One More Direction
One Direction’s “Best Song Ever” is a power pop song released on July 22nd, 2013 as the lead single of Midnight Memories. The band members of One Direction are Niall Horan, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne, Harry Styles, and Louis Tomlinson. They received a total of 137 nominations and 76 awards, including Billboard Music Awards and MTV Video Music Awards, and set a Guinness World Record. The song alone won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Song of Summer, was nominated for a Rockbjörnen prize for Best International Song, and is pending for World Music Awards for World’s Best Song and World’s Best Video. The accompanying music video broke the VEVO 24 hour record with 12.3 million views and currently has over 133 million views on YouTube.
The first thing the viewer would recognize in both the lyrics and the music video is that the members of One Direction are singing about their youthful experience of being in love and enjoying being young. Overall, the lyrics can be interpreted as a story about the boys falling in love with a girl and dancing with her all night, and the music video can be interpreted as the band members simply having fun and being themselves. However, the music video, with the lyrics, sends an important message to Hollywood, society, and their fans (the Directioners). Throughout the music video, One Direction deconstructs the way Hollywood and society has become throughout the music video and the lyrics. The primary purpose of the music video is to show what Hollywood has become, and that the members of One Direction will not let themselves become puppets of Hollywood management.
In the lyrics and the music video, the explicit argument is mostly about being young and truly happy. The lyrics describe a scene where the girl is telling the boy that he has a dirty mouth, most likely as in talking dirty, but she kisses him anyway. This represents the idea of general teenagers’ concept of being young and having fun no matter what. One Direction also shows their way of true happiness throughout the music video. When the members of One Direction vandalize the offices, their facial expressions clearly show that they are having a blast. Towards the end of the music video, the choreography is rather lightly structured and playful. One Direction again shows bright facial expressions while dancing, displaying that different from other boy bands that are more serious, the One Direction members know how to enjoy being young and be truly happy.
The very first thing that can be seen when the music video starts is the Hollywood landmark. This is symbolical because One Direction is showing the way Hollywood and society has become and breaking it down and walking staying away from it. The music video begins at a Hollywood office where two executives are talking to each other; one of them is boasting about what happened between him and Angelina Jolie. This shows that society has come to believe that money can do anything and everything including buying happiness and success, because obviously, the two executives do not have a single thing to put in front of them other than the fact that they make millions of dollars in a snap. When the assistant walks in to tell the executives that One Direction is here to discuss the new movie, they do not know who One Direction is, but they let them in anyway because they know they will make money off of them. This, again, shows that all society thinks about is money. Throughout the meeting, One Direction points out that even through all of the pressure upon them; they remain true to their original identities.
The music video presents satires for how Hollywood could completely change someone, whether that change is on the optimistic side or the pessimistic side. During the meeting at the beginning of the music video, One Direction meets Marcel the Marketing Guy and Leeroy the Choreographer. Leeroy shows them a ridiculous dance routine at which Louis states, “we’d never do