Freddie Baseman
Contributing Writer
In June, Syco Entertainment owner and “X Factor” judge Simon Cowell joined Stephen Bartlett on his “The Diary of a CEO” podcast. In the discussion, he told Bartlett his “only regret,” in regards to his management of boy group One Direction, was that he didn’t own the band’s name.
On Oct. 16, former One Direction member Liam Payne died at 31 after he fell from a third-floor balcony in a Buenos Aires hotel. There’s been no shortage of coverage of Payne’s death and the events leading up to it. People quickly found interviews, interactions, and headlines going back to his One Direction days; every word spoken about him by anyone with even a modicum of relevance was excavated from the internet’s archives and covered by what felt like every online news outlet. There’ve been tributes to him, paid by fans as well as bandmates, and blame thrown too — at toxic fan culture, at Cowell’s management of One Direction, and at Payne himself. Out of all this, however, the search for meaning has been an overwhelming exercise in futility, even disrespect.
Though there are problems with the performance of sympathy (“thoughts and prayers”) in the wake of a public tragedy, from its alleged mindlessness to it being used as a substitute for action, I have a half a mind to defend, rather than condemn, it as a trend, especially in cases of private tragedy made public. It’s easy, through abstracting and intellectualizing the context of a person’s death, to impose one’s own values and biases onto them, to fictionalize their very intricate and very real life. It’s good to recognize that tragedy doesn’t occur in a vacuum, but it’s better to respect the lives of celebrity strangers as ones you are not wholly privy to. Just because they are objects of public attention, does not mean they should become accessories to their own stories.
So let’s put Liam Payne and One Direction to the side, because in the discussion of the now-defunct Syco Records and Cowell’s treatment of his artists, it’s all too easy to draw a throughline of blame, from Cowell to Payne, from Payne’s One Direction days and his young fame to his early death. But this is an irresponsible line to draw, equally convenient and unempathetic. The renewed interest in “X Factor” and Syco, through Payne’s death, should instead be channeled into an overdue conversation about Simon Cowell’s management history, a conversation concerning Britain’s Little Mix, America’s Fifth Harmony, and 2006 “X Factor” winner Leona Lewis.
The least surprising aspect of Cowell’s managerial approach is his control over his artists’ creative direction. Singer-songwriter Leona Lewis, who in 2014 left Syco and signed with Universal’s Island Records, penned an open letter to her fans explaining her decision. She cited Syco impairing her creative direction as a key reason for her departure, and said when she spoke up about wanting to leave, she was “threatened with the fact that if [she] left, it would come out that [she] had been dropped.” Deciding she could no longer “compromise herself,” she left anyway. After her departure, Cowell posted a statement online, wishing her the best, saying, “You put X Factor on the map.”
What’s more surprising are the details of the treatment of the vulnerable teenagers Cowell helped rocket into superstardom. In Fifth Harmony member Ally Brooke’s memoir, “Finding Your Harmony,” she talks about the group’s debut, explaining that in the crafting of their first album, the label wanted to push an “adult” image, despite the group’s two underage members. When the group objected to the themes, the label pushed back. Brooke writes, “The response was, basically: If we’d wanted to sign a Christian group, we would have signed a Christian group.”
There’s no knowing how aware Cowell was, personally, of this behavior. However, given the credit he takes for these groups’ successes, and that he was the CEO of Syco Records, it’s arguable that he had a responsibility to his artists that he didn’t uphold.
Another musical group managed under Cowell’s record label, Little Mix, expressed their dissatisfaction towards him more explicitly. On their first album after their departure from Syco, “Confetti,” they performed “Not a Pop Song,” singing, “I don’t do what Simon says,” which is hardly ambiguous.
The Little Mix members’ solo careers, post-Syco, diverged. Jade (stylized JADE) was the last to debut, and did so with an experimental pop single titled “Angel of My Dreams.” Accompanied by a nauseating music video, JADE makes not-so-subtle references to her time in Little Mix, under Syco Records, talk-singing, “Sellin’ my soul to a psycho / They say I’m so lucky.” “Angel of My Dreams” doesn’t stay snarky for its own sake, though; JADE uses the disjointed nature of the track and video to explore her multifaceted experiences in the industry. It’s a concept that’s been done before, but an admittedly compelling take on it.
JADE’s layered interpretation of her own experiences expose, in addition to “the industry,” the way we see the “dark side” of the entertainment industry as appealing, even consumable. There’s so many tropes and aesthetics people hate to love: the dark glamor of living fast and dying young; tales of trauma personal enough to compel, impersonal enough to stay tales; the grit under the gleam. It’s the cultural obsession with Marilyn Monroe, with sadness as something inherently meaningful — and it’s the undeniable satisfaction that comes with someone at the top being taken down a peg.
But if we the audience can be content with a certain distance, both between us and the A-list and between our image of them and their person, a space grows in that distance, wherein fans relinquishing control translates to artists reclaiming their personhood. If the entertainment audience can assimilate a more whole conception of artists’ humanity and autonomy into their expectations, perhaps moving forward, we’ll be able to reject talent managers like Cowell with more honesty, because as it stands, we like to eat what he brings to the table. We just don’t like that we now have to see how it was prepared.