At what point did teen girls suddenly just become wrong? "Serious" music fans seem to have universally accepted a critique of quality that befalls any artist who willingly sells to the rabid teen girl market and stigmatized the fans who dare to sometimes be male or at least above the age of 18. It's why we only divulge our love for Justin Bieber with a laugh and overdose of self-awareness that lets the world know we don't feel he or the boys in One Direction are legitimate artists.

See also: Beliebers on One Direction: "They're Nothing"

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You could hear the sigh of relief among pop fans a couple of weeks ago, when Carly Rae Jepsen's single with Owl City, "Good Time," broke into the Top 10 on Billboard's Hot 100.

In his weekly chart roundup, veteran columnist Paul Grein remarked, "'Good Time' is an appropriately positive title for a song that guarantees that neither act can (fairly) be referred to as a one-hit wonder." (Emphasis mine.)

Hang on a sec: The week before it leapt to No. 9 on the big chart, "Good Time" was sitting at No. 13. What if it had gone no higher than that? Would it have been fair to call Jepsen, famed for the 2012 Song Of The Summer "Call Me Maybe," or Adam "Owl City" Young, owner of the 2009 bedroom-pop megahit "Fireflies," one-hit wonders? Didn't the rise of "Good Time" into the Top 20 already preclude that ignominy for both of them? Heck, didn't the one-hit wonder tag go away the minute the song appeared on the Hot 100 two months ago?

I know what some of you are thinking, though: C'mon... of course she's a one-hit wonder. She's always gonna be Ms. "Call Me Maybe."

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How much Swiftian shock will we see tonight?

Has the live-blog been obliterated by Twitter? Let's find out on MTV's biggest night of the year, the Video Music Awards, which this year will feature Taylor Swift (in business casual on the double-decker red carpet right now), Frank Ocean, Rihanna, and Green Day, among others, as well as honors to various clips designed to big-up the biggest pop tracks of the year.

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Nate "Igor" Smith

They're all the cute one, don't you know.

Saturday afternoon I spent some time at the Beacon Theater for a matinee performance by the British boy band One Direction, who played three shows (two at the Beacon, one at the Izod Center) in the area over the course of the long weekend. It was an extended version of the opening set they played at Radio City Music Hall earlier this year—the 75-ish-minute set was padded out with a bunch of seasonally themed videos that looked like chillwave-inspired ads for a super-preppy clothing line (the room went absolutely silent when any romantically interesting women appeared on the screens showing these clips, in a stark reminder that boy bands' fantasy-object status is paramount at all ages). (Well, the bras and underwear—multiple on both!—that were thrown were probably stark reminders too. But I digress.)

Also padding out the set, since the boys only have one album under their belt: Cover songs. The still-curiously-mature "Use Somebody" cover that united mothers and daughters back at Radio City got a prime spot in the backend of the set; there was also a medley of hits earlier in the show that included "I Gotta Feeling," "Stereo Hearts," and—in another sap to the parents—"Torn," the Ednaswap song made inescapable by Aussie soap star Natalie Imbruglia in the late '90s. The breezy guitar and sad-confused lyrics fit in perfectly with One Direction's scrubbed-schoolboy-who-can-still-be-bad aesthetic, and perhaps most surprisingly, every member of the audience, even those who weren't even eggs when the song hit big in 1997, knew every word. Which got me thinking: What other songs from that halcyon era could One Direction, whose sound borrows much more from the alt-leaning radio pop songs that would later become adult-contemporary staples than it does the likes of 'NSync and the Backstreet Boys, remake into their own, cherub-cheeked image? Six suggestions below.

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Beginning tonight and spooling out over the weekend, a pack of five British youths will blitz the tri-state area with performances and signings and, eventually, a Rockefeller Center-stuffing appearance on NBC's Today. The five young men make up the vocal group One Direction—a five-member boyband of floppy-haired dudes from the UK and Ireland, hatched in part by the ever-smirking real talker Simon Cowell—and they've so far had quite a bit of success on the other side of the Atlantic. If this whole thing works out and even more foreigners usurp this country's teen-idol gigs, you'll probably be seeing a lot more of them. (Even in those corners of the Internet that claim to dislike them, because what would those outlets be without talismans of Bad Music to rail against? Right.) In advance of their debut appearance in New York, which happens tonight at Radio City, here are six things to know about the group.

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