On Legacy and Liam Payne for October 19th
I. It Seems To Me That When I Die These Words Will Be Written On My Stone
I don’t envy Rob Sheffield.
He’s the legendary music journalist tapped to pen Rolling Stone’s official memoriam for Liam Payne, a bygone member of 2010s British supergroup, One Direction, who either stumbled or leapt to his death from the window of an Argentine hotel on October 16, 2024. Payne was only 31 years old when he passed away, alone, manic, recklessly drunk and destructively high in an attempt to drown out the domestic violence accusations flooding the press in the weeks preceding his demise. It’s rumored that these allegations and correlating social media hate campaign cost him his already flailing record deal just three days before the tragedy—Payne hadn’t charted in any meaningful way as a solo artist since 2017, with a modest ear-worm hip-hop hit that left as quickly as it came. In the twilight of his short life, Payne had transformed from a star to a laughing stock, a formerly famous fuck-up too pathetic to be feared.
If you work in editorial, you’re aware that most outlets bank obituaries for important cultural figures. Complete drafts commemorating Mick Jagger, Paul McCartney, and Stevie Wonder, for instance, are probably sitting in The New York Times’ publishing system as we speak, awaiting a few final tweaks before swimming towards the light of a search engine. The rupture of a sudden, premature death, however, pits profundity against speed for journalists, demanding pitch—perfect language and rigorous fact-checks in record time. Sheffield’s essay, titled The Untamed Heart of Liam Payne, was the first piece filed in an onslaught of attempts to grapple with the legacy of a haunted man who hadn’t yet touched his potential as an artist. The standfirst, “mourning the kid brother of One Direction”, bespeaks a fundamental misunderstanding of Payne’s role in the supernova that catapulted him to fame—while much of the group’s appeal rested in their cheeky, unpolished puerility, Payne, despite being the second-youngest member of the band, was considered the most focused, at least at the outset, a buttoned-up father figure amid the laddish chaos embodied by his brood.
Sheffield goes on to describe Payne as “guileless”, noting that he wore “ his heart on his sleeve”. These descriptions feel more accurate, if incomplete.
Sheffield’s remembrance is rushed and awkward, as are Alexis Petridis’ and Kate Solomon’s write-ups in The Guardian. I am not passing judgement—the assignments were fucking impossible. Payne was an alcoholic who made bad songs, an ultimately minor player in the pop music canon. He was also a father, a talent, a seemingly gentle, insecure soul who couldn’t escape the gilded cage constructed for him by record executives and 1D stan accounts. Grown-up fangirls on TikTok tearfully opine the abstract torment of grieving a stranger, or defend their collective right to miss a flawed and factious childhood relic, but these are just rhetorical scapegoats to distract from the truth—fame killed Liam Payne, which, of course, means we killed Liam Payne, the listeners, the commentators, the girlhood user-citizenry of zeitgeist past.
Liam Payne’s death, like Liam Payne’s life, was scripted by other people, signed off in board rooms, typed out on message boards, slid across a table at recording sessions, reduced to pithy quotation after gory headline by those whose “duty of care” remained contingent on his ability to line their pockets. The obsessive teens who have grown into obsessive adults post measuredly about the “boy that Liam was”, ignoring the fact that he, too, was a phantom, an engineered projection site for young lust and parental cash. So what is Liam’s legacy, then? The women he abused? The minibars he raided in locked hotel rooms far from his childhood home? The drawings he made in his Malibu mansion? The images of his bruised and mangled body on TMZ? His Snapchat stories?
I’d argue that Payne’s memory lives in the writing— not his, but ours. One Direction, the great parasocial experiment minted in the Wild West of 2010s internet virality, was a living, breathing fan fiction, turning teenage boys into hierograms, or even voodoo dolls, on the panoptical altar of stardom. Theorist Svetlana Boym called nostalgia an “individual mechanism of survival”, and our collective urge to quantify, to itemize, to exercise diction as a weapon against uncertainty, is endemic to the mythos of contemporary corporate enterprise. The “Western” world’s fetish for lore over analysis stems from this creative impetus against loss—if we can control the narrative, we can ease the hurt. We’re writing about about a decade-long-disbanded boyband because we’re writing about ourselves—who we were, what we wanted, how we found means to escape before adulthood circled the wagons.
The finest literary testament to One Direction was written in 2015 by Samantha Hunt, a magical-realism novelist best known for her 2004 book, The Seas. There is Only One Direction ruminates on the operatic longing of motherhood in the context of pop fantasy, positioning top-40 as a temporary tonic for the routine cruelty of everyday life. “The boys and their fans are a reminder that the intellect does not alone belong to suffering and seriousness but populates girly things just as fully”, Hunt explains. “One Direction reminds me that love, joy, giddiness, even hysteria are crucibles of intelligence”. Ephemera is the point.
“Stay young forever”, Hunt snaps. “Good luck with that”.
The fable of fame’s sacrificial lamb is primordial in scope. So is the need to up-end it. We write about Liam Payne in order to craft a future where none exists, to stave against the ravages of cold, stupid reality.
We write about Liam to give ourselves a chance to change, even if, or perhaps because, he couldn’t.
II. Let’s Pray We Stay Young, Stay Made of Lightning
I’m sitting on the floor of my best friend’s Brooklyn apartment, trying my best to contort myself into a shape that obscures my folded stomach—no small task in a sheer tank top. It’s December 31st and bitterly cold outside, but 20-somethings don’t give a shit about windchill. My slight, wide-eyed little sister, L, sits to my left—we’ve made the journey from Boston on a stuffy Megabus to experience a New York New Year’s Eve, an impossibly glamorous possibility to girls from the suburbs of Massachusetts. L has recently returned home from a post-collegiate year working on farms in far-flung locales like Norway and Scotland. She’s gorgeous, irrepressible, still titillated by the notion of urban nightlife as a signifier of adulthood.
I’m back on the East Coast for the holidays after moving to the outskirts of Detroit, where I am spending my my first year of graduate school wearing matte purple lipstick and pickling my liver over a painter from Ohio who thinks I’m just okay. L and I know F, G, and E from high school, where we commiserated over hard tests and the easy love proximity breeds in adolescents. They’re living out my Lena Dunham dreams as scrappy young women in the big city, hungry for the whirring entropy of the sleepless sprawl. It’s all new still—the live music, the big-girl jobs, the dating apps, the 4 am last calls. We tipsily chirp updates at each other as lipstick is slicked and bobby-pins are placed, voicing dreams big and small with equal relish. I place my iPhone in a glass bowl to help project the sound and select the latest One Direction album, Four, as our collective soundtrack. A slightly nonsensical arena stomper, on-brand for The Boys, starts to waft through the crisp air. Glasses overflowing with 2-buck chuck clink in chorus as G declares 2015 “the year of the Girl Almighty”, the folkloric demigoddess that Liam would purportedly worship out loud.
[Zayn]
Am I the only,
Only believer?
[All]
There's something happening here,
I hope you feel what I'm feeling too
[Liam]
I'd get down, I'd get down, I'd get down on my knees for you
I'd get down, I'd get down, I'd get down on my knees
I'd get down on my knees for you
L, buzzing with 23-year-old exuberance, declares, “This year, I’m going to be brave!” We all laugh at her teasingly, because, of course, we want to be brave, too. Bravery is a bitter medicine. We don’t have to know that, yet.
“Stop scoffing!”, chides F, forever my True North for comportment and morality, as she sips the last dregs of her kitchen cocktail. “It’s okay to be brave”.
At 35, I hover over this memory with a queasy sense of stifled, maternal guilt. We’ve all had to learn bravery in the nine years since that night, unique, discrete braveries, the kind that age and scar and grind tendon into bone. I wish I could pause the footage, climb inside our internecine moment, and whisper the simplest script into each girl’s ear.
I wish I could write the agony away. I know I can’t.
[Harry]
Let’s have another toast to the girl almighty
[Louis]
Let’s pray we stay young, stay made of lightning
After left my partner of 7 years in December of 2021, he sent me a series of mean, histrionic emails. I deleted them, maybe too hastily, but two phrases still stick with me when I force myself to recollect them.
“Manic bitch” is the first, but, despite that colorful choice of language, the second stings far worse.
“You just move on with no regard for what happened”, he wrote.
“You just move on”.
He was right. It’s true.
I rarely, if ever, revisit “what happened”. Despite myself, I move, as The Boys were conscripted to move, in only one direction, plodding towards the inevitability of change without much interest in the labor of process or stock. I don’t reminisce about age 25 because age 25 was humiliating. I threw up on bar tops, I pleaded for sexual attention, I made shitty paintings, I insisted on masquerading as a performance artist. I mistook vulnerability for bravery, sincerity for guts. My prose sucked, and my reliability sucked more—a far greater sin, in my opinion.
I don’t remember anything else about New Year’s Eve 2015 because I blacked out. This was on-brand for me, and continued to be until my early 30s.
I wasn’t Harry or Louis or Zayn or Niall, in other words. I was Liam, crippled by sensitivity and the creeping myopia of low self-esteem. I lacked to discipline to find my voice. I was a “manic bitch” whose saving grace was a gift I didn’t have the range to recognize—anonymity. Anonymity and time.
On October 17th, journalist Anna Leszkieweicz published a piece in The New Statesman titled Liam Payne was a victim of the pop pin-up machine, which railed against the vulturous paradigm of teen stardom. “Liam Payne was dehumanised his entire life, by the music industry machine that made him famous, by tabloids, by social media, and even by his own fans; being idolised is just as depersonalising as being villainised”, she argued. “He became a pin-up poster, then a literal doll (you could collect all five)”.
Leszkieweicz ends her polemic with the question we all refuse to answer.
“How many victims does the pop music industry have to produce before something changes?”
On Twitter, teenagers tell Chappel Roan to kill herself in response to her palpable fear in the face of fan surveillance. Influencers sob on camera as they describe the maddening toll of mass opinion to thousands of unmoved viewers. College students harass Liam Payne’s ex-fiance into profile deletion between classes.
As I stare at a still performance photograph of five teenage boys, soft-featured and frightened, I realize, shamefully, that I’ll never write enough.
[All]
We’re only getting older, baby
And I’ve been thinking about it, lately
Does it ever drive you crazy
Just how fast the night changes?
Thank you for reading and subscribing. If you like this, you’ll love my forthcoming book Revolutionary Algorithms: A TikTok Manifesto, from Grand Central Publishing. Pre-order available here.
this is the best thing I've read about liam. you articulated what I've been feeling but couldn't find the words for.