single-minded
On Hanson:
"Listen, just do me a favor and forget about 1997 for a minute. Not the whole year, maybe, I’m sure something important happened to you in 1997— for me it was the fifth grade, which I’ve been given to understand is kind of a big deal— so maybe just the pop culture stuff. Who hosted SNL and which Friend was screwing which other Friend and that one song that was always on the radio that you probably really hated, or have learned to hate in the years since.
Because that song was Hanson’s MMMBop, and if I could make you forget it, if I could spend a week writing about the band without addressing it, I would. But it is, inescapably, their legacy, their biggest hit, the thing people hum when they see the Hanson poster on my bedroom wall (yeah, still) so let’s get this out of the way: Hanson has been a band for twenty years, and they are great, and you would probably think so too if you had never heard MMMBop."
On One Direction:
"This is the myth of One Direction:
In 2010, Harry, Louis, Liam, Niall and Zayn entered The X-Factor as solo contestants. Individually, they were good but not great. They were kicked off the show. And then the divine hand of Simon Cowell stayed their banishment from reality television paradise and said, “What if you all came back, and the five of you sang together?”
They were strangers to each other when this happened: five teenage boys from mostly lower-middle class towns in England and Ireland. They weren’t the only band Cowell put together that season. They were underdogs and goofballs, bad dancers. They were plucked from obscurity and brought together by fate.
They didn’t even win their season, actually— someone named Matt Cardle did, and I’m sure he can tell you how much good that did him. Because winning, as it turned out, didn’t matter. Winning might actually have hurt their careers, because it would have made them products of the machine instead of the two-time almost-also-rans.
Instead, they became ones we got to save ourselves."
On Taylor Swift:
"Taylor has finally figured out how to tell him (all of them): fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you. She does it in a dress, with a smile. A pop song with a pen click sound effect. A video that distracts you with dresses! And horses! And a baby deer! So that you get the song stuck in your head for so long that eventually you can’t help but hear the lyrics: go ahead and imagine she’s just a blank space, and that you’ve diminished her enough that she isn’t a threat to you or anyone. She’ll go ahead and sell a million plus records, calling you by name."
and now this week I'm on One Week One Band doing Harry Styles' Harry Styles, because I don't know how to love something without needing to write 5,000+ words about precisely how and why. Two more posts are coming before the end of today, but I figured I'd send this now so you could start catching up before that happens.
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What else? Nothing else. It was a lovely short week and everything I'm working on right now is a little more long-term. Maybe you watched the finale of PLL and wanted to know what I thought about it earlier in its run? Maybe you didn't, or don't. That's fine too.
I did still wrote a book, you can still review it on Amazon, and I will still appreciate it if you do.