Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It by Kaitlyn Tiffany

Author:Kaitlyn Tiffany [Tiffany, Kaitlyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture, Media Studies, Technology Studies
ISBN: 9780374722722
Google: oaw9EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: FarrarStraus
Published: 2022-06-14T20:45:06+00:00

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After Zayn Malik’s unexpected departure from the band—he dipped out with a terse Facebook post in March 2015, a day on which the internet screamed and screamed in unison and I drove around my college town in the rain playing “You and I” on a loop—One Direction’s record label opted not to release any more singles or music videos from the last album he appeared on, the band’s fourth album, Four.

This irritated a certain faction of fans who had hoped to see a big promotional push around “No Control,” a sexy eighties-rock banger cowritten by Louis Tomlinson and Liam Payne and various other people. It featured Tomlinson on lead vocals in a chorus for the first time ever—a big deal for those who had selected him as their favorite from the beginning and had so far received very little validation of this choice. It also featured a bunch of graphic lyrics about morning sex. (“I don’t want to wash away the night before / And the heat where you lay / I could stay right here and burn in it all day,” for example.) While everyone on Tumblr was moping about Malik’s departure and what already looked to be the band’s looming demise, a then twenty-three-year-old London-based fan named Anna Franceschi shared a proposal: “I would like this fandom to gather together for a project I thought about while I was coming back home on the overground on a working day,” she wrote. “The project is releasing No control as the first One Direction DIY single.” Sony wasn’t going to do it, so logically, the fans should do it themselves. “We should decide a date as the release, promoting it through twitter and tumblr and facebook,” Anna suggested. “This fandom is born and raised throughout these platforms, promoting the band just like when they were kids at The XFactor shouldn’t be hard at all.”4 She tagged the post “#sorry it’s just a silly idea” and “#it would be nice [though].”

A team assembled on Tumblr overnight. The professionals—referred to in shorthand as the collective “1DHQ”—were dropping the ball. They were failing at their most important task, which was bringing One Direction’s most openly vulgar song to every corner of the earth. The fan-organized “social media exposure campaign” would kick off “immediately” and end with a massive effort hours before the Billboard Music Awards. The ultimate goal was not entirely clear, but the energy was electric. “1DHQ is like that lazy partner you were paired up with for a school project, so you have to do the whole thing yourself,” one fan joked.5 And with that, Project No Control was off the ground.

Instructions for supporting the project circulated on Tumblr and Twitter throughout the week: fans planned to buy the song on iTunes as many times as possible on their invented release date, May 17, and then came up with the idea of gifting the song to fans who didn’t have credit cards. Everyone who participated was expected to keep

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