Number Ones: One Direction’s ‘Drag Me Down’ And The Enduring Appeal Of Boy Bands

Bringing his popular column from The Vine to Junkee, Tim Byron takes a deeper look at the top song on the ARIA Singles Chart.

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Even if you usually try to avoid teen pop, you’ve probably heard of One Direction: they’re the premier boy band of our time. Formed on the British version of The X-Factor in 2010, they rapidly became successful worldwide thanks to ‘What Makes You Beautiful’, and they’ve maintained a healthy fanbase over four albums. With all this success, perhaps the most surprising thing about  ‘Drag Me Down’ is that it’s One Direction’s first ever #1 single in Australia.

Mind you, One Direction are certainly no strangers to our charts. Their breakthrough single ‘What Makes You Beautiful’ has sold half a million copies here, and they’ve had a solid run of singles that peaked at #2 or #3 (‘One Thing’, ‘Live While We’re Young’, ‘One Way Or Another [Teenage Kicks]’ and ‘Story Of My Life’).

‘Drag Me Down’, their latest and most locally successful release, was written and produced by John Ryan, Jamie Scott and Julian Bunetta — the team that has also written, produced, played the instruments on, and added the backing vocals to the majority of songs on One Direction’s last couple of albums.

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How ‘Drag Me Down’ Appeals To Fans

The boy band has long been a fixture of pop music – see the Monkees in the 1960s, the Bay City Rollers in the 1970s, New Kids On The Block in the 1980s, or the Backstreet Boys in the 1990s. Like most of their predecessors, One Direction’s appeal is obvious: they’re cute, they look like they’re having lots of fun, and their music sounds like it too.

Video clips for songs like ‘One Way Or Another (Teenage Kicks)’ depict the group running around having a ball, looking like the best of friends – a bit like the Beatles in the movie A Hard Day’s Night. They go to a lot of effort to flirt directly with the fans via the camera lens: there’s a lot of smiles and eye contact. Lisa Simpson’s Non-Threatening Boys Magazine would undoubtedly be largely devoted to One Direction these days.

What’s more, 1D’s lyrics contain more pander than the bamboo forests of China. Take ‘What Makes You Beautiful’, their biggest single until now. The song acknowledges the self-doubts present in most 14-year-olds trying to navigate the world – “you don’t know you’re beautiful” – and turns them on their head – “that’s what makes you beautiful”. It’s textbook teenybopper catnip.

‘Drag Me Down’ also panders expertly, especially since it comes at a pivotal point in the band’s career. One of One Direction’s members, Zayn Malik, recently quit the band, leaving the other four (Liam, Harry, Niall, and Louis) to carry on without him. Most boy bands don’t last five years, and when a band member leaves, it’s usually the death knell: see Robbie Williams leaving Take That or Justin Timberlake’s solo career ending NSYNC.

And the message of ‘Drag Me Down’ is this: you fans are keeping us going through all this. The chorus of the song, after all, has the band singing “with your love, nobody can drag me down”. For a devoted fan, this is a pretty irresistible message.

It’s not the only way that ‘Drag Me Down’ panders, either. Ultimately, it’s mums and dads who are in charge of the money the teens spend on One Direction music, tickets and related memorabilia. And so lyrics like “all my life, you stood by me when no one else was ever behind me” make a sort of sense. You can imagine fans singing those lyrics thinking about their long-suffering mums, or One Direction dedicating the song to the long-suffering parental chaperones at concerts (the Backstreet Boys also pandered to audience mums with a song called ‘The Perfect Fan’, below).

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The Appeal Of The Boy Band

An episode of the animated family sitcom Bob’s Burgers, ‘Boyz 4 Now’ — written by two sisters, Lizzie and Wendy Molyneux, who you suspect were teenage Backstreet Boys fans — is an empathetic look at the psychology behind the boy band phenomenon. The family’s two daughters go to see the titular boy band’s live show; the eldest daughter, Tina, whose character revolves in general around the awkwardness of the crazy hormones of early puberty, is a devoted fan of Boyz 4 Now. Her younger sister Louise scorns the whole idea of boy bands but tags along to the concert anyway — only to discover that she actually has her first-ever crush on a Boyz 4 Now member.

What that Bob’s Burgers episode explores so well is how the boy band is a fairly safe receptacle for the hormone-crazed crushes of the teen years. The band members can be fantasised about without messy reality getting in the way, because if you decide that you like Harry now rather than Liam, nobody’s feelings really get hurt. The idols of the boy band become fantasy lovers; the fan can try out different crushes and see what feels right.

The boy band crush also serves other purposes, creating both a kind of solace and a means to jockey for status in the cut-throat world of the high school pecking order. For the teenage boys at my high school in the 1990s, it was Matellica that did it: liking James Hetfield’s snarls and Lars Ulrich’s pummelling kick-drum seemed really important at the time. It was a sort of bonding experience: to like Metallica was a signal that, yup, you understood the weirdness of being male and teenage. When someone else got it, it made them seem a little bit more human. The ability to play ‘Nothing Else Matters’ on guitar or the ability to talk about Kill Em All gave you a certain prestige compared to those who just knew ‘Enter Sandman’.

One Direction don’t have as many guitar solos as Metallica, but they serve a similar purpose for plenty of teen girls (and probably a few teen boys – someone I know taught a pop music subject at Macquarie Uni last year, and in one class had students anonymously write their ‘guilty pleasures’ on a slip of paper and put them in a box. In a majority male class, there were dozens of slips with ‘One Direction’ written on them). And perhaps music is often secondary in the boy band experience, but plenty of stuff with an “omg-teen-girls-like-this” stigma ends up getting positively reassessed by later generations.

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‘Drag Me Down’ Is A Canny Pop Song

One Direction fans, of course, are numerous and devoted enough that they could probably propel a collection of fart noises to the top 10 if it was marketed as a One Direction song. But ‘Drag Me Down’, for better or worse, is not a collection of flatulence. Instead, it’s a lean, hooky pop single that sounds at home at the top of the charts. There’s a catchy chorus, and a catchier pre-chorus. In fact, of the three minutes and 12 seconds of ‘Drag Me Down’, only a minute of it is devoted to the intro and verses – the rest is all chorus.

The song also pretty expertly echoes the last five years of vaguely-soulful pop songs for white people. The way that the One Direction boys echo ”nothing, nothing” is reminiscent of Taylor Swift’s  ”trouble, trouble” in the chorus of ‘I Knew You Were Trouble’. There’s something to the syncopated semi-reggae rhythm of the verses that triggers memories of latter-day Maroon 5 singles like ‘One More Night’ or ‘Sugar’. The bass sounds like that of ‘Locked Out Of Heaven’ by Bruno Mars, and dances around the beat in similar ways. And the guitar arpeggio in the verses gives the song a hazy Haim-via-1989 flavour.

The prechorus in ‘Drag Me Down’ uses all those handclaps to build up to what you’d expect would involve a variation of dropping the bass. But instead of a drop, the song goes to a half-time feel, deliberately undercutting the build — as it does in Ariana Grande’s ‘Problem’. And where the rest of the song is all-words-all-the-time, the chorus gives room for listeners to catch their breath, a little like the chorus on Mark Ronson’s ‘Uptown Funk’ does.

‘Drag Me Down’ sounding like all this skim-milk soul is actually unusual for One Direction; their music usually has a distinct flavour of power-pop or pop-punk. There are probably balding Fountains of Wayne fans with teenage daughters who are slightly confused about how much they like ‘Best Song Ever’, and ‘One Way Or Another (Teenage Kicks)’ mashed up two late 1970s punk tunes by Blondie and the Undertones (one suspects their production team were deliberately trolling horrified ex-punk parents).

This pop-punk sound works for them, because their collective persona is more ‘loveable goofballs’ than ‘brooding heartthrobs’. Perhaps for this reason, ‘Drag Me Down’ isn’t quite as successful at evoking the giddy fun that’s One Direction’s brand. Where the skim-milk soul that characterises ‘Drag Me Down’ is usually a platform for vocal showoffs, One Direction probably sing this a little too straight. The relatively unadorned, relatively anonymous, singing style that’s normal in One Direction — I do find it hard to tell apart the different vocalists on ‘Drag Me Down’ — doesn’t quite work quite as well as it does with the pop-punkish stuff.

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Streaming vs Buying A Single

So why is it this song, and not ‘Best Song Ever’ or ‘One Thing’, which got to #1? Part of it is that ‘Drag Me Down’ could appeal outside One Direction’s usual fan base. But I also think it’s benefited from recent changes in how we consume pop music.

We live in a world now where owning music is increasingly seen as unnecessary. Why buy the cow on iTunes when you can get all the milk you could ever want for a small monthly charge on Apple Music, or a few ads on Spotify?

However, One Direction fans still have reason to buy the cow. For them, it’s not just a song to be consumed: it’s the latest offering of a band they’ve invested part of their identity in. It’s a way to impress their friends: “oh, you’re just listening to it on Spotify? Well, I bought the song, so I’m a bigger fan!” At least, my Metallica-obsessed friends in the 1990s would have been much more impressed if I bought the ‘Fuel’ single instead of just taping it off the radio.

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Tim Byron completed a PhD in music psychology, plays in too many bands, and chronically overanalyses everything musical. He has written for Max TV, Mess+Noise, The Guardian, The Big Issue, and The Vine.