#on harry

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Have you read the Ringer’s review of Coachella? They really lay into Harry’s performance calling it “the KIDZ BOP version of the Almost Famous soundtrack.” It’s interesting how divisive music critics tend to be about Harry as an artist. Either they proclaim him the new David Bowie or they consider him a cover singer who is merely imitating the greats.

This was such a good article? Like wow. Really loved the whole analysis of what Coachella sprung from and how it's changed over time and become well...

Loved the whole section, and it's probably the most insightful thing anyone has ever written about him (go read the whole article):

This is a long way to explain how Coachella went from having Rage Against the Machine as its first headliner into having the Machine be its latest. Let’s be unequivocally clear: Harry Styles seems like a nice lad. His politics are saint simple; he believes in peace, love, equality, and every other utopian notion nearly impossible to eradicate in a world riven by cruelty, avarice, duplicity, and all the other defects hexing the human genome. His motto is “TPWK” (treat people with kindness), which is all well and good when you’re worth an estimated $80 million and dating Ted Lasso’s ex. Stevie Nicks likes him. According to his Wikipedia, he believes in karma. He does pilates and meditates. He’s a pescatarian. He endorsed Joe Biden.

But Styles’s set at Coachella revealed an artist out of his depth. If Beyoncé proved to even inveterate skeptics that a pop act headlining Coachella could supply something as imaginative and visionary as any rapper, DJ, or guitar apostle, Styles doubled as a wicker man for the retro-fried fetishization that has defined the past decade. If he was cast in a West End production of Aladdin Sane: The Musical!, there would be no cause for complaint. But closing out Friday night, the lingering shadow of all immortal predecessors loomed. Roger Waters played Dark Side of the Moon atop the same soil where Harry Styles kicked a KIDZ BOP version of the Almost Famous soundtrack.

The idea is that the former One Direction singer is the Justin Timberlake of his generation: a product who shed his boy-band assembly line past to mature into an artist capable of selling Pepsi on his own merits. The problem is that he’s closer to Robbie Williams from Take That or Donny Osmond, references surely lost on 99 percent of the relatively paltry, mostly under-25 crowd who gathered on the former polo field to listen to Styles’s set.

Harry Styles is an archetypal artist for the late capitalist drain spiral of ambient streaming and social media thirst: simply far too big and slickly packaged to fail. He rose to fame on a reality show, was coached by Simon Cowell, and made brain-fry famous as one-fifth of a boy band whose distinguishing characteristic was loving both kinds of music: boomer rock and pop. They finished in third place on the reality show, but ended up selling millions. Since he went solo he’s been managed by the son of the most powerful man in the music industry, represented by the world’s most powerful talent agency, and signed to a label owned by a multinational conglomerate that made $11 billion in net income during the first year of the pandemic.

As a child, Styles learned to make music by singing karaoke covers, and never learned how to stop. There is no such thing as a Harry Styles song. There are Hall & Oates songs, David Bowie songs, Pink Floyd songs, Elton John songs, Queen songs, and Fleetwood Mac songs, which Harry Styles and his producers and songwriters rejigger into new alignments like a Web3 reboot of Glam Rock Scrabble.

To his credit, Styles made a valiant effort. Wearing a sequin harem outfit that looked made out of a souvenir disco ball from Studio 54, the former One Directionist skipped across the stage, shimmied, and hoisted his microphone to the heavens. He had the moves down as if he’d purchased hundreds of music documentaries on Amazon Prime (and maybe even a few Blu-rays that aren’t available on streaming). He blew kisses to the crowd, cheerfully plinked at a guitar, and holistically indicted boyfriends. He told us that our only job was to have as much fun as possible, and to be whoever we were. But it’s unclear if he even knew what that meant for himself. Over a belabored piano vamp, he bellowed “WOOOMAAAAN,” somewhere between Mike Myers’s beatnik poetry in So I Married an Axe Murderer and Russell Brand’s Jeffrey-puffing rock goofball from Get Him to the Greek. He finished with a song called “Sign of the Times,” which was somehow not a Prince cover. It sounded created for a Disney biopic about Rod Stewart, which has yet to be cast.

'There is no such thing as a Harry Styles song' - precisely! I'm glad someone found a way to voice something I've been thinking but couldn't quite articulate.

Loved that they pointed out (entirely correctly) that he's a highly manufactured product. (All of the subtle digs at his politics in the first paragraph...oof).

And it is indeed depressing that Coachella went from Rage Against the Machine to...

Loved the section too about how the ideology has become 'all popular things must be good because they are popular' and the bit that pointed out that journalists are no longer comfortable giving honest reviews because stans are incapable of critical thinking and love to harass them.

It's hard to know why there's such a split between journalists who love him and journalists who don't. I suspect some of it might be that a lot of the journalists who don't love him often seem really, really well versed in a lot of his musical influences and can see them from a mile away and find him gimmicky, whilst some of the journalists who love him might come from a more traditional pop writing background (and sometimes be younger) and not see it as clearly. It's really interesting that a lot of his younger fans cannot identify the influences in his songs or their derivative quality because they've never heard the artists he's trying to be. I think a lot of the journalists who see him as gimmicky are often rock or indie music leaning writers who know that body of work, and a lot of the writers who are maybe more up his ass are pop writers and might find Harry more 'innovative' or nostalgic in a way that some people don't enjoy or think is innovative.

Ultimately I think the author of the article isn’t wrong in essentially saying that Harry is a mass made product designed to be retero karaoke that is highly consumable and buyable and not at all original.

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Well this is an absolute clusterfuck of a quote. It’s very easy to dismiss labels as a cisgender potentially het man, I’m just saying. Maybe this would be more authentic a statement if he didn’t market ambiguity the way he does. The “is he or isn’t he” is a huge part of his brand, whether his fans want to admit it or not

https://twitter.com/popcrave/status/1519002262395314180?s=21&t=Yl6mggTqj9A2xaQUHeQ7BQ

The thing is, I really don't like this line of thinking and find it borderline offensive.

It is perfectly wonderful if people, on an individual level, don't want to label their sexuality or don't think they ought to. It's perfectly lovely if for them, they don't want to talk about it because they personally, on an individual level, feel like it ought to be meaningless anyway.

What I hate, is the whole 'this is where we should all be heading' attitude, like 'everyone ought to not care like me' or 'labels are bad, actually'. It's fake woke. For some people, their identity is incredibly important. For some people, labelling it and speaking to it is an act of power, is an act of truth, is a politic. For some people it's a complete necessity - you literally cannot access gender affirming healthcare if you do not have people, including yourself, labelling you as gender diverse. For some people, there is no option. Their queerness is read on their body, their queerness is obvious to all because they are married to or partnered with someone of the same gender, their queerness is constructed within and impacted by institutions that loom over their lives and control their bodies, their options, their work, who can visit them in the hospital, who can mourn for them.

Harry Styles might not realise any of that because Harry styles is a white man with enough money to sink a ship and no discernible oppression to truly speak of. Even if he is multi gender attracted, his life is still incredibly, incredibly privileged. So it's very easy for him to say 'we should all be heading in the direction of who cares', because so little impacts him. For him, not declaring himself whatever he may be, is a fun choice, something he can flirt with with no real consequence. For other people, there is no choice. For other people, they have to speak their truth because if they don't, they lose everything.

I truly think his entire thought process on sexuality was well and truly summed up by 'I think sexuality is fun and that's about it'. And good for him. But its clear when he speaks about it, he is speaking from a position of extreme privilege. If he's multi gender attracted, apparently he doesn't see what it would mean to people for him to represent that openly, rather than making banal platitudes in Better Homes and Gardens. He doesn't get why labels are important, or sometimes needed, or why they empower, and doesn't seem to really get much at all about the conversation. It's boring.

And it’s not that he owes anyone a coming out (if he’s queer) but some of these quotes he gives makes it feel like he doesn’t even get why it would be important to like, some young boy fan in Idaho to see him own it and talk about mutli gender attraction and be shameless. It doesn’t mean he has to be that for anyone, but him not seeming to get the concept of the impact or representation or what labels mean for other people, is strange to me. You can say things like ‘I understand why people want that from me, I know how important it is, but here’s how I feel on me.’

He has got to be, if he is queer, the least interesting and reflective queer person on planet earth about queerness. Its very easy to stand in Better Home and Gardens with a tea pot and sunglasses or with your pants off apparently, and talk about why everyone should be heading towards who cares. Because what does he have to care about? It doesn’t impact him. He doesn’t have to get it or even think about it beyond this vague crap, because its not his problem.

It’s almost hilarious that he hasn’t seemed to have grown or thought or read since his ‘who cares’ quote because this is the same thing again.

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Yeah Harry’s not an activist...but neither is Zayn. And which ever one of them you prefer doesn’t mean anything about your own politics, either. It’s MUSIC. Stanning Zayn and posting 100x a day about how the white boys are undeserving is not activism. Neither is reblogging posts about Harry attending a protest. Why are people so caught up in this. Do the right things yourself and quit worrying about which 1D member is the best activist when none of them are.

I think you’re misunderstanding the conversation.

Yesterday, a song Zayn wrote about his experiences with racism, discrimination etc, a song in which he made overtly political comments about Palestine and the Biden administration was leaked.

And many fans made a point about the difference in how Zayn, and as a point of comparison, a white man like Harry, are perceived by the media and the fan base. The general point is that Harry has, historically, been given political credit for non political acts, like turning on the central heating for a female interviewer, where as Zayn has historically often have othered by the fan base, white washed, ignored, and not given the same high regard.

A journalist wrote an article saying Harry tuning on the AC changed her view of feminism. Zayn says Free Gaza and fuck Biden in a song and the media doesn’t notice.

The conversation was, explictly, not about ‘who is the most woke member’. The conversation was about ‘why is Harry, as an example, treated as if he is the most woke member and promoted as such a special example of man, when Zayn isn’t and is often turned into a vague antagonist’? It’s not about ‘which of this millionaires is best uwu’, it’s a conversation about Zayn being thought of and treated a certain way for his race, whilst Harry’s race means he gets given a different and higher regard.

Of course, as soon as any body dared to acknowledge that Harry has historically been spoken about, not just amongst fans but in the media, as some kind of woke king, when someone like Zayn is belittled or ignored for more political acts, Harry fans popped up and had to make it about proving that Harry is actually better. Because people have this bizarre tendency to take broad conversations about why we reward white men for silence and men of colour only when truly exceptional, applied to a fandom context, and reduce them to ‘wtf why are you attacking my fave’.

Some people can’t help themselves and absolutely have to take a conversation acknowledging Zayn’s different treatment and the way he is mythologised differently than Harry, Harry who is always spoken of more highly despite neither of them being on the ground activists, into ‘ok but Harry IS better’. They literally did what people say society, generally, does with men like Harry. Which is that it uplifts them for little to no reason above men of colour, and then gets angry when people point it out.

You’re right in that none of the members of the band are strong activists. But that’s not the conversation. The conversation is why does the media produce think pieces about how Harry is a feminist prince and awards him progressive points when he is largely apolitical, and Zayn’s explicit politics aren’t given regard. Why do we assign white men positive, assumptive, characteristics simply because they are silent, and we assign people of colour negative characteristics even when they are progressively vocal?

The conversation isn’t ‘uwu Zayn is the next coming of Angela Davis’. None of the band are dedicated activists at this point in time. However it is also very ignorant to pretend that Zayn being so vocal about such a contentious topic as Palestine, for close to a decade, considering his disadvantage he already has as a public figure of not being white, means ‘nothing’. People keep entering the conversation consistently forgetting that speaking up against the status quo as a person who isn’t white AND was raised Muslim is entirely different to speaking up as a white man. Zayn is and has been one of the more vocal celebrities on Palestine for years. And considering the personal attacks that have been launched against celebrities in 2021 for daring to be pro Palestine in public, I hope it highlights Zayn’s courage in doing so six years prior.

The whole ‘fandom isn’t activism’ argument tends to get thrown around by people who just can’t cope with people applying their politics, publicly, to the content they like. People strangely assume that anyone who talks on tumblr about double standards re race and applies it to a boyband, aren’t also out in the real world enacting grassroots change. Which is a strange assumption. It also implies that people who talk about politics in the context of their favourite thing aren’t aware that it’s not a discussion that’s going to Free Gaza, which is deeply patronising at best.

People are applying their politics to the conversation, because the conversation is political. When people reflect on Zayn’s treatment by the fandom or by the media, they must engage with politics. And there’s nothing wrong with that, indeed entire departments at universities are dedicated to cultural and media studies, re applying critical theory to bands, music, literature, film. Because art, and how we consume it and what art gets mainstream attention etc, is an inherently political conversation.

And what’s particularly strange, is that some people are perfectly happy to weaponise political or critical theory rhetoric to justify arguably shitty things, like My Policeman, but if people do exactly the same thing but come to a more critical conclusion, it’s all ‘omg it’s just fandom not activism, don’t apply politics’.

Fans are allowed to apply their point of view, which is often politically informed, to content they like and the way that content has been mythologised and consumed. And if anything, this fandom has consistently excused itself from reckoning with the topic of race and racism, by describing it as ‘too political’ and ‘just fan wars’. Louis saying the N word, still, to this day, is viewed more as ‘you’re only bringing that up to win a fan war’ rather than ‘yeah we should probably finally talk about how we, the fandom, swept that one under the rug’.

If you think discussions around why Zayn is paid dust for his explicit views and Harry is assumed to be progressive simply on the back of his silence, is about ‘whose the best activist uwu’, you aren’t listening.

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This has fifteen thousand likes.....yeah he done fucked up

Here's the screenshot for interested people who can’t be fucked to click:

I mean...yeah. I scrolled down to the comments and someone said something really good too about how being unlabelled is something that ought to only belong to the queer community, it's about being queer and not wanting to have to dumb down your queer experience into categories. Rather than what the commenter said Harry was doing, which is not what unlabelled is for, which is using the term to refuse to claim queerness at all either way or using it as a term to mean 'I could be queer or not queer and I'm not saying'.

There's also a lot of comments saying he doesn't need to label himself as bisexual or whatever, but he does need to acknowledge he's either in the queer community or not because he's profiting off of it and knows it. People are getting really sick of him being simply unable to even just say 'yeah I'm in the queer community'. Like truly though it's really not hard to say you're queer and don't have a label, and at this point you can understand the queer community wondering why he can't just say it and treating it almost like it's this scary private thing to hide away unlike everything else he willingly talks about.

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Harry featuring Mick Fleetwood for Pleasing feels like him doubling down on defending straight cis men dressing outside of gender norms.

A lot of the interview content in Vogue felt like it was justifying his gender aesthetic as any other reason than an LGBT identity:

1) Harry likes feminine things because he has a sister and grew up with women

2) Rock stars did it in the 70s, and Harry want to be just like them

He could have used the Billy Porter criticisms to become a better ally and he could be using Pleasing to feature more people in the LGBTQ community. But this feels like doubling down on his Fine Line talking points, which also sounds like we’re not going to see much personal growth from him in this era.

I don't think I read it that way, but I will say the new 'drop' from the line is somehow even more pretentious than the first one lol.

It'll be interesting to see how some of Harry's 'fans' play the whole 'this drop is directly inspired by and referencing LSD and taking drugs' thing, when they shit on Louis for having merch that barely, barely referenced the concept and attributed him moral blame for it, or when some of them constantly refer to Zayn as a 'druggie'. How is it that Harry can make a beauty line drop that references dropping acid (which, I'm sorry, that's so fucking dorky) and his fans won't say a peep as per, but anyone else does it and it's 'evil'?

I don't know that it's 'evil' but I do think it's hilariously pretentious. It's just so...dorky to be that guy that's like 'look at me, I do acid', which he's felt the need to draw attention to more than once now. We get it, you feel like you were born in the wrong generation and wish you'd been at Woodstock, we know.

Maybe there's something to say though about marketing products named 'acid drops night serum' to a demographic which he KNOWS are primarily young women aged like 11-25. First of all, most people in Harry's demographic (and lets be real, no one else is buying this stuff) do not NEED a night serum, they are children, tweens and teens. So marketing the first drop towards them with that shit and then lathering it up with 'I'm not saying you're ugly but my products for your exterior will make you feel good inside' was hilarious enough. But now it's like 'here, 16 year old who runs a fan page about me, have my acid drops night cream for your non existent wrinkles, the name is inspired by me taking shrooms, remember when I did that?'.

The whole Pleasing thing is almost starting to feel like it could be satire (it's not). He and his team are calling up members of Fleetwood Mac to sell his overpriced nail polish in Vogue, talking about moving beyond binaries, for grocery store level nail polish? It's all so...like how did he become this?

I've said it before too and this was a point that famous nail artist youtuber made, but presenting Pleasing as a 'gender neutral brand' when it comes to a product that's always been gender neutral and able to be used by any gender, is reinforcing the idea that nail polish is inherently for women and new brands need to be created 'for men'. When they don't, the more progressive position is to simply shift our thinking around already existing products.

Everything around Pleasing is boring and off-putting and I really wish he'd never done it but here we are.

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From what I can tell it seems he doesn’t wanna say because people already know so much about him and his life that he just wants to keep some things to himself which is fine and it also helps the mystery around him so it’s a win win for him

It's fine but it's also, I think for a lot of people, quite convoluted.

He keeps saying he's trying to be private and wants to keep things to himself, didn't like being asked about sex in the group (which is very valid). He says that the reason he won't just say 'I like more than one gender' or 'I've had experiences with more than one gender' is to keep something for himself.

Except he then alludes to it in his work (Medicine) or really, really over divulges about the personal and sex like we now know he likes choking, we know he probably cheated on Camille, we know he does cocaine and shrooms (which he won't stop talking about), we know about (presumably Olivia but who knows) 'popping' when they get intimate, we know how salty he was about Camille's new boyfriend, we know all about his one night stand with Townes etc etc etc.

So it's odd or incongruent that he tells people so, so, so much about his sex life in his work, even hints at the sexuality question with Medicine, and then turns around and says, 'I'm actually really private about this'. Because he's not. He's not a particularly private celebrity, there are celebrities people know absolutely shit all about, and there are musicians who are much vaguer in their descriptions of relationships. Harry is purposefully (you would assume) not vague and is using the Taylor Swift songwriting style to his advantage, he's explicitly and must know he is profiting off of the assumption people have about his sexuality, he is tying his brand (Pleasing) to diversity and gender neutrality, and then he sits there and says 'this one thing is so private though'. Like...is it? Is it really that devastating to your private life to just say 'yeah I've had experienced with more than one gender' when you're doing...all of that? When you've made the question such a central feature of people's fascination with you anyway?

He's entitled to have it as something that's 'just his'. But it feels to me really quite bizarre that he's happy to talk about the coke he does or the shrooms, or throw Townes under the bus, or tell us all about sex with Olivia and her wet vagina, but he keeps refusing to just say 'yeah I've had experiences with more than one gender'. I don't think you can pretend that's profoundly more personal than anything he's divulged, or that it would shock pretty much anyone.

So it begins to feel like a question he KEEPS allowing to be brought up in interviews, and then purposefully constructs a narrative around for why he isn't going to answer (but is happy for the question to be asked, apparently because if he wasn't it wouldn't be allowed), because it suits him and his image. To me, that's the most logical explanation as to why he's so comfortable talking about Olivia's and ‘she gets wet for me’ and giving interviews about Camille and sex and feeling sad and drugs etc, but he won't answer this one specific question even in the most banal terms with 'yeah I've had experiences with more than one gender.' To be frank, if he'd just said that years ago during the Guardian interview or something, people would have gotten over it and people would probably be far less invasive about his sexuality because the question would be answered. So many other celebrities have casually given quotes like that, their lives weren't blown open. I think it's hard to truly believe he's not casually chatting about it because of privacy, but hey.

If he answers the question the mystery is over. If he blacklists the question the mystery can't be brought up and used to sell an article and an album. It benefits him to keep the question in play. I think it's a bit telling that in this interview he explicitly hit the kinds of talking points his fans use to defend him, too. It's like his PR team knows the line of defense people like to trot out when any queer person (like Billy Porter) wants to talk about Harry and queerness and meaning, and Harry just repeated it. He's entitled to his privacy, but its bizarre that he's private about very little else, and that he keeps pretending he's confuzzled over why people care when he then goes and sings I Will Survive and Medicine and Boyfriends and has a brand like Pleasing, you know?

It’s the same with the whole Harry will never acknowledge a woman he’s with while he’s with her thing. He says it’s because he’s private, but we all KNOW he’s with Olivia. They aren’t going out of their way to hide it. And then when his relationships end, he happily tells us everything down to his random kinks with the woman. Isn’t it more logical that he doesn’t confirm his relationships because he knows what his fans are like and its an image thing, rather than pretending he’s out there clearly in relationships but simply not confirming them with his words because of ‘privacy’? Harry and Olivia are out there referring to each other as ‘my friend’ in interviews and I can’t really believe that’s out of some philosophical commitment to ‘privacy’ that doesn’t actually achieve anything other than not making his fans have a meltdown. How would it impact his privacy to simply say ‘my girlfriend’? Like really? Just as how would it impact his privacy to say ‘yeah I have had experiences with more than one gender’ when he sings Medicine on every tour? What’s the issue?

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I’m disgusting that Harry does coke after being all “cryogenics” and “health” and I mean doing this presumably around children? I’m revolted. My friend who went to a HSLOT concert with me is also really upset. He seems so juvenile, like someone from high school who would be awful to me.

Here's the thing, a lot of (if not the large majority of) rich and famous people use drugs (and often cocaine). I'm not saying it's a good thing, but I'm saying it's almost unbelievable to me that people were walking around thinking he didn't. I know that a lot of his fans have been convinced for a long time that he doesn't do drugs, and when he made it clear he does they convinced themselves he doesn't do hard drugs, but here we are.

It's ok to be disappointed. But I just don't really understand why people ever thought otherwise. I think there's something to be said too about the way people never really questioned the idea that Zayn would smoke weed, but with Harry his innocence with drugs has always been assumed even way past him making it super clear he is a relatively avid user in his music.

And to be honest, it's super normal for people to be all 'I do pilates and yoga and drink green smoothies after intermittent fasting' and still do hard drugs on the weekend. That's like...quintessential upper class white person behaviour.

I don't necessarily like it. I especially don't like the fact that Harry really tries to glamorize it in his music and seems to think he's really cool for doing hard drugs, like that mindset is dangerous and immature. But it doesn't surprise me and I think a lot of people have been deeply, deeply naive by thinking for ten years that he wouldn't be doing that kind of thing. Same as the people who are shocked he'd have a lot of sex or even have an affair. People have allowed their daydream version of him to cloud the reality that a lot of rich and famous people are boring dickheads who do a lot of drugs, cheat, have no sense of self etc.

It's hard to know whether he's 'doing it around children' like maybe he and Olivia (who I assume is the person he's maybe talking about with like 'you do cocaine in my kitchen') partake when her kids are away (you'd hope). But there's a lot to be said about how society excuses rich white people who do cocaine when it comes to raising children, but can and will intervene if the people raising kids and being drug users are poor. In my personal opinion (and I'd hope this isn't controversial) once you have kids I'd like to hope most people cease drug use, but people have way more sympathy for rich celebs snorting coke when they are parents than they do poor people who are dealing with addiction.