Everything i need i get.., p.2
Everything I Need I Get from You, page 2
In public, fangirls were a joke: a ball of hysteria, so noisy! On the internet, the joke was on everybody else. The Rihanna Navy moved over from a small co-run blog to a Twitter account called @RihannaDaily in 2009, the same year that the biggest fan accounts for Beyoncé and Lady Gaga appeared. At the time, Twitter had not yet decided what to be. These early Twitter-using fans often came from the cultural powerhouse of Black Twitter, or from insular fandom spaces like LiveJournal and Yahoo Groups, and initially found themselves in small, tightly knit clusters, discussing the movements of their heroes in circular conversations. They came up with the internet-age semantic convention of using an abstract plural pronoun even when speaking alone. As in, “We have no choice but to stan.” As their circles grew, they realized they could disrupt conversation and funnel attention at will, taking over the Trending Topics sidebar whenever they had a whim to. Eventually, they settled into a rhythm—Tumblr was the confusing and therefore secluded site for longer-form conversations and strategy sessions, while Twitter was the faster-paced site for a public-facing display, where they showed off their numbers and their no-limit capacity for posting.
When One Direction lost in the finals of The X Factor, its nascent fandom mimicked what previous fan groups had done but made it bigger and faster. “They lost The X Factor but won the world,” fans repeated to themselves like a mantra, willing the dream to life. From the beginning, their efforts hinged on direct participation from the stars they were centered on, which the One Direction boys provided in the form of intimacies, inside jokes, and regular online conversation—they disclosed how many hours they’d slept, the type of cereal they’d eaten and at what time, the game shows and cheesy film franchises they watched to turn off their brains. They spent so much time talking to their fans in blurry behind-the-scenes livestreams and casual, crackling Twitter threads that some fans were genuinely shocked when they were unwelcome at Niall Horan’s nephew’s baptism.13 They’d never been uninvited before.
* * *
For me, One Direction arrived just in time—like being yanked out of the crosswalk a second before the bus plows through. Or like waking up from a stress dream and realizing that your teeth have not fallen out: Thank goodness, and why was I so scared?
I was nineteen, home for the summer, working in the mall food court. I loved school, but I hated the event of college, and couldn’t find a place to insert myself in a fraternity-dominated social landscape. Most Saturday nights, I would put on something ugly, drink two beers in a fraternity annex and wait for someone to say something I could throw a fit about, then leave. I watched so much television my freshman year, I received a warning email about exceeding my limit for campus internet usage. I hadn’t kissed anyone, and I’d made only a handful of friends I wasn’t sure I even liked. At the same time, I was obsessed with a coworker at the mall who was older and generally cruel. I’d driven home most weekends just to make minimum wage elbow to elbow with him, pulling weak espresso shots and drizzling caramel syrup over whipped cream. When I wasn’t doing that, I was stewing on Tumblr, scrolling through moody imagery and photos of feminist-lite prose tattooed into rib cages. The year was a bad one for me in general, and I didn’t have any idea why I—the gleaming try-hard of suburbia!—was suddenly failing at essentially everything.
But I still liked the feeling of being taken care of by my parents, sinking back into the arrangement of being one of four children, all girls, taken on outings and lectured for this or that. I still wanted to be a child, and to enjoy childish things. It was August, and the heat was insane. We weren’t a summer activities family, apart from the travel soccer leagues we played in every year, but we were a movie theater family. So my mom’s minivan took us to a matinee showing of the One Direction documentary This Is Us. My younger sisters were already fans, but I wasn’t. I didn’t care about anything except the air-conditioning and the snacks and the fact that I wouldn’t be paying, driving the car, or trying to be charming. I could just slump, maybe sleep, and occasionally wake up to ask someone to dump some more popcorn into the paper napkin on my lap.
Here’s what I saw at first: five boys, impossible to differentiate. Boring. The songs blend together. There’s too much shiny brown hair. But then, for whatever reason, One Direction decides to go camping. This is a physical comedy sequence—why would these boys know how to set up tents? (Liam does know, because competence is his signature.) When it gets dark, they sit around a fire and talk about how they’ll “always be a part of each other’s growing up,” and will probably stay friends forever. Then Louis says something incredible, which is that he anticipates someday being forgotten by most of the world, but that he hopes to be remembered, by “a mom telling her daughter” about the band she loved when she was young. “They just had fun, they were just normal guys, but terrible, terrible dancers.” At that, I felt a jolt. My covetousness of approval from men my age, maybe, or my sort of saccharine interest in intimate lifelong friendship, or my deepest desire, which was for nothing to fundamentally change—some combination of these things produced an outsized reaction to a twenty-one-year-old boy describing what he wants as the legacy of his time on earth: to stay in touch with his boys, for women to recall him sometimes as they age. It’s not any easier to explain than other kinds of infatuation. In fact, it’s harder, because it wasn’t as if I’d developed a crush— in fact, I generally found Louis the least charming of the five. I’d only been enchanted by this one little idea of his, tossed off so casually.
It took a while for it to sink in. But a few months later, I sat in a high school friend’s car in a parking lot outside of a Red Robin in Ohio, near the small art college where she was studying graphic design. We were dehydrated and exhausted, depleted from a night of celebrating both Halloween and her twenty-first birthday. It was a weekend together that was about to end—I was going to get on a Greyhound bus back to a college campus where I still loved no one and was making no progress toward building an identity for myself that wasn’t tied to sitting in cars in parking lots of chain restaurants with people I’d known all my life. On the radio, One Direction was singing about their mothers and sisters. My friend was already a big-time fan, so she knew whose vocal part was which. She picked them out quietly, forehead on the steering wheel. “The story of my life, I take her home, I drive all night to keep her warm,” Harry Styles shouted— as she informed me. “The story of my life, I give her hope,” he said next. If I focus, I can put myself back in that car and feel the hot rush of gratitude and surprise. I can see my oldest friend’s hand on the dial, turning it up without comment while our waves of nausea passed.
* * *
One of the more evocative pieces of modern art I have seen in my life was posted to Tumblr shortly after One Direction’s final performance together.14 It started as an illustration from a 1967 issue of the DC comic Young Romance, the one showing a woman in a purple turtleneck with a close-cropped auburn bob, holding red manicured nails up to her lips while two long tears stretch down her face, out from under a pair of sunglasses. Reflected in her shades, usually, are two images of a couple kissing—she’s torn up about it. Romantic jealousy, captioned “Can any man really be trusted?” But in this Photoshopped version, the image that bounces off the plastic is a GIF of Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles hugging.
This was an act of public affection the two had abstained from for several years at that point, hoping to discourage the popular fandom theory that they were secretly in love (“Larry Stylinson” in shorthand). But apparently moved by the significance of the night and the moment, they gave in to feeling and embraced. In this remix, the woman’s tears are of surprised joy rather than romantic betrayal. “I remember the whole fandom feeling so happy,” the artist, Maëlys Wandelst, told me when I emailed her years after she posted the image.15 She’d made it in Photoshop in under an hour while sitting in bed. It was just a hug, but now it is the hug. The hug, the hug, the hug. Scroll through Tumblr long enough and you’ll see—there’s only one hug that needs no further identification. (Even the day before the hug’s anniversary is celebrated every year on Tumblr, with well wishes of a happy Hug Eve.) The darker elements of the story are missing from the meme. You can’t see how the Louis and Harry fanfiction community was subsumed by the Louis and Harry truther community, or how a conspiracy theory unfurled over the course of several years, incorporating new villains at random. At one level, looking at this image is a pure and singular sensory experience, like carbonation. It reminds me of having a crush. But looking closer, as part of the subculture that would really understand it, it reminds me of years of conflict and paranoia—it reminds me that something as beautiful as One Direction, brought to the internet, can somehow produce years of conflict and paranoia.
This is not actually a book about One Direction, for a couple of reasons: I don’t think they’d appreciate it, and, as much as I love them, they are not so interesting. (They are boys, and we are the same age.) It’s not a book about Twitter or Tumblr or the hundreds of years of technological innovation that brought us to free GIF-making software either. What I would like it to be is a book that explains why I and millions of others needed something like One Direction as badly as we did, and how the things we did in response to that need changed the online world for just about everybody who spends their time in it. The people, many of them young women, who catapulted One Direction from reality show failure to international pop stars did so with methods that had never been seen on such a scale before, and with a dedication and single-mindedness that defied easy understanding. They catalogued every wince and wink for years on end. They sent threats of violence to girlfriends and to journalists. They were warm and witty and generous, sharing in-jokes and spare dollars for iTunes downloads. They were cruel and stupid; they schismed and broke down. Like many of us, they had a habit of needing more than they could get, and of giving too much of themselves in spaces where they were unlikely to be rewarded.
One Direction fans, locked in a never-ending death match with Justin Bieber fans, pioneered the idea of a Twitter stan war. On Tumblr, they created new language, spoke in code, and popularized the core phraseology of our time, including “I want [X] to run me over with their car.” The artifacts of their elaborate conspiracy theories published daily to Tumblr read stranger than a Pynchon novel. They invented new methods for getting what they wanted, which included such methodical and bureaucratic techniques as teaching international acquaintances how to fake American IP addresses and thereby accrue Spotify and YouTube streams that would count on the Billboard charts.16 They were driven by passion, but also by a desire for control. Because of their role in promoting and financially supporting the artists they love, these fans have maintained a creator’s hand throughout those artists’ careers, treating them as collaborative projects. They take responsibility for every setback and share in the thrill of every success.
When I sat down in front of my Tumblr dashboard as an adult, looking at it for the first time as a reporter rather than a participant, I wrote two questions: How did fans use the internet to create and accrue a new kind of power? And then, What are the characteristics and limitations of that power? These questions cut at multiple levels; the way individuals experience fandom in their personal lives is much different from the way fans experience a community together, which is different from the way we all experience fandom, in its collective version, at its most visible and insistent. One Direction arrived at the same time as commercial social media, and they rose at the same time as a new wave of anxiety, isolation, and fractured attention. Their success in that context doesn’t strike me as a coincidence, but the mystery of how so many people were able to find happiness through watching them and talking about them deserves documentation. So, too, does the unfortunate side effect of that joy, which is its commodification—fanfiction websites cut deals with major film studios, brands trade merch for tweets from major fan accounts, “fan” is at this point an industry term for “consumer.” If fangirls seem powerful, that power still comes from taciturn platforms that want them almost solely for the ease of selling ads that align with their interests—it can be taken away at any time. See Tumblr’s acquisition by Verizon, which led to mass purges of “NSFW” fan content and is only a recent example in a long history of censorship in fan spaces.17 Or the way moderation systems on Twitter and YouTube implicitly and explicitly favor rich copyright holders over those who might appeal to principles of fair use, placing strict boundaries around the way fans are permitted to communicate.18 As one-dimensional “girl power” rhetoric and corporate feminism have once again succeeded in leeching real meaning from the women’s movement, pop stars have also appropriated it for their own use, to charm greater allegiance from fans by embracing an extremely narrow idea of what it means to support women: supporting the beautiful women they’ve turned into stars, defending them on the internet by lashing out against anybody who would criticize them.
What can we expect under these conditions? Within the current arrangement, with full command of the tools now available, with the best possible understanding of the promise and limitations of the platforms that presently exist, years ahead of everyone else, fans wield a specific and fragile kind of power. What do we all stand to lose if it slips out of their grasp? And if they manage to hold on to it—well, what then?
* * *
My favorite One Direction song is from the band’s fifth album, Made in the A.M., released in November 2015, shortly before the start of their indefinite hiatus. It’s called “I Want to Write You a Song,” and it is earnest to the point of being nearly unpleasant. It really teeters on the edge. It’s the discomfort of an adult writing a love letter in crayon, and I like it mostly because of the way it explains to me, in clear terms, my most enduring and childish hopes. “I want to write you a song,” Niall Horan informs me matter-of-factly. “One to make your heart remember me.” This is sort of the classic definition of a lullaby. “Any time I’m gone, you can listen to my voice and sing along.” Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson would like to write me a song as well—and lend me their coats, or so they say. “So when the world is cold, you’ll have a hiding place you can go.” Liam Payne is going to build me a boat—it’s so my heart won’t sink. This is all so generous, it’s hard to believe I deserve it. The twist, as revealed in the song’s chorus, is that I might. “Everything I need I get from you,” the four of them say to me in turn. (Zayn Malik left the group with a farewell Facebook post, eight months prior to this song’s release.)
Of course, this is too much. This is not a normal thing to say. This would not be a very mature thing to feel. It’s pretty twisted, actually, playing as it does on the existence of an uncountable number of parasocial relationships, and each time I hear it, I think about the teenage fear I was swimming in when I went to see that documentary. But I also think about how much fun I’ve had, and how many times I’ve been surprised by what I’ve seen. For every disappointment or flare-up of viciousness, there have been days and days and years on end when most people who love One Direction feel only that, and it leads them to a desire to create things: art, writing, music, community, funny videos of people screaming. “One Direction reminds me that love, joy, giddiness, even hysteria are crucibles of intelligence,” the novelist Samantha Hunt wrote on The Cut the year that song came out. “There’s a darkness in this light music that stirs thoughts of life.”19 If I’m really honest, I like One Direction because their music reminds me of myself. I’m nineteen and I’m not nineteen; I get to hold the two images side by side and think about the ways in which I’m changing and the ways in which I will always be the same.
“I Want to Write You a Song” is a promise and an apology. Dripping with proactive nostalgia, it seems to admit that this is the last time we will be written a song, even though members of the band have always publicly insisted that they are only taking a break, embracing an opportunity to nurture their individual strengths and pursue divergent artistic interests. It’s the coded language of the end of a romance—keenly felt but ultimately untrue. I’ll care about you forever. This will always matter as much as it does now. It can’t and won’t! It’s fitting because One Direction is just a band: special to the people who love it, ordinary to everyone else. The song, sweet as it is, has a cool remove to it that inclines me to believe that the performers agree. This music will not be remembered as particularly innovative. These stadium tours will be eclipsed; these chart records will inevitably be broken.
The legacy is something else: the people who took the paragon of a commercial product and made it the foundational text of a new kind of culture. Their indefatigable belief that the dull, senseless pain of modern life could be undone—the world remade in the likeness of a pop song.
1
Screaming
On the morning of August 25, 2014, a sixteen-year-old girl arrived at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in baffling condition. She was short of breath but had no chest pain. She had no history of any lung condition, and there were no abnormal sounds in her breathing. But when the emergency room doctor on duty pressed on her neck and chest, he heard noises like Rice Krispies crackling in a bowl of milk—spaces behind her throat, around her heart, and between her lungs and the walls of her chest were studded with pockets of air, an X-ray confirmed, and her lungs were very slightly collapsed. Somehow, the upper half of her body had become bubble wrap.
