As the LA Times article points out — along with other sites like Vulture and Gawker, amongst others — The Wanted are being sold to American audiences as the wild playboys (but not TOO wild), while One Direction are being positioned as the (slightly) younger, more innocent band. For example, the video for The Wanted’s breakout hit, “Glad You Came,” features them partying in Ibiza and trying to hook up with all sorts of women — but only when they’re not too busy jumping off cliffs and hanging out in speedboats. Then there’s the song title itself, clearly a double entendre. Moreover, the band seems to love pointing out that it’s a double entendre. For example, the blog Idolator mentioned that the band was recently on a radio station morning show to perform the song. When asked, “Is this really a song about having an orgasm?”, they went ahead and “answered with a chorus of ‘Yes!’” Overall, you’re supposed to get the impression these guys are masculine bros and that they think about having sex with women every waking moment. One Direction, on the other hand — they’re just supposed to think about kissing girls all of the time. Maybe I should also point out The Wanted wear a lot of leather jackets and V-neck t-shirts. Meanwhile, as others have pointed out, pictures of One Direction tend to resemble images from a J. Crew catalog.

However, in what I am sure is a completely unsurprising twist, the bands actually do not seem too dissimilar and, significantly, some of the overlap seems to go back to the argument that the comfortable homoeroticism linked to One Direction really is an outcome of British teen boy culture becoming less homophobic and more accepting of “demonstrative male friendship.” For example, the Internet abounds with old pictures of The Wanted playfully spoonfeeding each other, posing together shirtless for The Gay Times, etc. Importantly, this is when the band was just being sold to British audiences. Additionally, their previous videos, mainly intended for British viewers, tended to be less explicit about the band members’ sex drives. However, such moments of casual affection seem to be largely absent from the American coverage of the band. This omission in accompaniment with the “Glad You Came” video mentioned above, as well as instances like their radio interview, cannot help but make me wonder how these bands might be adjusted for American audiences if their popularity continues to grow. In other words, looking into the future, I’m curious whether future depictions of The Wanted in America will veer more and more towards the “defensively heterosexual presentations” produced during the last era of the boy bands, whether that comes from the fact they think that’s what American audiences want or because they’re trying to differentiate themselves from One Direction. While the video for “Glad You Came” seems to still straddle a line, balancing shots of the band’s sexual hungers with shots of the band members wrapping their arms around one another or sitting with one another on lonely cliff edges, the next video might not even allow such moments.

Also, while I’ve never heard of JLS, I’ve heard briefly about The Wanted (who I’ve heard described as “1D’s rival”). I’ll be curious to see if One Direction’s breakthrough in the U.S. will lead to more transnational importation of pop music and how those global flows will shape youth music culture.

I’m really fascinated by this idea that these somewhat homoerotic moments might result from a combination of the band’s compressed development/promotional timeline, heavy reliance on digital/social media, and an attempted appeal to authenticity based on “behind-the-scenes-casual-fun-means-these-guys-are-“real”-people-not-just-a-manufactured-group-from-a-reality-show” type effort; as if somehow the structure and/or economic demands of the contemporary entertainment industry & its struggle to adapt to a convergent/digital media environment are allowing for a more visibly queered iteration of traditional boy bands. The fact that social media simultaneously serves as the place where they visibly perform heterosexuality/police their queerness by frequently tweeting to/about their girlfriends only further exemplifies how central new media platforms are to their process of signification & polysemic representation. What a rich case study!

We also talked about the persistent whiteness of British and Irish boy bands, notwithstanding the popularity in the UK of JLS (are they popular in the US???), nor the fact that gestures are being made to account for the social realities concerning the ethnic and cultural diversity of Britain and Ireland, which is reflected in the ethnic make up of popular groups like One Direction, and The Wanted, on who 1D appear to be modelled. What I mean by this is that both groups are comprised of four British and Irish members, fairly straightforwardly readable as white, and one mixed race member with a combination of white and South Asian heritage. Zayn Malik of One Direction is of white and Pakistani ethnic heritage. Siva Kaneswaran of The Wanted is of white and Sri Lankan ethnic heritage. While on the surface this does seem to speak to the ‘Mixed Race Britain’ [and Ireland] of which the BBC made quite a meal last year, their ethnicities are nevertheless downplayed if not subsumed by the larger discourse of whiteness at work in the mediation of these groups, which I hadn’t thought about or noticed until Ian pointed it out. Just look at how Zayn has been whitewashed on the cover of their album, which illustrates your piece. And if you google images of The Wanted, Siva is frequently the one standing at the back in partial shadow.