the Backstreet Boys. This loss of an all-encompassing shared experience with peers my age was a gaping wound, and I couldn’t yet recognize its pain. Eventually, I found pop-punk and Warped Tour bands, but it never captured the purity of unadulterated euphoric pop obsession that is created when you love a boy band.
**
My first memory with One Direction is not what I would call revelatory, but it is something that I cannot forget. It had to be around Fall 2011. I was in my then roommate’s car while running an errand or two. As she turned over the ignition, the radio cut on to the local pop station and out of the aging car speakers came the musical intonations of this song. It was upbeat, it featured a cowbell, and a gaggle of male teen voices telling me “You don’t know you’re beautiful.” I remember thinking that this was a new single by another UK-based boy band outfit, The Wanted.
As someone who is not averse to fun in music, I was not put off by the actual musical elements of the song. It was the lyrics that first made me second guess them. The song opens with “You’re insecure / don’t know what for / You’re turning heads when you walk through the door / Don’t need makeup / to cover up / being the way that you are is enough.” As a burgeoning feminist, I was pretty repulsed at the notion that I needed my physical beauty relegated to the idea that didn’t know I possessed it. I talked mad shit about this song whenever I heard it on the radio.
I didn’t even know what the band looked like, but I just knew that they were some goofy looking teen idols trying to be the next Jonas Brothers or something like that. My co-workers at the record store where I worked also felt the same. Thanks to promotional material supplied by Columbia Records, I soon saw that they were almost exactly how I imagined them: floppy hair, polos, chunky shoes, among other things. They were basically children who had to sing songs with lyrics that were vapid, based, and shallow. The music was surprisingly fun, yet I couldn’t take them seriously. They were just another boy band from the UK trying to break in America. It was a given that my co-workers wrote them off. I did too… at least at first.
**
When One Direction was formed in 2010, their immediate popularity can be credited to fan-driven voting on the UK reality talent show, The X-Factor. Simon Cowell, former American Idol judge and canonically resented resident prick, witnessed the five members auditioning individually. At the time, their voices and personalities were not deemed strong enough to compete as solo artists. Claiming to have decided “in about 10 minutes,” Cowell took Harry, Zayn, Louis, Niall, and Liam under his wing and placed them in a group together, acting as their coach and mentor.
In the opening 20 minutes of One Direction’s 2013 documentary, This Is Us, Cowell and the band remark on the strangeness of their unprecedented atmospheric rise. They went from having only a few fans hanging out at the studio after a performance to hundreds. It was 2010, during the early years of social media, and the fervor around their popularity caused Cowell to pause and confess, “this is unusual.” What may have been discounted by the producers of the show, music execs, mainstream music media, and the band itself was the dedication and veracity of a teenager with social media access and free time. Take thousands of them and you have something that is only hoped for: a groundswell of an organic, viral moment that transformed the lives of One Direction, as well as their fans.
By utilizing Twitter and Tumblr, these fans made it their life to spread the Gospel According to 1D. And it worked. Before a single was even released, a ravenous and dedicated group of British fans tweeted and shared videos of One Direction with the world, and the world responded by opening their arms and embracing them. The birth of One Direction ushered in the new age of boy band fandom and it was facilitated almost entirely online. At the helm steering their trajectory were the fans.
**
The song that I heard that day was One Direction’s first single, “What Makes You Beautiful,” which debuted in the UK on September 11, 2011. Their debut album, Up All Night, was released in November that year and rocketed to the number two position that week. Even though it didn’t claim the number one spot, the inaugural album still managed to break records, becoming the fastest-selling debut album of the year in the United Kingdom. When it finally got its American release, their label pushed its date up a week to meet the high fan demands. On March 13, 2012, 1D Mania swept the US, shooting to number one on the Billboard charts. Up All Night gave One Direction the title of “the first English group to ever debut atop the charts with their first album,” according to music critic and boy band fan, Maria Sherman. If you think that isn’t a big deal, this was a feat that not even the “originators” of the British boy band, The Beatles, could accomplish.
While 1D was reaching new levels of popularity, I was staunchly denying my own personal affection for One Direction. Their ascension can be credited to the brilliant work done behind the scenes on the album, not just by management. Savan Kotecha was a producer and songwriter for Up All Night and much like anyone who got lassoed into working with 1D in the early days, he knew they were going to be something special. He and his other songwriting partners, Carl Falk and Rami Yacoub, leaned heavily into creating a “Beatlesque and Monkees-esque” sound, full of “fun, poppy guitars.” In addition to deriving influence from historically popular British “boy bands,” they intentionally focused on rewriting the formulaic “boy band code” that popularized TRL favorites by opting to replace the synths and pianos featured on those standard tracks for guitars. This edgier sound, as one music critic called it, allowed them to seem “dangerous,” though personally speaking, that doesn’t come until their third album, Midnight Memories.
Their popularity on the charts played into the historical marketability typically accompanied by the excitement of “Boy Band Mania,” but One Direction has always classified themselves as being the “Anti-Boy Band Boy Band.” Mischievous, lacking in matching outfits and choreography, and self-proclaimed “terrible dancers,” these five lads worked hard to subvert the stereotypical definition that was tacked on to boy bands. They were more personal, more involved, and more tangible than any boy band that preceded them. Armed with a YouTube channel, updated regularly by the boys during the first year of their ascent to stardom, and Twitter profiles, 1D broke down the limiting barriers that separated the fan from the band. And that approach manifested in ways that new fans did not expect.
**
I recently compiled a questionnaire to share with friends of mine that have fallen under the thrall of One Direction. I wrote out 17 questions, asking about the first point of contact with the band and the eventual descent into One-D-Land, among other things. It wasn’t meant to be wholly comprehensive of their love for them during specific times of their lives but was simply meant to see how the band affected them personally. Each of the six replies I got expressed the impact of these five incredibly silly and stupidly handsome ding-dongs from the United Kingdom that I once was so averse to.
Sean Mushenheim was one of those teens who eventually fell under the charm of the band. In 2012, she was a 16-year-old junior in high school and had previously only been exposed to the band through the photo-blogging platform, Tumblr. Scrolling through her “dashboard” of posts, she used to see pictures and GIFs of the band reblogged by people she followed, but never invested in the group herself, claiming to be “pretty apathetic” about them. However, in April 2012, she happened to watch One Direction’s debut performance on Saturday Night Live. She explains, “That was it – I was IN.” Part of that appeal? “The memory of the sweet nervous energy of Harry Styles doing his solo in ‘What Makes You Beautiful.’” Following that chance watch, Sean’s love for the band happened suddenly: “It [felt] like one day I was not a fan and the next day I could tell you the birthdays, hometowns, and defining characteristics of each band member.”
While reading through the questionnaires, I found that almost all of the responders had felt the same way – one day, they weren’t fans and then the next, they were.
Anna-Claire McGrath found them when she was 24 and studying abroad in Scotland. She was farther removed from her family and friends than ever and was feeling isolated and lonely. Her emotions manifested in “the worst unrequited love of my life, on an English guy who was several years younger.” In most cases of unrequited adoration, this relationship was doomed, and the drama that sparked between the two eventually led to their falling out. When this occurred, she “went into a downward spiral,” but made the decision to displace the “crazy energy I was spending on one British boy who didn’t love me on[to] five of them who I could not text.” She confessed to pirating This Is Us before reuniting on the European mainland with her family, and the rest is history.
Moira McAvoy was like me: she heard “What Makes You Beautiful” and “postured about how it was anti-feminist,” leading her to pen “multiple Tumblr posts about how it was offensive.” She, like most fans in the burgeoning days of the fandom, kept their love on the “down low,” over fear of retribution from friends, critics, and invisible internet entities that lurked in the shadows of the web. She confessed, however, that when their album Four was released, she finally succumbed to their wake. When asked if she was working through any personal trauma or issues around the time, Moira wrote, “What is undergrad but a thinly-veiled depression chamber?” She goes on to share in her response that while navigating school, she was also attempting to “disentangle myself from a complicated and fraught relationship with my father,” realizing she was “not straight and was possibly in love with my best friend,” and “bottoming out with alcoholism.” Her comfort in 1D and much later, Harry’s solo career, took her into the arms of a community that has been “united by a love of someone who mostly radiates light, acceptance, and fluidity” and expressed that the people she has surrounded herself with “embrace the same values in themselves and others.”
The component that seemed to unite fans more thoroughly than just their love for this band was the culture of acceptance and love that encircled the fandom. Everyone is brought together under the umbrella of these sentiments, creating an almost-Utopia in these spaces, both online and in-person. While there are, with most fandoms, issues that will bubble under the surface, even within the smaller subgroups, everyone is there for the same reason: to have a good time. Sean wrote, “It made me so happy to watch them and listen to them! Their relationships with one another were so real and I had fun watching them have fun.”
**
The best word to try to summarize what One Direction encompasses to anyone who may naysay about their appeal or musicality is that singular phrase: fun. One Direction is wildly fun. They are a straight shot of serotonin and dopamine to the heart and brain. Their songs are infectiously catchy, tinged with the hint of an edge that’s highlighted by their embrace of raucous rock guitars. Their tracks feature lyrics and melodies so chock full of ear worms and call-and-response vocalizations, you can’t help but remember them. Despite the lyrics being hopelessly cheesy and subscribing to heteronormative and sexist norms of the genre in their early days, they refuse to give up their vacancy.
What makes 1D’s songs so memorable? Perhaps it’s their insistence on repetition in their choruses. Or their ad-libbed “Ows!” accenting spaces between words. Or how Harry can stretch out the word “Yeah” over a couple bars of music. Or how Zayn can effortlessly drop off some vocal runs that make you stop in your tracks. “Kiss You” slaps because it insists on having a good time. By the time you get to the bridge, the lush effect of five voices harmonizing some “Na na’s” will lead to you shaking your head back and forth, if not fully running in place, which is what they did when they performed this song live. To deny even the smallest atomic iota of fun while listening to 1D is cheating yourself out of uninhibited silliness and glee.
If you look at the concert footage from This Is Us or the band’s live tour DVD Where We Are: Live from San Siro, you can see the happiness, the enraptured joy, the undiluted euphoria that accompanies fans when they are at a One Direction show. It is a safe space for them to feel like themselves and to be around others who equally love and share this experience. While each person there probably has a different favorite member and a different life, they are all there for one reason: to have fun.
What One Direction represents is unashamed ownership of something that makes their fans unrealistically happy. The sensation of excitement and bliss-filled euphoria that erupts out of fans starts in the pit of the stomach and climbs up through the body towards the throat. It then begins radiating out of them in hiccups and gasps for air, causing an instinctive clutching of the chest, accompanied in most cases with screaming and in others, tears. This has happened to me many times. While this behavior can be negatively seen as “hysterical” or “fangirling,” it is an earnest physical reaction to something that has caused us to feel these incredibly overwhelming emotions. And if it’s over a boy band that we love and share with a greater community of individuals, then so be it. Everyone has their thing and that makes them, regardless of what it is, beautiful.
