One Direction with Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, and Louis Tomlinson have been the kings of preteen pop and the hands-down leaders in social media as well since 2010. Winning the hearts of hundreds of millions of young girls worldwide, these guys have not only risen to the top but have stayed on top for six years. They remain the most popular boy band since the Beatles, 50 years ago. One Direction has taken the world by storm, one breathless young girl at a time, but do they merit all that attention? One Directioners probably outnumber their grandmothers who were infected with Beatlemania at about the same age, but it is the same type of phenomenon.
Do Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, and Louis Tomlinson actually have the talent to stack up against John, Paul, George, and Ringo, or are they just pretty faces? One Direction’s Styles, Malik, Horan, Payne, and Tomlinson obviously have the raw talent in terms of vocals and voice range to equal just about anyone, but there has to be more to it than that. The question is, why all the attention, and does that attention mean they are talented.
One Direction, and especially Harry Styles have dominated Google, made $30 million each, and made millions of girls scream until they lost their voices. What exactly sets 1D apart, and are they really worth all this commotion? Harry Styles’ presence in some ways upstaged the rest of the cast while filming the movie Dunkirk, as girls and paparazzi repeatedly tried to breach security to see Harry Styles. The press went bonkers trying to play up the fact that Harry had taken up acting, from every imaginable angle. That said, Zayn Malik’s solo work is simply incredible, and Harry Styles is expected to also release a great solo album in 2017.
Liam Payne and Niall Horan are also planning to produce solo albums to be released next year. They all hope that their solo albums will be taken seriously, but fear being locked into the image of their previous genre instead. The One Direction boys are incredibly talented and capable of so much more than the world has seen from them so far. If they do reunite, perhaps with Zayn Malik as well, they do have the potential to equate with the Beatles, provided they can escape the preconceptions people have about them because of previous genre limitations that forced them into being overtly commercial, and somewhat vanilla.