harry styles

Showing 11 posts tagged harry styles

this is pretty much how it’s gonna be this week.
(Hendrik covered almost everything in his intro, but you can also read my assorted thoughts on the One Direction years on my Tumblr, and I’ve written a handful of non-Tumblr things about the Direction... High-res

this is pretty much how it’s gonna be this week. 

(Hendrik covered almost everything in his intro, but you can also read my assorted thoughts on the One Direction years on my Tumblr, and I’ve written a handful of non-Tumblr things about the Direction as well, notably an essay about how dressing like Harry sometimes helps women dress like themselves for Racked. I’m gonna jump in momentarily with thoughts on Sign of the Times + Ever Since New York; after that, we’ll go in album order all week, including tomorrow because Harry Styles transcends America.) 

you can’t bribe the door on your way to the sky

This is how it had to start, right? With repentance? Harry Styles spent his entire adolescence running from one side of a stadium stage to the other, dimpled and grinning, shaking his curls, asking girls to be quiet because there wasn’t any louder he could ask them to scream. 

“Watching Harry spit water and touch his hair makes me want to be a better person,” Rob Sheffield wrote in a review of One Direction’s 2015 tour stop at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, and the Direction’s fans nodded fervent yeses, whispered a chorus of amen. One Direction was the most famous boy band in the world and everyone agreed Harry was its rock star, Timberlake but talented (don’t get me started on “talented”), beautiful and gracious and charismatic, bound and destined for serious, long-term, well-earned fame. Real fame. Not that fleeting fake adolescent girl-powered stuff.

So the release of his first solo single was Harry’s moment, and the first thing he did with it was apologize: for leaving, for needing to be on his own. (Just stop your crying / it’s a sign of the times. / Welcome to the final show / hope you’re wearing your best clothes.) He wrote a ballad that swoops and soars, that promises all of the howling, enormous emotion that One Direction slipped into perfectly crafted three-minute pop songs was not being packed away but instead let loose, a bolt of lighting giving way, finally, to the promise of a real storm.

But, and, or, because: you can’t bribe the door on your way to the sky. You look pretty good down here / but you ain’t really good. Listening to this song for the first time in my headphones at four am, up early on my way to the airport, it seemed like a gesture towards his past, a mournful suggestion that he didn’t know how to feel about the status he’d been raised to, the mountains of adulation he’d received, and whether it could ever stand in for actual love.

Having listened to the album, though, I tend to think that he’s also apologizing: for Carolina and Kiwi and Only Angel, for where he knows he’s about to take you, for where he’s not entirely sure you’re going to follow. This song isn’t exactly about not being sure you deserve to be a rock star; it’s also about knowing that you’re a rock star, and not being sure that anyone can love you for it they way they loved you for being young and gorgeous, a beautiful and blessed child.

Harry Styles is about addiction and withdrawal, obsession and abjection, objectification and loneliness. It sounds like the soundtrack to my own fucked up twenties, the long years I spent confusing the power of my cravings with power, period. Harry spends the album alternatively on his knees for women who aren’t giving him what he wants and dismissing the ones who are— just let me know I’ll be on the floor / hoping you’ll come around he sings on Meet Me in the Hallway, before writing off Kiwi’s hard candy as a cokehead, try-hard faker: Holland tunnel for a nose / it’s always backed up, the lyric goes, and later she goes home to a cactus / she wears a black dress / and she is an actress.

So before he let us hear any of that he opened with it’s a sign of the times, this cracked-open apocalypse scream of a song: its admission of bad behavior and its obsession with escape. We’ve got to get away / we’ve got to get away / oh we’ve got to get away. I don’t think Harry’s ever heard Modest Mouse but Isaac Brock asks the relevant question here: where do you run when what you’re running from / is yourself?

oh / tell me something I don’t already know

There’s a particular grace to hopelessness: there can be relief in surrender to grief that cannot be denied. Ever Since New York is a song about the boring, dogged persistence that living requires. Tell me something / tell me something / you don’t know nothing / just pretend you do, it begins. I need something / tell me something new.

The adolescent trauma is learning that no one knows anything and that the world stupid, random and cruel; adulthood is something like the choice to see the dumb thing through anyway. How many times have I sung some version of this song into a friend’s shoulder or lap, heartbroken and sick, begging them to tell me something I don’t already know. Taking comfort in the fact that they’re trying instead of getting ruined by the fact that they can’t.

The thing that makes faith powerful is accepting that it isn’t rational; the thing that makes faith function is when you stop looking for proof, or even evidence, and trust that faith is its own force in the world. The point of faith is that you choose to believe something: that even when you know that praying is talking to the walls you keep at it. I’ve been praying / ever since New York.

Jews have this idea about prayer, that you can talk about it two ways: about the words that you say, or the way that you say them. Prayer is a ritual designed to get you into a mindset, to give you words when you don’t have them, but that doesn’t mean you know to know a prayer to talk to whatever god you believe in. Prayer are a ritual designed to help you access your spirit; if you’ve got your spirit in hand, you can skip the form of prayer. I say this only by way of saying, listen to that last repetition, the crack in his voice, the way it begs: oh, tell me something I don’t already know. I know that refrain. I’ve sung it myself, not because I thought it would help but because I didn’t know what else to do. Faith that persists despite sheer, utter hopelessness: tell me that’s not the essence of prayer.

Track

Meet Me in the Hallway

Artist

Harry Styles

Album

Harry Styles

is there any more to do?

Harry Styles is an album about addiction: wanting the thing that doesn’t fulfill you, and wanting it indulgently, to excess. Wanting it to fuck you long past all the way up.

I just left your bedroom, the song begins, and then immediately wonders, is there any more to do?

What a rock star question: is there any more to do?

At what point does the constant excess of depravity circle back around to become mundane?

The melody in one of the verses echoes Sign of the Times, or presages it: just let me know I’ll be on the floor blending with we never learn, we’ve been here before. But Sign of the Times’ escape becomes Meet Me in the Hallway grasping at recovery: I’ve gotta get better, Harry yelps. Gotta get better. There’s no leaving, not in the state he’s in.

What a way to being the album: abject, on the floor, in the hallway, in a series of nowhere spaces. It’s easy to imagine the endlessness of a One Direction tour, a hundred thousand hotel corridors and service elevators, the limos and vans and decoy vans, the shift from time zone to time zone so that your body’s law becomes the only natural one you know. Here’s him describing it to Cameron Crowe in Rolling Stone: “New location. Quick cut. New location. Cut. Cut. Show. Shower. Hard cut. Sleep.“ And so it’s easy to imagine Harry swimming through these sterile landscapes and grasping at warm bodies, good drugs, any kind of company. (It’s important to remember: what we imagine is not the same thing as being able to know.)

We don’t talk about it, goes the song’s last line. It’s sung in chorus, a low hum of voices whispering inevitable truth in your ear. It’s something we don’t do. / ‘Cause once you go without it / nothing else will do.

Not once you’ve had it— once you’ve gone without it. This is a song about having everything and still not having enough. It’s about getting obsessed with the things that hurt because you’ve started to believe that hurt is the only thing you can feel. There’s always more to do, but eventually you’ll get sick on it, gorge and overdose. No one will stop you from doing that to yourself. And so instead you learn to love lack, and get high on willpower, to count the minutes until you surrender again and find yourself in the hallway, at the door, begging to be let back in.

she feels so good

I. “It’s hard not to wish that Styles could have been more empathetic in his imagining of what writing about Jones might do to her and her life. It’s particularly been a blow to longtime fans who loved Styles before he was trying to establish his rock-and-roll bad-boy bona fides. He can give sound bites about respecting teenage girls all he wants, but “knowing who the girl is ruins [“Carolina”],” says longtime Styles fan Yvonne Popplewell, who’s in an online One Direction discussion group. “As a fantasy, it’s fun, but the idea that Harry made this girl so easily identifiable means … it’s someone’s real life that I have to consider. She’ll forever be Harry’s muse before her own person.”

II. “She’s a good girl:” it’s a tired lyric, right. Drake, etc., a pallid description and an offhand reduction, she’s a good girl, she’s a milquetoast femme archetype, nothing more than a submission to patriarchal conceptions of what feminine acceptability might mean. It’s weirdly sort of nice, then, that Harry moves to clarify, or maybe undermine: she feels so good. Good girls aren’t supposed to feel like anything, because they aren’t supposed to let you touch. But the lyrics wink, and let you know that this girl’s goodness is already eating itself alive.

III. It’s also something about the way he sings it, she feels so good, and the how can I tell her that she’s all I think about, how obsessed he is with his own obsession. It shouldn’t be but it is charming. It makes me want to whisper very softly in his ear, “Harry, you know you’re not the first person who’s ever had really good sex, right?” 

IV. The song is wrapped up in a maniacal chant, la la la la la la la la la la la la, that first appears threading itself through the chorus, and then return, languid and psychedelic, in Woman. The lalas might read like simple melody, but in context they sound almost like a blurred out slur, a way of eliding the dirtiness of the language that wants to get used. His head is spinning and his tongue is heavy, like a cartoon dog with big AHOOOOOGA eyes. There’s no language left for all the bad things this girl’s goodness makes him want to do.

trying to remember how it feels to have a heartbeat

I’ve written about songs Harry Styles wrote that seem to be about Taylor Swift before, last time I did this. You can believe whatever you want about exactly who the “eyes blue” in Two Ghosts belong to, but as with Perfect, it’s hard not to see Taylor being called out specifically in the imagery: her red lipped classic thing that you like, his long hair, slicked back, white tee shirt.

Those three images– blue eyes, red lips, white shirt– are the meme of their relationship, the easiest and most public shorthand for it; they don’t point us inward, towards the intimate experience of it, but rather toward the surface, the way we’ve consumed it from the outside: as a series of paparazzi photos, fan rumors, and then, ultimately, recorded song lyrics. Style and Perfect (and the rest of 1989) codified the vocabulary we’d use to discuss the relationship, the images of it we’d most remember, and associate with it. 

Two Ghosts marks the moment at which you look at an old flame and realize you can bring up the memories you’ve made for yourself of them– this moment, that outfit, the fucking feeling– but beyond that there’s not much anymore. Your memory is more constructed than recalled. 

They’re lost to you, and in losing them, you’ve lost some small, vital piece of your own self.

(Losing this piece of self is the only way to keep on growing up.) 

With Perfect, I wrote about the idea that Taylor had trapped the ghost of their relationship in the structure of her song, so that in writing Perfect Harry was perhaps, at least in part, writing about what it felt like to be used that way, and to be complicit in using your self in writing your own work: turning your private emotional life into very public art.

Perfect is ironic, but Two Ghosts is not at all arch; it’s sweetly mournful, an empty-handed pean to something so long lost that there’s nothing to hold into anymore, nothing left but memory, or spirit— or maybe just illusion.

How do you prove you existed? How do you prove that what you felt, especially when the feeling existed between two people who aren’t on the same page anymore, was ever real? Taylor’s answer is defiant: she sings, over and over again, oh I remember. She records her personal history in order to give weight to her version of events.

But Two Ghosts knows that being able to remember something doesn’t mean you can make it live again; having control over the past doesn’t give you any way to steady yourself against the heartbreak of the present.

Every time Harry sings we’re just two ghosts swimming in a glass half-empty I hear echoes of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, which goes we’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl / year after year. Wish You Were Here is also about the distance that time creates, about the tricks that the mind plays on us: oh / so you think you can tell / heaven from hell? Blue skies from grey? The song is a series of questions about what its subject has been up to— did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts? Hot ashes for trees? Hot air for a cool breeze? But nothing changes its inevitable conclusion: oh I wish, how I wish you were here.

Romantic nostalgia longs for a lost self as much as the lost love. Whoever the song is about, their presence makes Harry feel like a ghost of himself, like since he felt that he hasn’t felt anything at all. Trying to remember how it feels to have a heart / beat. Memories seem like good company but in fact they all too often just make you lonely, reminding you of how many past selves there are to mourn.

Track

Sweet Creature

Artist

Harry Styles

Album

Harry Styles

you bring me home

Sweet Creature marks the halfway point in the album, and closes its sweet opening. Sweet Creature is lovely; the next four songs are marked by a descent into rock’n’roll that sometimes reads cliche. They’re littered with references to sex and drugs, animated by the erotic, by the animal hungers of desire. But first there’s this, intimate and careful: I know it’s hard we argue / we’re both stubborn I know / but oh, sweet creature / when I run out of rope / you bring me home. Here, at the album’s heart, is something private and grounded, ceaselessly hopeful. We’re still young, Harry sings. Is there a more evocative promise for a pop star who has spent his life being uprooted, sought and chased, dissected and analyzed, than the concept of being allow to be young, to be uncertain, to be allowed to run out of rope and get gently, inevitably tugged towards home?

in between my teeth

Only Angel is, lyrically, the clearest example of abjection on the album, and how could it not be: she’s an angel, elevated, and he’s crawling across the floor to worship at her feet. (Which is another way of saying: between her legs.) The songs begins with a long fakeout, nearly forty seconds of a choir singing– watch that video, where Harry has to vamp while he realizes just how long the intro really is– before he whoops in with a rock’n’roll yelp and lets us know where this thing is really going. It opens with the grossest of dude commands: open up your eyes, shut your mouth, and see.

If Carolina was obsessed with feeling good, Only Angel is equally smitten with feeling bad, engaged with its own perversity and wondering at what point it will become perversion. There’s nothing we can do about it, Harry sings of his entanglement; of his lover, couldn’t take you home to mother in a skirt that short / but I think that’s what I like about it. It has the slightly wide-eyed feeling of a young man discovering the particular raunch of indulging his own taste, liking only and exactly and unabashedly what he likes. Not the clinical closeups of porn but the sweat and scent, the friction and ache of actual fucking, the way it’s a thing that happens to your whole body all at once. How you can do it with someone you hate, whose body you don’t want to want. How desire comes on you like a wave: a goddamn force of nature. 

Only Angel is thrilled with its ability to be impolite, which is… fine, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t begrudge Harry, who is, by every single available account, constantly publicly polite and charming, a little self-indulgence, but does it have to sound so cliche? Does it have to come in the form of ordering a woman around, and celebrating her debasement as somehow holy, a Madonna/whore complex being projected onto some poor girl’s debauched body? 

It turns out she’s a devil in between the sheets / and there’s nothing she can do about it. He needs to imagine them both as overcome by forces so strong they’re actually divine, perhaps in order to excuse himself: we wouldn’t do these things if we could stop ourselves. It’s not what we want; it’s what we need. It’s not what we want; it’s the way we were built. 

Only Angel inverts the normal shape of religious worship, praising the body and its sins: she’s an angel / my only angel. The only thing worth worshipping is the one that makes you cry out at night, fevered and sick for it. But attributing that kind of passion to possession instead of regular old animal desire does both Harry and his subject a disservice. Sex is such a particularly human experience, and grappling with the forces of your own wanting can be a deeply intimate, tender thing. 

So maybe it’s no wonder that he’s not ready to own up to what he wants for himself yet– that, in public, all he’s willing to say is, god, the devil makes me do it. It’s a strut of a song; he’s the cock of the walk. But as so often happens, ultimately, trying to pull off manliness only makes Harry seem like the boy he still very much is.