FIRST IMPRESSIONS: One Direction

Is it bad that I hadn't heard of One Direction until last week? Suddenly they were trending on Twitter.. For some reason, their name led me to believe that were a k-pop band or maybe even a misspelling of Glee's New Directions. They're not... they're a five piece boy band from the UK and apparently they finished 3rd on the X-factor in 2010. It does always seem like the people who don't win these competitions get the most popularity, doesn't it?


Not knowing what to expect, I searched up their singles and listened. I actually went in with pretty high hopes.   I thought to myself, "Ooh, they're from another country! Maybe only the US produces splenda sweetened pop music."

No. Or... maybe I should say na. Na na na.

I first listened to What Makes You Beautiful. A song about a girl who doesn't know how pretty she is? Oh man, I haven't heard this one before. After a painful two minutes and twenty seconds, I turned it off. Perhaps going past 1:30 was just being hopelessly optimistic. Is there a prechorus here? Is there a chorus at all? It sounds the same to me. And wait, no, what's that I hear? Oh God, no... A cowbell?! What Makes You Beautiful sounds like a song that's stuck in the late 90s or very early 2000s. Aaron Carter and his craving for candy comes to mind...

Na na na was a musical improvement. This time, the main singer sings rather than talking. The backing vocals, which were lacking in WMYB, help to fill out the bottom of the song. I really appreciated the drawn out words and notes in Na na na. If you compare the two, you'll find that WMYB seems to have a stop-and-go kind of feel to it, which makes it happy, dancey, and fun, but not good in the flow department. Lyrically, Na na na is another song about breaking up and getting back together. Katy Perry's Hot n Cold  comes to mind for this one.

So what I think of One Direction based on these two songs? I think they're an average, pop group that'll be gone in the next five years. You'll find nothing substantial in these lyrics. You might argue that a girl will hear WMYB and become less shy, but no. That's not going to happen. She's never going to know a guy's looking at her, or if she does, she's going to think he's a predator. Sorry dudes, but I can pretty much guarantee the shy girls are afraid of you.

One Direction is living up to their name by going in one direction - out. Mind you, this is informed hatin'; I don't deny their star potential. I predict that they will rise high into the atmosphere in 2012 before fading away in a non-brilliant star collapse.