One Direction - is this a legit new threat wrt to a new boy band invasion? y/n

I'm enjoying this with muted expectations. It all sounds very good but it's hard to get over Harry's shallows as a writer

lmao at "carolina." "oh yeah for my first solo album i'm just gonna rewrite 'stuck in the middle with you,' seems fine"

― ToddBonzalez (BradNelson), Friday, May 12, 2017 10:45 AM (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for a considerable portion of his audience, doing that is probs a novelty. places like music-writer twitter and ilx make it hard to forget that tweens/adolescents are the primary buyer demographic for this stuff (whether the solo stuff is being targeted at them anymore or not), but, like...they /arel lol

*/are/

kid can't write lyrics for shit but otherwise the harry solo album is p solid pleasant 70s rock pastiche stuff. i listened to styles as well as the liam payne single for something i'm writing and i assure you the payne thing is 1,000x worse and more tryhard

oh the liam payne single is dogshit, don't get me wrong. also i don't hate this record and am not blind to its audience

word. i was actually wondering who the audience is - fans who bought 1D records for the vaguely country-rock ballads? did they have those? I should clarify that I have never listened to more than like, two 1D songs, enough to understand the appeal but realize it wasn't my jam

So many good songs..

My seven-year-old niece loves "What Makes You Beautiful," and hearing to her belt along with the chorus has earned the song a small place in my affections, but on the whole, idgi. Then again, I never liked the Backstreet Boys either.

“fireproof” should get some kind of award for production

Well this is kinda great

today in Things You Cannot Make Up: I was in the cafe I go to every day, working on my dissertation about @Harry_Styles, when outside the window appears.... the real human Harry Styles pic.twitter.com/azCqSZYqll

— Ally Gross (@AllysonGross) May 21, 2018

<3

he's....aged

he's.... aged well

man needs a haircut imo

god has it really been more than five years since i wrote some profoundly erotic harry styles / mick hucknall slashfic itt

where does the time go

miss them so much.

otm

...because I heard Glad You Came again.

Heard “Night Changes” at the mall today.

today i heard 'what a feeling' again and is probably their best song ever?

tied with "No Control"

and "little black dress" and "fireproof" and

1D traxx poll please

pleaaase.
'fireproof' and 'stockholm syndrome' are obvious contenders.

What A Feeling is the one I play most. Fantastic song.

I like No Control too, but What Makes You Beautiful and Steal My Girl and Best Song Ever

every song on the radio sounds like "stockholm syndrome" now

Would you say that the radio has... Stockholm syndrome?

“stockholm syndrome” is a really good 1975 rip off but “change your ticket” is >>>>>>>>>>>>> everything

Yep

every song on the radio sounds like "stockholm syndrome" now

Apparently I need to listen to the radio more - what specific songs are you thinking of, Brad?

oh i was def exaggerating to the point where... that claim isn't even correct, but i've heard a few examples in the past few months; ofc the one that sticks in mind is the charlie puth rebrand, but also that new 5 seconds of summer song? these are all 1975 bites to a degree but it's also not necessarily the sound i associate with them bc it sounds cross-pollinated with mj pastiche

may be playing fast and loose with the word "radio" there too

sorta reminds of me of when multiple people were making fake maroon 5 songs in 2015 including maroon 5 ("sugar")

recent maroon 5, charlie puth, shawn mendes and 5sos singles/albums are all in a continuum of tasteful lite guitar pop that i think was crystallized by 1D as adapted from 1975, who used similar guitar tones but in a more bombastic fashion

maroon 5 “wait” is my fav example of this tho bent towards more contemporary notions of slick pop in the way you might expect from maroon 5. it was co-written & produced by john ryan who w/ julian bunetta did the last three 1D albums so the connection is even really that tangential

oh thank god i'm not completely full of shit

i think the tendency to ascribe the genesis of a partly imagined mainstream lineage to one or two acts that had little direct/lasting impact on mainstream radio (even while they were quite famous!) just b/c one rly likes their music is understandable but profoundly silly. i mean the 1975 come on what

(i appreciated that you at least pointed out creative personnel in common wrt 1d/maroon 5 but "wait" doesn't even sound remotely like any 1d song i've heard lol)

ok where did this sound come from

like i'm not making this attribution bc i LOOVE the 1975, these are the reference points i have

"Get Lucky"

lol nm i'm making an argument i don't even want to make

might as well throw in John Maye was part of the lineage

oh yeah that was another new single that ticked this box for me

i don't really think these songs sound like "get lucky" but ymmv

"get lucky" is more patient zero for the michael jackson/weeknd/maroon 5 stuff

ah yeah definitely

im being a bit reductive for the sake of expediency... the trend i'm talking about is mirroring pop in general (lady gaga "the cure" etc), the current post-tropical house/"future bass" iteration of EDM seen in recent zedd & marshmello songs etc

but as far as the rock end of it goes i think the 1975 -> one direction is far from crazy... 1975 are a niche concern in america but pretty big in the UK & 1D did two blatant rip offs of their sound and i think also messed around with matt healy at one point. and again the guys behind that are working in this same vein w/ some of the listed artists and others. (an interesting tangent here is that "slow hands" -- a bunetta/ryan song that fits comfortably in the company of this realm of tasteful soft rock -- was a bigger hit for niall than anything off harry's album and i think any other solo 1D songs outside of "pillowtalk" and "strip that down"). "wait" doesn't sound precisely like one direction but then again maroon 5 never has sounded like one direction or the other way around. i'm just outlining a continuum.

john mayer produced a song on the shawn mendes album

Daughter is watching iCarly and 1D have just turned up.

Harry's acting skills have certainly improved

maroon 5 are interesting to me specifically... red pill blues is half amazing and i think really representative of this general trend in pop but at the rock end in particular. you can see them slowly un-cheese themselves in the time in between "moves like jagger" (which fwiw was ripping off chic even before "get lucky"... it is maroon 5 after all) and "what lovers do". "don't wanna know" is a straight up trop house song basically & "cold" is the skeletal version of the slow, clean, insanely well produced, rippling guitar line stuff that pops up in a few places on red pill blues ("best 4 u" in particular). V is essentially unlistenable but not that far off of red pill blues really, the latter is just way less... cheesy & corny essentially in a lot of ways (in production and in the way that adam levine's falsetto isn't sharpened into an ice pick). "what lovers do" is basically an attempt at a "cool" version of "moves like jagger" (xtina becomes sza, shellback becomes starrah) but again we're talking about small degrees here -- "sugar" was this plasticine version of disco pop (dr luke & cirkut re-writing katy perry's already infantile but much better "birthday") that feels just a bit more artfully done on "what lovers do"

the 11 min song that closes red pill blues is basically an extended yacht rock jam (maroon 5 balearc remixing themselves) and i really don't think that you have to draw a far line between that and some of the real head-y one direction album tracks like "what a feeling" and "fireproof"

Can’t talk about “what lovers do” w/o genuflecting to “sexual” though.