16 Reasons One Direction Are on Top of the Stadium Rock Game
1. For the past five years, the world’s biggest pop group has been the world’s biggest classic-rock band, doing their “Baba O’Riley” remake every night for 60,000 screaming girls. “People like us don’t get to play stages like this,” Harry Styles said last night at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, and he’s right. Strange but true: One Direction are on top of the classic-rock stadium-band pyramid these days.
2. Harry and Louis are the Stevie and Lindsey of the mermaid-tattoo-era stadium-rock eye-contact game. Louis’ eyes are dark, intense, controlling, with a surly “damn your love, damn your life” edge. Harry’s eyes say “I hear the darkness you’re expressing and it’s important to me but my heart tells me to twirl right now,” so he twirls and touches his hair. The brooding look vs. the beatific twirl. When one of them gets happy, the other gets wistful. When one of them gets bitchy, the other gets sugary. I could watch them sing together for hours. I could probably watch them do laundry for hours. (I doubt they do laundry.)
3. One Direction played MetLife Stadium a year ago to the day, and they were great that night—but very different, and nowhere near as great. 1D are massively better as a foursome, because their personalities all have much more room. Last year they were so competitive for stage time — Niall and Zayn seemed to be auditioning for their solo careers. Harry spent much of the 2014 show with his mop wrapped up in a headband — obviously ambivalent about the onstage traffic jam. (Harry covering his hair onstage is like Stevie Nicks in sweatpants.) Tonight, the hair was free, and Harry’s hair is always the window into his soul. Without Zayn they have to work harder — they’re all singing more lines and patrolling more turf — but they’re needy boys and they like it that way.
4. Harry Styles, master of the power flounce. For a band that formed on TV, 1D are not done justice by video, because Harry is a performer you have to see live. The way he covers space is insane — imagine if Mick Jagger had the warm and benign heart of Paul McCartney, cast under a magic spell by Stevie Nicks, and you’re about halfway there. Every limb of his body is an instrument he uses to express to girls how happy he is to bask in their presence. He uses his arms, he uses his legs, he uses his style and he uses his sidestep. He’s in a pop-star zone where he can seem totally self-adoring and cosmically benevolent at the same time.
5. Literally the first thing Louis does onstage is run to the corner and wave up to the nosebleed seats in the upper deck, a mile in the sky with only a side view. He’ll take care of the fans up front later, but his first order of business is making sure the cheap seats get noticed.