For example, I adore the girl groups of the early 1960s: The Cookies, The Ronettes, The Shangri La's, and so on. In my experience, listeners who mock contemporary acts such as One Direction are often very fond of older groups cut from the same cloth. That's a pretty shortsighted approach to music, historically speaking.Ĭhances are it's hypocritical as well. By such standards, Frank Sinatra was "inauthentic." So is Beyoncé. Myopic because these also tend to be the sort of listeners who subscribe to the auteurist theory of popular music, in which an artist who writes his own songs and plays his own instruments is automatically better than an artist who sings someone else's songs and employs backing musicians-never mind the fact that this sort of collaboration was the norm until the Beatles and Bob Dylan came along and has recently become the norm again. In fact, I think that people who behave as if they're morally repulsed by it-such as the commenter on a recent One Direction piece in the Guardian who wrote "Do we really need reviews here of this tripe?," or the one who described the band's music as "a right bag of wank"-are either hypocritical or myopic. The second reason I took the assignment is that I'm not actually as offended by "manufactured pop music" as I'm supposed to be. I figured that a blind musical taste test-a review by someone who might as well be an alien from another galaxy as far as One Direction is concerned-could yield some interesting results. And, of course, the tabloid exploits of resident ladies' man Styles, who is one of the 14,000 celebrities to have dated Taylor Swift (so far). Their stratospheric record sales (19 million singles and 10 million albums in about two years). Their Simon Cowell-X Factor genesis story. The first is that when people talk about One Direction, they tend to talk about everything but the music. If all of that doesn't qualify me to review One Direction's latest LP, I don't know what does. And I don't think I've ever heard a single One Direction song in the wild. My last music story was an admiring profile of Jake Bugg, the young, rootsy British singer-songwriter who recently said that One Direction "must know they're terrible" because they "sing meaningless tunes." I don't know what a Harry Styles is. I once lived down the street from an artisanal mayonnaise shop in Brooklyn. In fact, I'm pretty sure I seem like the sort of person who would hate One Direction. My colleague was laughing, I suppose, because I do not seem like the sort of person who would like One Direction. "You should review Midnight Memories, the new One Direction album." I could barely understand him because he was laughing so hard. "Romano, I've got an idea for you," one of them said on a conference call. My colleagues thought this would be funny.
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