HOLLYGOSSIP

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

One Direction article in the New Yorker

Via Glooce

One Direction takes over pop rock




One Direction, five amiable young men under the age of twenty-one who came together in England, on the set of “The X Factor,” has taken over America. The band’s record, “Up All Night,” which was released in March, became the first début album by a British group to enter the American charts at No. 1. “Up All Night” has sold more than a million copies, and more than five million digital tracks. In December, the band will headline at Madison Square Garden. It is the newest standard-bearer of an old form: the boy band.


[...] “We’re five lads in a band,” Payne said. “Boy bands aren’t all about dancing and being structured and wearing the same clothes.”
Not only is this statement a dismissal of twenty years of unison dance routines and syncopated beats; it also signals One Direction’s desire to take its place in Britain’s lad culture, which has historically rejected boy bands, preferring rowdy acts like Oasis. 

[...] What One Direction really sounds like, though, is a bunch of girls. The band plays a form of pop rock made popular, in the past ten years, by women. In it, details are either eliminated or enlarged to barn size: there are big hand claps, huge dropouts that spotlight a single word, even sirens. 

[...] Malik has genuine swagger, and Styles has a shaggy amiability. The other three are of various heights, and that’s about all I can tell you.

[...] The album and the band are like a dull gray sphere, with few flaws and fewer distinguishing marks. The marketing plan seems to have been “Make no mistakes.” 

[...] One Direction has no commercial need to change course, or to rough up its cuteness ahead of schedule. But the band needs one demonically well-built track, the kind of thing that [Max] Martin could provide.

                                               Via this blog
Read the whole article at the source



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