One Direction’s Week in Review: 11/7
The band is on a break, but the boys aren’t.
One Direction last performed together on a Sunday night, Dec. 13th, 2015, on the season finale of the British iteration of “The X Factor.” They sang a single from their fifth album, accepted accolades from Simon Cowell and others, and then vanished into the night to begin a hiatus with no end-date. Between them, in the months since they last took the stage, they have officially announced very little — two solo record deals, the birth of a child, the founding of a golf management company. But each week they are out in the world, doing things, going places. This is what we know.
On Tuesday, Niall Horan tweeted, “Wish I could vote today .. America get out and vote and do the right thing please.” He meant “vote for Hillary Clinton,” but he didn’t say it explicitly. Most fans could use some casual deduction skills to figure out he meant Clinton — he has a Barack Obama statue in his yard — but maybe some couldn’t.
On Wednesday, he confirmed his leanings when he tweeted, “It’s a sad state of affairs but the one thing you can take from it is that map they’ve shown of how the young people voted” and “Grin and bare with this guy. No one knows what to expect ,everyone’s nervous but I’m sure the American people will have more sense in 4 years” and “……. well we all hope so.” He’s a twenty-three-year-old Irish child who didn’t graduate from high school.
Horan has 27.7 million Twitter followers. How many are U.S. citizens? I don’t know. How many of those U.S. citizens are over 18? I also don’t know. How many are convicted felons? I also do not know this. But if even 1 percent of Horan’s followers are U.S citizens over 18 not convicted of a felony, that’s over a quarter of a million people that could have heard the message “vote for Hillary Clinton,” and some percentage of those people would have read that tweet and said, “okay.”
That’s the nature of the way we interact with celebrities! We love them. We want to please them. We buy the things they buy and tattoo their handwriting and lyrics on our bodies, and when they tell us to buy an album, we do. Does it also work with voting? I don’t know. I don’t know. Maybe it could have. Am I blaming One Direction—three British children and one Irish child—for the election of a racist misogynist xenophobe to the highest office in the country? No, that would be ridiculous. I’m just thinking about it. Tossing it around in my head.
Horan was the only member of One Direction to tweet anything about the U.S. election. (Horan was also the only One Direction member to tweet about Brexit.) All four own houses in the U.S. and have made this country their home for part of the year. Their former bandmate is Muslim. Horan is in LA.
Liam Payne is also in LA, posting dumb shit. On Sunday he posted some poppies (“lest we forget the bravery, always remember” and the prayer hands emoji) for Remembrance Sunday. That’s nice actually. Fine.
Louis Tomlinson is also in LA, posting shit that a week ago I probably would have been taken with, but now just seems tone deaf and stupid.
Harry Styles is presumably also in LA. He hasn’t posted anything in ages. I tend to think of him as a special human, an important human. When he is on stage, he glows. Maybe he’s in pain somewhere, v sad that his adopted homeland just elected a fascist and he couldn’t do anything about it. Maybe his management wouldn’t let him tweet. Maybe he didn’t tweet because he thought there was absolutely no chance the bad man would win. Everyone he knows was voting for the extremely qualified woman and it was just too ridiculous, the dumb man on the TV, a nightmare, impossible. I’m projecting.
Notable Adjacent News
I don’t know what adjacents did this week because every time one of them popped up on my feed, Instagramming their breakfast in London, I got angry and unfollowed them.
If I stop loving One Direction because of this man, it will be the least bad thing he has done. But it’s still a bad thing.