The tragic death of Liam Payne last month was a shocking, devastating happening that served as a reminder of the dangers of celebrity and the neglect that the music industry so often demonstrates towards what are, after all, normal people. The immediate aftermath of the news brought to light the ways in which this man was clearly driven to a place of existentially poor mental health due to a lack of support system surrounding him. Alongside the abuse allegations that emerged from his ex-girlfriend, Maya Henry, the situation was truly tragic for all involved.
The news brought on a bout of One Direction engagement the world-over that hadn’t been seen in nearly a decade. Six of One Direction’s songs entered the Global Billboard 200 in the week after Payne’s death, as did all six of their albums. I partook in this, as I’m always willing to pass through a wave of psychological nostalgia. The emergence of the group was one of the first cultural moments I can truly remember living through.
It was a weird thing to revisit, mainly because it’s the first time I’ve truly reflected on something I can literally remember happening in the context of a world that is fundamentally different from then.
I’m not a direct contemporary of the members of 1D – they’re all around five years older than myself – but I can vividly remember watching them on The X Factor and then being unable to escape their sound for the rest of my teenage years. As an insecure 13-year old I, naturally, despised them. Obviously I was jealous; they were cool, they were talented, and every single girl loved them. It was only in the aftermath of their breakup and in the post-1D world where I’ve really come to appreciate the agreeable hedonism of ‘Best Song Ever’ and ‘Live While We’re Young’, whilst ‘Night Changes’ is a wonderfully wistful comment on the ephemerality of time (something that will become startlingly relevant to this article). I even have a favourite song of theirs; ‘No Control’, a euphoric guitar-led number that would be at home as the opening credits song to any mid-00s teen drama.
But my main reflection on revisiting their X Factor performances, music videos and visits to awards show stages is just how definably early-2010s they are in aesthetic. This presented a very interesting sociological proposition to me because I am a big advocate of ‘hauntology’ in culture - that being the persistence of socio-cultural elements from the past in the present. It was a term originally used by Jacques Derrida and the theory in music was popularised by social theorist Mark Fisher.
I find the easiest way to explain it comes from Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life:
'Imagine any record released in the past couple of years being beamed back in time to, say, 1995 and played on the radio. It’s hard to think that it will produce any jolt in the listeners. On the contrary, what would be likely to shock our 1995 audience would be the very recognisability of the sounds: would music really have changed so little in the next 17 years? Contrast this with the rapid turnover of styles between the 1960s and the 90s: play a jungle record from 1993 to someone in 1989 and it would have sounded like something so new that it would have challenged them to rethink what music was, or could be. While 20th-century experimental culture was seized by a recombinatorial delirium, which made it feel as if newness was infinitely available, the 21st century is oppressed by a crushing sense of finitude and exhaustion. It doesn’t feel like the future. Or, alternatively, it doesn’t feel as if the 21st century has started yet.' - Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, pg. 6
Fisher wrote this in 2012, amid the One Direction frenzy. I find undertaking a retrospective interesting because I agree wholeheartedly with Fisher’s point. The 21st century is marked by a persistent feeling of the past recombined into the present, resulting in cultural moments that don’t particularly have any sense of the moments they exist in. Fisher further explains this:
'Take someone like the stupendously successful Adele: although her music is not marketed as retro, there is nothing that marks out her records as belonging to the 21st century either. Like so much contemporary cultural production, Adele’s recordings are saturated with a vague but persistent feeling of the past without recalling any specific historical moment.' - Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, pg. 11
One Direction’s music is a prime example of this. I don’t think there is anything distinctive about their sound. I don’t think their songs feel like the early 2010s despite inherently being the 2010s. But I do think, retrospectively, the members themselves feel like the 2010s.
Find any picture of One Direction from their first few albums and they don the uniform of the 2010s boy: camel-coloured chinos, pre-skinny jeans, low neckline threadbare t-shirts with irrelevant graphics, checkered shirts and ill-fitting blazers. It is bizarre to look back on but that’s what was cool at the time. I remember coming home with my first ever pair of sandy chinos and my mother’s reaction simply being, ‘oh, right, love!’.
Getty/Ian West/PA Images.
The aesthetic itself was clearly reproducing the past. It was an amalgamation of 90s preppy-ness with the questionably-named ‘hip-hop’ aesthetic of the 2000s. It was, for all intents and purposes, terrible.
But what I think is interesting it how it interacts with the proposition that the 21st century is unable to articulate itself because it is repressed by the forces of capital, which no longer takes risks on anything it doesn’t know to be explicitly marketable (this is why we get Indiana Jones 5 instead of Indiana Jones, for example). Recognisability is comfort and comfort is dependable – it might not break records but it will allow profit to be generated. And whilst the aesthetic that One Direction had in their early years wasn’t wholly unique – as I said, it was a 90s/00s combo – looking back I would argue that it is definitively of its time in a manner that hasn’t been experienced since about 2013. I don’t think that specific combination can be mistaken for another time period, particularly not for someone who lived through it.
As a result, I’m willing to suggest that One Direction may be the last artist who actually had a new aesthetic.
The post-1D years, and even their final year or so, have been marked by a change in mainstream cultural aesthetics. Male fashion moved into its skinny jeans era, combined with a co-option of the once-alternative ‘skater’ aesthetic with hoodies and skate shoes like Nike Janoskis and Vans becoming the norm. The late-2010s and 2020s moved into a more generic ‘streetwear’ era, where repurposed crewneck jumpers, baggy jeans, cargo pants and workwear went mainstream. That still exists today, together with a slow bleeding back into the repurposing of the Y2K aesthetic in younger Generation Z-ers (baggy jean shorts, low-rise, tighter fitting graphic tees and the shudders boho-chic).
At a separate point in his work, Fisher says that ‘culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present’. I find the early-2010s aesthetic of 1D so interesting because I think it is a representation of exactly that. Formerly dominant subcultures with distinct aesthetics – punk, emo, country, all being good examples – still exist, albeit in much more restricted spaces. The new-preppy of 1D’s early era, however, no longer exists in the mainstream in any shape or form, and I would posit that’s because it looked fucking terrible. Yet, this hodge podge, short-lived mainstream aesthetic was exactly that because culture was struggling with the ability to articulate the present. The result was a disjointed, partially-original combination of previous aesthetics that have resulted in something we can look back on and recognise as a distinct time period.
But as previously discussed in the late-2010s to the present day, that ability to articulate the present has become ever more washed away. This is best evidenced through the biggest music artists that exist right now – Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Charli XCX and Chappel Roan.
All of them have defined 2024 in their own separate ways. And yet, individually, there is nothing definitively ‘2020s’ about them. Aesthetically, Sabrina Carpenter uses 1950s pin-up looks to complement the overtly sexual themes in her music, the sound of which is as undefinably mainstream as one can be. Olivia Rodrigo’s music has a nice riot grrrl/nu-metal edge but, in saying that, it is not new itself, and I find it difficult to even suggest she does have an aesthetic. Chappel Roan’s drag-inspired looks, whilst obviously brilliant, are still a subversion of 1960s feminine fashion as drag is, and her music sounds more like Fleetwood Mac than anything particularly new.
Charli XCX’s brat deserves its own paragraph. brat has undoubtedly broken ground and transcended into a cultural phenomenon, and we will all remember brat summer in our own special way. Yet the pure aesthetic of brat is nothing we haven’t seen before and, more importantly, didn’t particularly try to be anything new. The iconic album artwork of ‘brat’ in lowercase Arial font on a garish green background is a style stolen directly from early-2000s Cybercore internet aesthetics, whilst the music itself wouldn’t be out of place at any rave, legal or illegal, since about 2003.
And this is before we get onto Taylor Swift. Swift’s latest iteration, The Tortured Poets Department, was her blandest offering yet. It made no effort to distinguish itself sonically, with many of the songs blending into one, and fits perfectly into the idea that culture in the present is struggling to articulate itself.
Importantly, Swift embarked on her ‘Eras Tour’, in which the selling point was that she has gone through a host of different sonic and aesthetic phases, represented in her work. In talking to my friend John about my idea for this article, he posited that Swift is doing something new, manufacturing new ‘eras’ of herself to market, and that ‘the process of that manufacturing is now effectively the product’. Whilst I can’t disagree with the idea that this is new, I still would suggest that nothing about the sound of Swift’s music or indeed her aesthetic is new. You could argue that any song she has ever written wouldn’t feel out of place if it was released today, and I think this is something we literally getting to experience through the (Taylor’s Version) re-releases of albums written a decade ago. I think it stems directly from the reason why culture can’t articulate itself – because the forces of capital that fund it demand recognisability so as to not lose profit. If the manufacturing is the product, then Taylor can always be relied on to enter a ‘new era’, despite the fact that the era itself doesn’t depart in any significantly noticeable way from the previous one. The important part for capital, meanwhile, is to say it has and sell it as such. To use her own words to put too fine a point about both Swift and one-time partner Harry Styles on it, you probably can’t ever go out of style if the style is purposefully timeless.
Most importantly, though, none of these artists are doing anything that appear to be distinctly 2020s. Maybe the same thing was being said about One Direction back in 2012, but I am really unsure that we will look back on this year in a decade and see it as anything especially culturally specific aside from the actual product itself. Drake’s career being eviscerated by Kendrick Lamar, brat, Travis Kelce’s Taylor Era, they will all literally be 2024 but I remain unconvinced that they will articulate it in the way Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band articulates the late-60s, for example.
I also think it’s very interesting that all of the top-selling new artists in 2024 are women. The idea of the boyband isn’t one that really exists in the western music scene anymore. Grouped guitar music is mainly done by 2000s holdovers or bands that haven’t managed to make a dent into the mainstream, let alone develop any kind of cultural capital. Again, I think this is because studios believe they can’t afford to take a chance on anything ‘new’ and, more importantly, don’t really want to.
As a result, then, One Direction bizarrely become the last bastion of a resistance towards the neoliberal co-option of culture that was started in the 1980s. It took around 30 years for these forces to truly ensure that anything mainstream could be placed at any point in time and remain recognisable, but it appears that we have got there. The individual members of One Direction are also doing this with their solo music. There is, unfortunately, nothing about anything they have created that appears particularly 2020s, and only Harry Styles is trying something new aesthetically. Even still, these trials at a defined aesthetic only reinforce the difficulty culture is facing in articulating itself.
Sam Mandi-Ghomi is co-founder and co-editor of Left Brain Media. You can find his other work here.
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