I’ve Fallen Victim to Boybands

A recollection of One Direction & new 2023 boybands.

My 7th grade club soccer coach had to cancel practice the day Zayn announced he was leaving One Direction. Too many moms had called him saying their daughters weren’t emotionally stable enough to practice that he canceled the whole thing.

Coach Dan never canceled practice. Once we were playing a friendly and it started to rain and lightning. Since it was a friendly, there were no real refs, it was up to the coaches to decide if we needed to stop. Coach Dan said, “It’s far enough away, keep playing.” He didn’t give up until parents started plucking their daughters off the field and driving away. But Coach Dan knew better than to have practice that treacherous night, and so he canceled it without an argumentative peep.

I didn’t know much about One Direction at that time. The first I had heard of the split was when my mom showed me the email from Coach Dan saying, “Practice is canceled tonight because Zayn left One Direction.”

It wasn’t just One Direction, but pretty much any other major artist or actor. Of course I knew “What Makes You Beautiful” and the other One Direction songs that were popular at that time, but I didn’t know the names of the members and wouldn’t have been able to pick them out of a crowd. I knew it was a group, and the next day at school I asked my best friend from the soccer team, Kyra, which one Zayn was. She started crying.

My brother and I were raised in a way in which we ended up being pretty far removed from pop culture beyond the art that it produced. Like we had seen High School Musical, but we didn’t know the actors names. To us, the actors were just the vehicle for the characters, they were talented, but they weren’t something innately special that should be praised. The same with music. We knew the popular songs, we knew who sang them, but that singer was just a talented person flexing their gift in the same way my accountant dad flexes his proclivity for finance every day at the office.

All that to say, I didn’t really understand celebrity culture. However by the next day at practice I had learned which one Zayn was, and I emphasized with my teammates, speaking on what an abomination it was that he left. 

It wasn’t until my upperclassmen years of high school when One Direction came back into my life and I began to learn the full reach and lore of the band. It was my junior year of high school and our soccer team had only one senior, Olivia, and we constantly inundated her singing One Direction’s song “Olivia”. 

Two of my good friends at the time were absolutely obsessed with the band, despite them being broken up by then (or as they like to call it, “on hiatus”). When carpooling I learned the full discography, and in between tournament games when we were subjected to laying on our backs underneath the shade of a tree to relax, I was shown the X-Factor video diaries. The two girls took the biggest liking to Harry and Niall, and I watched and observed as they spit facts about every aspect of the boys’ lives. Even commenting on outfits they had worn multiple years ago, or dating conspiracy theories they still believe (like that two of the boys were dating each other?).

They also always talked about how hot they were, which I think was the oddest part for me. Because I had spent my whole life growing up having a huge separation between the art and the artist. Just because someone is hot doesn’t mean they are a good artist or that you should listen to their music, it seemed very black and white. But that’s not really how celebrity culture works. But anyways, my friends were always talking about the boys’ hair and arms and abs… when we graduated college, they both came out as gay. Sometimes I think back to those conversations and wonder what was going on inside their brains then.

I have given you my life story in relation to growing up at the same time as One Direction for one reason, to get across the point that I have always been on the cusp of understanding boybands. I can see the edge, but I have yet to be able to spread out my parachute and jump.

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Last night I went to my first bar as a 21 year old. Alone. For work.

If you’re new here, I’m currently working on a photography project through the month of July to document the different concerts happening in New York City for my summer apprenticeship with Parsons School of Design. Luckily, I turned 21 in the first few days of July or else this project, which has me going to mostly bars to catch free or cheap bands, would be impossible.

Last night sent me back to Williamsburg Brooklyn, where I spent two weeks of my summer during a break in classes. For a long time now, Baby’s All Right has been a staple in the Brooklyn music scene and a well-known venue for New York music junkies, and now for Midwest music junkies as well.

Back in 2017, Baby’s All Right had a major feud with Kendall Jenner about how she did not tip the staff member after spending the evening there. Kendall clapped back. The bar responded again. It was electric. It made me understand why people watch reality TV. I would be ignorant right now if I didn’t make the connection back to Harry Styles.

While I was not at the bar to see Kendall Jenner’s ex and his motley crew jump around the stage singing about how beautiful I am, I was attending a different boy band show. I have to admit that I didn’t put much time into researching the band prior to the concert.

The band was a group of four boys who hadn’t performed together or put out new music since June of 2020 when they went off the grid. They were huge in the Brooklyn music scene, and people were devastated that they stopped playing. This was their first show back, and they hadn’t made it clear to fans if they would play again after tonight, so everyone in town was showing up for the reunion show.

Cende formed when these four boys graduated from college and decided that they wanted to “start a band and take over the world” (their words). While they have yet to take over the entire world, it is tremendously clear that they do have a death grip on Brooklyn. I got to the venue early to get a spot in the front for photos, but there were already a handful of people there. The 40 year old man with the hair down to his waist next to me called it, “the reunion show of a lifetime.” The group of three young men standing behind me were fangirling and shouting lyrics like I can only imagine teenage girls once did at One Direction concerts.

I was there on business, but very quickly in the set list I was also there for pleasure. The music was so good! The sound was so crisp and synchronized that I never would have guessed these four boys had not been playing together for the past five years straight. They had great stage presence, and their songs were so catchy that by the end of the night I was singing right along like I had been a fan since they dipped back in June 2020.

I left the venue feeling exhilarated, not wanting to just go back to my dorm room in Manhattan. I forced my roommates out on the town, but none of the music playing in the bars closer to home were as good.

This morning I woke up and although the Barnes and Noble at Union Square is only a block away from my dorm, I took the long way to get more of a walk before sitting down to do work. As soon as I exited the elevator into my lobby, I put my headphones on and searched “Cende” into Spotify.

I started listening to their entire discography, and as I walked around a New York that was cloudy and threatening to rain at any second, an involuntary smile came across my face whenever a song popped into my headphones that I recognized from last night. I quickly began saving all their songs to different playlists of mine. I send Mother Hen a link to their Spotify so she can listen to their music as well. I post videos I took last night on my personal Instagram.

When I eventually got to Barnes and Noble, I opened my laptop and searched for any kind of merch that might materialize my night. I want to be back in my Southern Midwest college and have people stop me and say, “Who is that band on your shirt, I have never heard about them?” which would open the opportunity for me to tell them all about that night in Brooklyn and maybe even send them some of my favorite songs. I post the pictures I took last night onto my photography account and tag them, getting excited when they repost the pictures on the story of their band account.

When I opened up this blank document to write about my experience photographing Cende last night I realized I have finally fallen victim to boybands.

Hey, I wonder if there is a Cende branded parachute?

Yours truly,

Calihan