the first one direction death

on the memory of liam payne and torschlusspanik

Last night, news broke that One Direction member Liam Payne was found dead in a hotel room in Buenos Aires. As of Wednesday night, police are still investigating the cause of death.

The response online was immediate. Tweets began pouring in. TMZ callously posted photos of Payne’s body that swiftly brought backlash for their nonexistent journalistic ethics. Every emotion—sadness, anger, shock, relief—was posted for the world to see.

“i genuinely truly think the last time my phone was blowing up like this with texts from people from all corners of the earth was when zayn left one direction,” one said.

“i feel sad because he was a part of a band that took up a big chunk of my life,” another wrote. “i also feel sad because of the type of person he was and how he never sought out help. it’s gonna be mixed emotions wow.”

Whether you liked their music or not, One Direction was an undoubtedly generation-defining band. Songs like “What Makes You Beautiful,” “Story Of My Life,” “Perfect” and “Night Changes” have been streamed billions of times; they were an immovable representation of my coming-of-age and many others’.

Image via YouTube.

They were also one of the first juggernauts to collide with social media’s expansion. The very backbone of modern digital fandom was cemented largely through communities like the Directioners, who pioneered the act of weaving a content ecosystem for their stars. Directioners arguably changed the very definition of fandom by taking it beyond just following their idols, instead using the tools of social media to make the fandom as equal of a pull to continue being a fan. They built a cemented sense of community with fan group chats and mutual follows, created standalone content with fan edits and fanfics (long live Larry Stylinson), and recorded a history of fandom inside jokes that became just as important to know as information about the stars themselves.

Even as a thirteen-year-old, playing “Magic” and “Kiss You” on a loop as I played Tetris with my friends during study hall, I knew that the first death of a One Direction member was going to shake our generation. It’s the inevitable fate of when a celebrity takes the world storm like that—Selena, Whitney Houston, Princess Diana. But this time, we were all interconnected on social media, constantly seeing images and audio of the bandmates. That being said, I don’t think anyone thought it would be so soon. The refrain on Tumblr was always that you’d be 50 years old and have to pull over on the side of the road when the radio announced the first One Direction death. While we’re older, much of the fandom is still a far cry from 50, which makes it all feel more jarring.

Image via Entertainment Weekly.

After John Lennon was shot and killed in 1980, TIME critic Jay Cocks wrote a cover story to commemorate the artist’s legacy. “For everyone who cherished the sustaining myth of the Beatles,” he wrote, “the murder was something else. It was an assassination, a ritual slaying of something that could hardly be named. Hope, perhaps; or idealism. Or time. Not only lost, but suddenly dislocated, fractured.”

I think Payne’s death represents much of the same thing to many of us. The grief is feeling a little death of our youth, naiveté, optimism. One Direction songs sang about those very themes, after all: the promise of young and true love, the joy of living for today, the journey of friendship. Their discography was a corporate package of sugar that we remember even more fondly in bitter times. Many of us are navigating the early stages of adulthood, and the punctures of youth already feel so profound. If Lennon was “a creature of poetic political metaphor,” as TIME wrote in 1980, then Payne was very much a creature of untroubled optimistic meritocracy, where a boy could audition on X Factor UK at 14 years old and sprint right towards stardom with four new friends in tow. It’s natural to grieve a physical loss tied to a distinct ideal.

But grieving the actual person is an entirely different story, because the memory of Payne, much like Lennon, is also marred. As the members grew out of their teenybopper packaging, it became clear that the individual members were not as untroubled as their pop songs were. Payne’s continuation in the public eye drew backlash after backlash, as he made claims like saying he was the reason One Direction was put together and that he both disliked and liked bandmate Zayn Malik. He had a child with one of the judges who watched his audition when he was 14 years old. Days before his death, his ex-fiancée Maya Henry filed a cease and desist against him, revealing that Payne was harassing her and her family, and had previously assaulted her. Immediately after Payne’s death was announced, some fans took to Henry’s Instagram to leave some truly heinous comments, mocking or blaming her for his death. None of this should be looked past for our inward torschlusspanik. All of it speaks more to the individual’s character than their parasocial marketing trappings.

“The worldwide appeal of the Beatles had to do with their perceived innocence, their restless idealism that stayed a step or two ahead of the times,” Cocks wrote in TIME. “The songs became, all together, an orchestration of a generation’s best hopes and fondest dreams.”

While I think we’ve evolved past the point of disregarding the morality of an individual for the vague marketing wrappings of their artist, I do think learning to identify our grief will become ever the more important, especially as social media continues to race towards hyperbole, misinformation and SEO-ification of everything. Payne left a complex legacy, including some reprehensible choices. What he represented at the onset of his career is still cherished by millions. Many things can be true at once.