About two weeks ago, I was sitting in my living room watching television. Suddenly, my sons cranked up the volume of the TV to unbearable limits and started singing a song (Story of my life, I take her home) and danced to its tune. Yes, I am talking about the famous album by the overrated English-Irish pop band One Direction.
To be quite honest without wrecking my sophisticated Ph.D. image (which already has been wrecked enough by now, I presume), I liked the song and the music. Those boys are really talented and they have a charisma in addition to the harmony between them especially during live performances. What really attracted my attention was that they were so young with the eldest of them all being less than 22. Yet they think they have a life full of experiences that made them eligible to come out with a song called: Story of my life.
This sounds really funny when you are just over 20. At this age one barely steps out of the childhood phase (not to exclude diapers and buggy phase). One just comes out of the teenage phase experiencing all the mood swings with the feeling of being king of the world. It is a time when one hates people interfering in one’s personal matters. So, in my opinion the 20 or so years do not qualify to be called a life.
While the song is not quite about telling a life story as much as telling a love story, the title of the song just got stuck in my mind. Well I could accept a song with the same title from The Beatles, ABBA, Bee Gees or even Backstreet Boys but it felt strange from One Direction. I then grabbed my cell phone and without thinking too much I wrote this tweet in Arabic (those kiddies One Direction have a song called story of my life, which life are you talking about when your eldest is merely 22). The tweet was written in Arabic and started getting retweeted with most of the people laughing about it (which was the original plan) until some One Direction’s fans caught the tweet. Soon after that, my twitter page turned into a war zone with fans sending angry tweets like how dare I criticize their beloved One Direction. The most interesting of them all was: “We know you’re Jeallouse, those kids as you claim make more money than you would ever dream of. Ahaaa you are trying to be famous by criticizing them.”
Well, those tweets were very funny and made me laugh out loud. It was like Zain Malik or Harry Styles were sitting there doing nothing but praising those attempts to defend them from my brutal tweety attack, it was hilarious and it went on for days and days without stopping. Well, just to be fair, I don’t by any mean intend to underestimate or make fun of teenagers’ interests, I myself had a big crush on Ricky Martin when I was a teenager and his songs used to really cheer me up. I also used to love Backstreet Boys songs and also Boyzone, but I don’t recall swearing at people who criticize them or their songs or even on people who hated them. OK, I used to feel the urge to defend but I remember resisting it, then why teenagers on twitter do not resist that urge? Frankly from the number of heated mentions I get regarding that issue, I feel that we are facing a big problem with young people not differentiating between artists’ and their performances, if you happen to like a type of music, then you don’t need to take the artist as a role model and defend him/her by attacking others. The entire episode served as a wakeup call to me, I need to go and do whatever I can to prevent my children from becoming One Direction’s (or whatever band comes after it when they are teenagers) crazy fans like the ones I had encountered. Wish me luck.
@ HatoonKadi
