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Liam Payne was just 14 when he took his first shot at the big time, trying out for the hit star-making show, “The X Factor.” He was 17 when the show’s judges teamed him up with Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Niall Horan and Louis Tomlinson — all young, handsome, telegenic-but-relatable singer/dancers — and created One Direction, one of the biggest boy bands in history. They released five studio albums and 17 hit singles and went on four world tours, traveling with a portable recording studio so they could put together one album while promoting another.
Wherever One Direction went in the world, fans gathered in the thousands, sometimes trapping the band members inside their hotels. Those fans and millions more, making the most of the emerging social media platforms, eagerly consumed news about the young stars’ lives, from their most impressive triumphs to their most humiliating setbacks. “When Harry Styles threw up on a Los Angeles highway after a night out in 2014,” Clara Gaspar wrote Thursday in The Daily Mail, “we all knew about it — and a shrine was erected by a fan in the spot that he had vomited.”
Mr. Payne was 31 years old when, on Wednesday, he died after a three-story fall from the balcony of a Buenos Aires hotel. Fans reacted with an outpouring of grief, along with something much more pointed: revulsion for the fame factory that had shaped him to its dictates, just as it had done to former child stars like Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, who struggled in adulthood, and Amy Winehouse and the K-pop megastar Moonbin, both of whom died in their 20s. “Tragic Liam Payne Was Churned Out by the Pop Machine That Breaks Its Stars,” read a headline in The Sun. “The One Direction boys were subject to a fame so glaring,” Poppy Sowerby wrote in UnHerd, “that it burrows into any vulnerability and seeks endless revenge for, as is inevitable, not ending up the person a 12-year-old fan imagined you to be 10 years ago.”
It got me thinking about boy bands and child actors; about the toxicity of fame and the complicity of fans; about how much — and whom — we are willing to sacrifice in the name of entertainment … and, ultimately, about pro football.
Bear with me.
Since the 2000s, the world has had ample evidence that N.F.L. players who take hard hits are at risk of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain disease that can lead to mood swings, memory loss, depression, even suicide.
Yet television viewership has never been higher. Yes, some of the players will die horrible deaths after experiencing mental decline, psychiatric illness, mood swings, memory loss, violent rages and personality changes that will cause pain and suffering to themselves and their loved ones. But come on. Why pass up the chance to spend a fall Sunday with your beloved team squaring off against their hated rivals?
Fame, like football, takes a toll. The effects can be particularly destabilizing when the star in question is still just a kid. And all too often, the people who should be looking out for these valuable, vulnerable quantities are, instead, cashing in. “Children are just a dollar sign when they show up on set,” Bryan Hearne, a former child star, recently said. “Nobody’s taking anyone’s mental-health serious, and that’s completely unfortunate.” “People were so shocked by some of the things that I did,” the Disney child star turned pop star Miley Cyrus told an interviewer, of her “Wrecking Ball” era, and the shock waves it produced. “It should be more shocking that when I was 11 or 12, I was put in full hair and makeup, a wig and told what to wear by a group of mostly older men.”
Mr. Payne, too, described feeling trapped. “There’s no stop button,” he told Jessie Ware, the host of the “Table Manners” podcast, in 2019. By that time, One Direction had broken up; Mr. Payne worked on a solo career but struggled with addiction as well as his relationships with his former bandmates and ex-girlfriends. “You’ve got no control over your life,” he said of his experience of youthful stardom. “That’s why I lost complete control of everything.”
Mr. Payne knew. We know, too. Turning children into international celebrities, putting them on the world stage and shining a spotlight on their every action, sexualizing them while infantilizing them, telling them they are demigods but not letting them make decisions for themselves, is dangerous. There’s a long line of damaged lives — of addictions, mental health struggles, flameouts, tragic deaths — to prove it. But come on. Why should the record industry pass up the chance to make that hopeful teen into a multimillion-dollar profit center?
On Thursday, some of Mr. Payne’s fellow celebrities called for the music industry to impose safety measures to protect performers’ mental health. Sure, it’s a nice idea, just like it was when the N.F.L. instituted changes intended to lessen the chance of brain injury. But they were incremental fixes that have left the game largely as it was. As long as there are fans to be monetized and young people willing to feed themselves, body and soul, to the pop music machine, there will be producer-built girl groups and boy bands, their members thrown into the stratosphere as teenagers, old news by 25, gone before they’ve had a chance to grow up.
Jennifer Weiner, a novelist, writes frequently about gender and culture.
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