Ex-One Direction band member Zayn Malik has not been making headlines recently after announcing his fallout from the most successful boy band in the world, One Direction.
After five successful years of performing with One Direction, Zayn announced last March 25, 2015 on Facebook that he was going to leave the band. After all the hype of him leaving the band, Malik pulls the spotlight right back to his face in a statement he disclosed to Fader Magazine for a cover story.
The 22-year-old performer called One Direction's music as "generic." Among other things that Malik shared in the interview in recollection of his experience with the group, it was his negative statement that became the centerpiece of the interview.
He says that the band and its producers left no room for him to improvise and express his personality during the recording sessions of its songs. "There was never any room for me to experiment creatively in the band," he says in retrospect.
He even claimed that the producers with impose to him a ready-made interpretation of the song even before the recording commenced. "If I would sing a hook or a verse slightly R&B, or slightly myself, it would always be recorded 50 times until there was a straight version that was pop, generic as f***, so they could use that version," says Malik.
He exposed that the songs and the way it would be delivered were already decided by the producers. "It wasn't me. It was music that was already given to us, and we were told this is what is going to sell to these people."
The personality behind the group's success was Simon Cowell, who was one of the judges that discovered them at the X Factor UK.
Cowell was not pleased with Malik's statement and responded to it saying, "It is a bit rude to the people who wrote all the hits with them."
But Cowell is looking forward to Malik's change of perspective in his experience with the band. Cowell negated Malik's comment on how the group's producers dictated the creative process, "I think once he has had a chance to reflect on everything he will probably reconsider what he's said because it was a very, very democratic process in the band."
