Should we ban boy bands?

It was Oprah Winfrey, I think, who said that “if you come to fame not understanding who you are, it will define who you are.” I read that to mean that if you get famous when you are young — get famous before you have a stable sense of yourself — then you are in trouble.  

One Direction’s Liam Payne, who struggled with depression and addiction before falling to his death last week after what seems to have been his umpteenth relapse on drink and drugs, is only the latest in a long line of those who reached adulthood damaged beyond repair by fame.  

The chimney-sweeps and cotton workers of our own age are on Instagram and TikTok, on talent shows and football pitches rather than up chimneys or laboring away in mills

Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Judy Garland, Macaulay Culkin, Lindsay Lohan and Drew Barrymore are only a handful of the better-known casualties. The bad behavior of sports stars — young men rewarded with seemingly limitless riches and adulation before they’ve had any life experience off the pitch to give them moral grounding — seems to me to fall into the same category. 

Now the songwriter Guy Chambers — whose long friendship with British singer Robbie Williams, a casualty of early fame a generation before Liam Payne, surely qualifies him to be heard on the subject — says that he thinks we should stop putting children in pop bands, tout court. “I do think putting a sixteen-year-old in an adult world like that is potentially really damaging,” he told the Observer, saying that the industry’s inability to protect the mental health of its young stars hasn’t noticeably improved since Williams’s day. “I would suggest that people should not be in a boyband until they are eighteen, and the industry should stick to that, too.”

I’m put in mind of the great argument about youth employment that took place between the Industrial Revolution and the late nineteenth century in Britain. Back then, the iconic figure came to be the chimney sweep — as rendered in the poetry of William Blake and Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies. Respiratory diseases and fevers carried off juvenile workers in ill-ventilated cotton mills; chimney sweeps were prone to lung diseases, contusions from falling, suffocation and cancer of the scrotum. A succession of laws — starting with the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802 — passed by public outcry in the teeth of very wealthy vested interests, gradually brought the wholesale exploitation of child labor under control. 

We live not in an industrial but in an attention economy now — in which the chimney-sweeps and cotton workers of our own age are on Instagram and TikTok, on talent shows and fields rather than up chimneys or laboring away in mills. The toll is psychological rather than physical. It comes in the form of some or all of addiction, depression, sexual delinquency, stress, megalomania, burnout and piercing loneliness. We see it unfold, and our tabloid appetites engender what they feed on. Nothing like a young celebrity in meltdown to sell clicks; and nothing like clicks to worsen the meltdown.  

Is there any hope of something like a Health and Morals of Apprentices Act for the twenty-first century? It’s tricky both in practice and in principle to see how modern states could legislate or regulate to prevent this. Films that depict children are always going to need child actors. There’s a particular sort of pop stardom that has always been the province of young teenagers, because there’s an audience of young teenagers yearning to relate to the people on stage. And you’re not going to get international-standard twenty-one-year-old soccer stars emerging if they haven’t been honing their skills under pressure from their early teens. The vested interests are still there — the record industry makes an absolute fortune out of boy bands, and leagues need pipelines to bring along the stars of the future.  

So seeking to outlaw putting sixteen-year-olds in boy bands or on soccer pitches or in Hollywood movies would, for most people, seem both impractical and illiberal. But it does, at least, recognize that few if any lessons seem to have been learned between one generation and the next about how to support and protect the children we put in this position. 

Here it’s reasonable to expect voluntary behaviors from the industries that profit from these child sacrifices, if only to forestall the blunt application of law. There’s no reason, I don’t think, why TV talent shows couldn’t voluntarily agree to have a lower limit on eligibility of eighteen; that industry standards couldn’t be established restricting the working hours of minors, making mental health support and independent chaperones a standard requirement, and putting continued education in as part of the package (as they do with child actors). And the flashbulb mafia: could they, perhaps, show a little bit of restraint with those not yet old enough to vote?  

We may not wish to or be able to prevent, by law, teenagers with remarkable talent doing what they do best in the public arena. But if we’re to continue enjoying their work it’s not too much to ask those who profit from it to show some decency and restraint and consideration in how they behave.  

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.