When One Direction performs on the North American leg of their “Where We Are” tour starting in August, you’ll have to squint your ears to hear the boy bands’ hits amid a more ancient and fascinating sound: the emptying of adolescent lungs.
Obviously, there will be screaming — high-decibel, high-pitch swells that push hard on the eardrums and then harder, toward the surreal. It’s an abstract sound that JC Chasez has had years to ponder as a member of the multi-platinum juggernaut ‘N Sync. But putting the power of that communal wail into words still isn’t easy.
“Sound is energy,” Chasez says. “And the entire room is producing sound, not just the people onstage, so when the entire room is resonating with every human being producing, it’s a very exciting feeling.”
Surely. But what’s behind that feeling? Why do young women assembled at pop concerts express their collective ecstasy with the most alarming sound available to their bodies? Why do they scream?
In some ways, today’s young fans are simply imitating the ritualized shrieks of the generations that preceded them, from the Beatlemaniacs to the Beliebers. And while today’s tween screams aren’t reserved exclusively for young male heartthrobs, concerts by Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift don’t seem to generate quite the same sonic fervor as a performance from One Direction or Ed Sheeran.
Since the splashdown of Elvis Presley in 1956, the American media has often characterized the din of young female fans gathered in the presence of a pop idol as “hysteria” — “a description that denigrates their musical engagement,” according to a 2003 article written by Australian researcher Sarah Baker.
So when the lights go down at a 21st century boy band revue, we aren’t hearing a helpless, hysteric howl.
We’re hearing a complex expression of individualism and collectivity — perhaps with a dash of Darwin thrown in.
Sociologists have different names for different types of crowds. The noisy throngs at a pop concert qualify as an “expressive crowd” — a gathering in which the participants are given implicit permission to abandon decorum and freak out.
“When men cry at a sports event, it’s very similar” to the screaming that takes place at a One Direction concert, says author Rachel Simmons. “It wouldn’t be OK for men to do that anywhere else. But the sporting event sanctions that behavior.”
Simmons is the author of “The Curse of the Good Girl,” a book in which she argues that young women are unfairly asked to squeeze into an impossible mold of politeness and modesty. Simmons says a concert is a unique event that gives girls the rare opportunity to break out of those roles.
“In their day-to-day, non-concert-going lives, girls don’t have a lot of permission to scream,” she says. “A concert offers an oasis from the daily rules about being good girls. Screaming is about letting go and leaving the confines of being the self-conscious pleaser.”
