And Finally Artist News Beef Of The Week

CMU Beef Of The Week #254: Zayn Malik v Louis Tomlinson (via Naughty Boy)

By | Published on Friday 8 May 2015

Zayn Malik

I was recently reading an article about Zayn Malik’s exit from One Direction, which basically said that a solo career could end up being a good thing for him, but he should stay friendly with his former bandmates so that they can all milk a reunion when necessary. Though in that regard, things could probably be going better.

As a child, I’m sure Malik’s mother warned him not to hang around with naughty boys. But now look at him, he’s hanging out with a guy whose legal name is Naughty Boy (come on, that must be the name his parents gave him, no one would actually choose to call themselves that surely). It’s just asking for trouble.

For some reason, this week that naughty boy posted a photo of himself and Malik to Twitter with the caption, “Replace this”. I’m not sure if he was saying that Zayn is irreplaceable or if it was just a note to himself that he should probably try to find a less crappy looking picture (or at least one without a crappy filter used on it). Maybe we will never know. That’s just something we’ll all have to come to terms with.

Or maybe we can just forget it altogether, because that picture was really just the catalyst for the monumental events that followed. A couple of hours later, 1D’s Louis Tomlinson tweeted to his followers: “Remember when you were twelve and you used to think those Mac filters for your pictures were cool haha! Some people still do HA!”

Now, he might not have been referring to Naughty Boy’s picture. He could have been talking about any crappy picture. He could have been talking about pictures in general. Naughty Boy did not think so though. Clearly already feeling a bit self-conscious about his awful photography skills, he shot back: “And some people can’t even sing… but who’s complaining when there’s auto tune, eh?”

Quick as a flash, Tomlinson wrote: “Jesus forgot you were such an in demand producer – How does it feel to be riding on the back of someone else’s career?”

Denying that he was, in fact, riding on the coattails of just one person (ie his mate Zayn), the producer noted that he has also worked with Emelie Sande and Sam Smith and suggested that it was in fact Louis who is being dragged along by others. But then Louis came back with the retort that he “happened to write on most” of the band’s hits.

So, as you can see, it was all very exciting. Exciting enough to become headline news in this General Election week. Kind of like Frost/Nixon. Almost. And like that classic discourse, I certainly hope a film of this is made one day. Especially as in the midst of it all, further dramatic tension was added when Zayn Malik him-very-self interjected with a message direct to Tomlinson: “Remember when you had a life and stopped making bitchy comments about mine?”

I think Tomlinson’s original comments were bitchy about the quality of a photograph actually, but maybe it was Zayn who took it/added the filter and that upset up. Again, we may never know. Though in the now-surely-in-development movie, we can have a scene where Malik deletes all the photos off his iPhone sobbing, and then pushes a load of stuff off a table. It’ll be Oscars all round, I tell you.

Malik has since said that he was just defending himself, and not looking for a public spat with his former bandmate, while both he and Tomlinson have thanked their fans, as is protocol in these situations.

Anyway, there are bigger fish to fry now, as Noel Gallagher has finally got around to having an opinion on Zayn’s departure from One Direction. It was only a matter of time. Speaking to Rolling Stone, he said: “It’s a strange thing for that lad to have done at that age. The greatest quote was – I laughed out loud when I read it – ‘I just want to be a normal 22 year old”. Pfft. Who wants to be a normal 22 year old?! Hang on a minute. You can be fucking anything that moves and [you’re] gettin paid half a million dollars a week, you fuckin’ idiot. You want to be a normal 22 year old? Have you met any normal 22 year olds? They’re fuckin shit-for-brains”.

Zayn hasn’t commented on this, but his good buddy Naughty Boy was on hand to jump to his defence, tweeting: “Noel Gallagher will make up with his brother soon because they will need the money, let’s stop talking about fuckin idiots mate”.

Ignoring the fact that in the same Rolling Stone interview Noel claimed that Liam was to blame for rumours of an Oasis reunion, and that said reunion wasn’t happening, his brother actually came to the defence of Malik too – although he doesn’t seem to realise that Zayn is no longer one of “those 1D kids”.



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