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Thursday, July 5, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS

Harry Styles is staring at me, 
and his eyes are bright green, 
wide open and beautiful. He’s 
kneeling down to come closer and 
his gaze is a straight shot directly 
down the center of the camera 
lens, piercing right through the 
screen to meet mine. “I’ve got a 
fire for a heart,” he says in a low 
clear voice, as if the nearly 800 
million people watching didn’t 
already know.
Harry’s stare, and my subse-
quent heart-pounding magnetic 
reaction to it, is no coincidence. 
The fact that I feel as though he’s 
looking at me and me alone isn’t 
a mistake, because he doesn’t just 
happen to be a pretty boy look-
ing into a camera, and I don’t just 
happen to be unable to look away. 
A lot of people are born with 
good faces, but heartthrobs aren’t 
made by accident.
Even though every aspect of a 
boy band performance is deliber-
ately, artfully calibrated to maxi-
mize irresistibility, heartthrobs 
do their best to make it all seem 
effortless with those floppy mops 
of hair they all seem to have, 
falling into their eyes whenever 
they hunch over the mic stand. 
It’s tantalizingly messy, makes 
you want to run a hand through 
it — and that’s exactly the point. 
Shirts are always unbuttoned just 
one too many, in a quiet master-
class of revealing just enough to 
make you want more. In videos 
if they’re not looking dead on at 
the camera they’re usually back-
lit, with the roving lights crossing 
shadows over their faces, lighting 
the backs of their shoulders, the 

slopes of their necks, the tips of 
their curls. The cuts in their vid-
eos are quick, images rushing one 
after the other like a memory — a 
flash of a smile, a hit of the drum, 
a couple strides across the stage. 
It makes the viewer feel like 
you’re always chasing after them, 
always trying to get a better look.
It’s both mesmerizing and 
menacing, because the promise 
of a heartthrob is not unlike the 
promise of a pick-up artist. They 
look you in the eye and they swear 
that you light up their world like 
nobody else, that they hold a want 
that’s all-consuming and all for 
you. Then they smile, flip their 
hair out of their eyes and move on 
to the next girl at the show. The 
heartthrobs of the world chose 
their audience of young girls 
carefully, harnessing the power 
of teenage obsession by giving it 
a focus and tangible shape in the 
form of a boy with a guitar. 
If you ask me, there’s not much 
separating a boy band and a rock 
star, not in performance style, 
looks or audience demographics 
— the only discernible difference 
is the genre of music and the cred-
ibility that follows when the criti-
cal world assigns rock musicians 
a heavyweight status they don’t 
offer to boy bands. An ineffable 
rock star swagger unites the two, 
a type of posturing that can’t be 
taught, but can be harnessed with 
laser precision on the audience to 
incite a violent fervor of teenage 
lust.
There’s a classic performance 
of Zeppelin doing “Stairway” at 
Madison Square Garden that puts 
the swagger on display. Robert 
Plant makes even the act of stand-
ing up seem lazy, his body propped 

up at an angle, barechested in just 
a vest and all that curly hair. You 
pay close attention to his every 
move: The way his hand curls 
around the microphone, every 
pulse of his hips, every arc of his 
neck when he lets his hair fly back. 
Jimmy Page is close by. You can 
barely see his face. He’s slumped 
over his guitar. He’s wearing a 
dark jewel-encrusted jacket open 
with nothing under, and he’s cov-
ered in blue light — hair, skin and 
fretboards all glinting. They drip 
an almost alien sexuality, making 
an otherworldly spectacle of their 
very bodies on the stage. A care-
ful push-pull of parts obscured 
and parts revealed. A shirt flaps 
open but the face is covered in 
the dark. A guitar gleams bright 
for only a second before the light 
roves somewhere else.
You can’t tear your eyes away 
by design, because sex and lust 
were always the pulse that drove 
the charisma of classic rock stars.
The fantasy of the heartthrob 
has remained remarkably consis-
tent over the years, because by 
and large, teenage girls haven’t 
changed. If you went to a Stones 
concert in ’64, a Zeppelin concert 
in ’74 or a One Direction con-
cert in 2014, the audience would 
be pretty much the same. Still a 
deafening roar of screams, still 
throwing their bras onstage, still 
reaching their hands in the air, to 
dance, yes, but mostly to grab hold 
of the boys onstage, because they 
feel (just as they’ve always felt) 
the pulse underneath the upbeat 
pop songs, the pulse of sexuality 
that’s being sold.
It’s no accident that boy bands 
like One Direction and 5 Sec-
onds of Summer are marketed to 

teenyboppers, just barely on the 
cusp of discovering their sexual-
ity, suddenly presented with a few 
perfect specimens onto which 
they can safely project all of their 
dreams and desires. Harry Styles 
would never spread rumors about 
you the way the boys at school do. 
All Harry Styles wants to do is 
look you in the eye, tuck a stray 
hair behind your ear and sing 
just for you about how beautiful 
you are. It’s a fantasy, a push-
pull of what to reveal and what to 
obscure, all in the process of mak-
ing real what had only ever been 
a figment of the imagination of 
teenagers everywhere.
In 5 Seconds of Summer’s single 
“Youngblood,” lead singer Luke 
Hemmings sings, “You push and 
you push and I’m pulling away / 
pulling away from you.” Here he’s 
tapping into the heart of the boy 
band’s promise, the promise of 
the oh-so-charming pick-up art-
ist. “Youngblood / say you want 
me, say you want me,” he sings, 
almost taunting his audience, who 
wants him to want them as badly 
as they do him, knowing full well 
it’s the only desire that he could 
never ever satisfy. To them, he’s 
pushing and pulling away, but 
they want to be the girl he’s sing-
ing to, the one he wants so bad it 
hurts. But he’s not singing to them 
and he never will — he’s singing 
to their hunger, the indescribable 
desire screaming out of control 
that all teenage girls carry with 
them.
It’s funny, because boy bands 
are almost universally dismissed 
as light and disposable, but there’s 
nothing delicate or gentle or any 
of the other attributes we call stu-
pid and code feminine about the 
hunger that propels them. There 
is a fundamental violence in a 
horde of girls chasing these boys 
through a mall like they want to 
eat them alive. Or in a stadium full 
of people chanting the name of a 
boy until their throats are hoarse, 
like a teen girl funhouse mirrored 
two minute hate. They form a 
mob, screaming and starving, an 
obsession that’s both completely 
insane and completely innocu-
ous. Innocuous because it’s a well 
regarded fact, universally under-
stood that this is just what teen-
age girls do. They bare their teeth 
with tears running down their 
faces and young blood pulsing 
through their outstretched hands 
reaching for the stage, curling 
into fists and punching the air, 
clawing and screaming, making 
presents of their very bodies — 
making any excuse to get closer.

The modern boy band or, 
the anatomy of a hearthrob

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

COLUMBIA

SINGLE REVIEW: 
“CRUSH”

A lot of pop music today wants 
to set the mood for a hot and 
heavy night — choose any song 
on the soundtrack for “50 Shades 
of Grey” — but Cigarettes After 
Sex offers something for the 
after. As the name of the band 
suggests, their slow and ambient 
music extends the blissful few 
moments when the real problems 
of the world haven’t yet returned 
and the entire universe feels like 
only two people.
Their 2012 EP, I., promised 
sexy, meditative music for the 
future. “Dreaming of You” had 
simple 
reverb 
synth 
chords 
mixed with bold hi-hats and 
cymbals. The subtle lyrics left 
room to fill in the blanks: “You’re 
the one calling out / you’re the 
one that’s calling me to heaven.”
After a 5 year hiatus, Cigarettes 
After Sex returned last year 
with a debut self-titled album 
that hinted at the catastrophe 
to come and deterioration of the 
band’s signature allure. Most of 
the songs on their 2017 album 
retained what made the EP so 
sensual and such easy listening. 
But the last track, the explicit-
rated 
“Young 
and 
Dumb,” 
marked a misunderstanding of 
the band’s best qualities.
The lyrics on the track try 
hard to evoke lust, but end up 
too straightforward and very 
cringe-worthy as lead vocalist, 
Greg Gonzalez, sings, “You are 
a patron saint of sucking cock.” 
Dear God, why would you write 
that?
The 
newest 
single 
from 
Cigarettes After Sex, “Crush,” 
unfortunately 
follows 
the 
example of “Young and Dumb.”
“Crush” begins with potential 
as Gonzalez uses his restrained 
and high voice — a whisper on 
the verge of a scream — to the 
band’s advantage in combination 
with pure, but suggestive, lyrics 
like, “photographs you sent / of 
you lying in your swimsuit on 
the bed.” Then the chorus begins 
and destroys the seductive vibe 
established in the opening verse 
when Gonzales sings repeatedly, 
“I wanna fuck your love slow.”
“Crush” 
proves 
Cigarettes 
After Sex has un-learned the 
lesson they taught the music 
world in their initial EP: Sexiness 
is not found in explicitness.

- Meghan Chou, 
Summer Senior Arts Editor

ASIF BECHER
Summer Editor in Chief