#27.8.15

"Project: No Control is the fifth-largest Thunderclap campaign in history, and the only one [in the top five] that did not have a major celebrity or sponsor supporting it," Lynn says, before rattling off some impressive stats. "The original objective was to have 500 supporters, then it became getting the song added to the set list." PNC boasted 34,449 unique supporters after six days, and One Direction performed "No Control" for the first time ever in June, during a concert in Brussels. Earlier this month, Lynn saw it live when the band’s current On the Road Again world tour brought them to Baltimore.

In May, Billboard reported the track "picked up 1 million U.S. streams in the week ending May 17 […] while its sales rose by a mighty 1,674 percent to 5,000 downloads." The band discussed PNC at the Billboard Awards and during their appearance on "The Late Late Show". Last week, "No Control" earned the band a Teen Choice Award for Best Party Song. All this because a passionate, predominantly female fanbase was savvy enough to identify a) that the band’s critical reputation would not change on its own, and b) the amplification required to chart a new track. They didn’t just want to consume the band’s music; they wanted to control what was on the menu. "Fans started gifting the song on iTunes, and tweeting about the song constantly. They came up with lists of radio stations to call and tweet," Lynn explains. They Shazam’ed it and racked up plays on Spotify, seeing it rise 1,348 places up the iTunes Song Chart is just two days. Nick Grimshaw, host of BBC Radio 1’s Breakfast Show, called the effort, "like punk all over again; DIY releases." All this because a London university student named Anna mused, to her coven of Tumblr followers, about how great it would be for the fandom to unify around a central goal, in a now-legendary post that, tellingly, was tagged #sorry it’s just a silly idea it would be nice thought [sic]

"By brushing these girls aside and laughing at how stupid whatever they like is, we tell these young women that their interests are less important than what men like," Sandra Song wrote on The Pitchearlier this year, "That their feelings somehow become discredited and are not 'real' by virtue of who is having them."

The broadstroke opinion of fangirls is that they’re vapid consumers, eager to gobble up whatever scraps a band of dreamy haircuts will toss their way. They’re actively challenging that perception on their own terms, but they’re doing so in their enclosed spheres, far from the white noise of the world assuming they don’t—or can’t—appreciate music for the "right" reasons. In these safe communities, their tastes aren’t ironic or irrelevant, and they don’t earn credibility points for deigning to give a pop act the time of day.

"We’re all in on the secret," critic Hazel Cills once wrote about Lana Del Rey, "The idea that pop stars don’t have teams behind them, that they’re the sole authors of their music, that nobody is styling them—those are sort of antiquated notions in 2015."