Let’s celebrate Zayn Malik’s perfectly executed sex-infused career-prolonging maneuver
The pouty 1D member’s new album is doused with the F-word. And in a bedroom kind of way.
Here’s the problem with boy bands: They have a biological expiration date, otherwise known as manhood.
The bands generally begin with a Svengali figure who picks members based on their cuteness, assembling a group that appeals to the broadest possible spectrum of teen girls, then bestows upon them a band name that is often misspelled (e.g. NSYNC). The kids sing harmoniously, dance in unison and, typically, don’t play instruments or write their own material. Above all, these boys are nice: They’re good¹, sweet and sexually non-threatening².
Then the boys become men, and the formula doesn’t work so well.
This modern boy band is only around 30 years old³, but that’s long enough for the members of boy bands to have devised a reliable career-prolonging solution to this problem: rebellion. And Zayn Malik just pulled off a particularly well-executed version of that solution.
A year after he split from the massive boy band One Direction, Malik has released his first solo album. He’s also thrown a whole bunch of shade at his former bandmates. Malik said he felt marginalized. Said their music was awful — so bad he couldn’t listen to it. He complained the band wouldn’t let him dye his hair or grow a beard. Now, dyed hair and all, Malik is on his own, the good boy turned bad.
He’s not the first boy bander to chafe at the saccharine uniformity of the formula. Justin Timberlake busted out of NSYNC, and by the time of his second album — 2006’s Future Sex/Love Sounds — the sexless pre-man thing was pretty much done. Around a decade earlier, Robbie Williams split from Take That⁴ to take his repertoire into more dangerous terrain, releasing hip-hop-influenced singles like “Millennium.” After the Jonas Brothers split, co-lead singer Nick Jonas released the sexed-up “Jealous,” and took his shirt off in Calvin Klein ads for good measure.
Now there’s Malik, whose new album — dropped precisely a year after he said he would leave 1D — features what The Guardian called “downbeat sex jams,” its R&B-infused tracks sprinkled with fucks and lyrics like: “I get her wetter than ever / four letter are never a question.” Not exactly boy band fodder, but predictable in its anti-nice, anti-boy-band approach. Because nice gets boring.
¹Malcolm McLaren assembled punk-rock legend The Sex Pistols based on their appearance, inviting boy band comparisons. The band violated boy band rules, however, by: (A) playing instruments (however incompetently), (B) writing their own music, and (C) being as offensive or shocking as possible, for example, cutting their bare chests with jagged beer bottles on stage.
²Boys II Men’s “I’ll Make Love to You” notwithstanding. There may be other exceptions.
³Readers may wish to disagree. The Beatles, for example, are sometimes considered boy-band-esque because they were young heartthrobs who made girls scream, especially in their early days. (Yes, sacrilege.)
⁴Take That had a comeback in the mid-2000s, as did ’80s boy band sensation, New Kids on the Block. In their second lives, they were sometimes referred to as “man bands.”
