What is it about Harry Styles that has led to his solo popularity after One Direction in ways that bandmates Niall, Liam, Zayn and Louis haven’t come close to? Photo / Getty Images
He first found fame in boy band One Direction, but these days Harry Styles is a sign of the times. Greg Bruce speaks to experts on what makes the singer beautiful.
From the all-consuming obsession over his supposed spitting on Chris Pine to the all-consuming fascination with his gender-nonconforming fashion choices, to the all-consuming reaction to his, “this doesn’t happen to people like me very often” speech after winning best album at last month’s Grammys, we are in the Harry Styles moment.
It’s a moment that had its genesis in 2010, when he first came to fame with One Direction, with whom he finished third on The X Factor in the UK, but his inexorable rise became exponential somewhere over the past few years, to the point where the 29-year-old now commands a profound and prominent space in the culture and evokes outpourings of love and obsession that most artists can only dream of.
His primary qualities are that he’s really, really ridiculously good-looking, charming, funny, has catchy songs and has great fashion sense. While these are valuable qualities to have if you’re going to succeed in the music business, they’re qualities that are and have been possessed by many others less successful than he, including those who were in his own boy band.
What is it about him that has led to his popular eruption in the wake of his solo emergence from One Direction in ways that bandmates Niall, Liam, Zayn and Louis haven’t come close to, that only a few artists in history have ever even come close to?
S*** You Should Care About is a New Zealand success story. A digital platform with 3.6 million followers on Instagram alone, numbers which have been generated primarily by its posts sharing and contextualising news for a mostly young audience. The site has perhaps not been hurt by its gratuitous and frequent worshipping of Styles, whose image appears frequently in the company’s posts.
This is the work of co-founder and CEO Lucy Blakiston, who is unashamedly obsessed with Styles, and believes the reason for his massive global appeal is not rocket science. “He’s very lovable. I mean, he’s conventionally gorgeous and his shows, I think, are as inclusive as possible, and interesting to watch. And it just feels very joyful across the board. He seems to be quite uncomplicated. And it would be nice if we could keep a few things like that in the world.”
She says she loved One Direction when she was younger, but what she thinks she loved more was learning how to be part of the online world that surrounded it. The skills she learned as part of that online community – writing, engaging with a group and understanding what brings people together – have been critical in building her own platform.
“But then we did not leave Harry Styles behind because the basis of our platform is you are allowed to care about whatever you want. And for us, that was Harry Styles because he was very true to who I am. He had to be part of the platform.”
One of Blakiston’s favourite topics is fans and fan movements, of which Styles has many. She believes we need to take fans and fandom more seriously.
“It’s not stupid to be interested in something,” she says. “It’s really nice to love something.”
Earlier this year, Texas State University associate professor of digital history Louie Dean Valencia began teaching the world’s first course in Styles: “Harry Styles and the Cult of Celebrity”.
Valencia says Styles’ appeal is a combination of factors: “It’s the music, it’s the personality, it’s his motto of, ‘Treat people with kindness’, which is a flexible thought that is really applicable, I think, to a lot of circumstances, and a lot of people have taken that as their own mantra.”
Styles’ success, he says, is coming at a moment where we see a global rise in antisemitism, discrimination, and rancorous behaviour on the parts of politicians and leaders.
“And, I think in a very real way, people want to be able to find something that can hold them accountable. And that simple sort of message of kindness is a direct, straightforward way to hold somebody accountable. You recognise kindness when you see it. You recognise the opposite as well.”
Valencia says Styles’ music was a particularly good way of connecting with people during the pandemic, when connecting was more challenging than ever, because so many people had turned to his songs for comfort, not just because the message is kindness and the songs are enjoyable but because they deal with complicated issues, from bodily autonomy to gun control to issues around queer identity.
Part of the reason for Styles’ success is that he has achieved both critical and commercial success and appeals to an unusually broad range of people.
University of Auckland senior lecturer in ethnomusicology Kirsten Zemke, says: “Not everybody wants this auteur singer-songwriter that writes their own music, that possibly has some classical background and is really complex. Some people like to have fun and dance and look at fashion and think someone’s cute. Sexual attraction. ‘Oh, my God, he’s so cute!’ And I guess that’s why Harry appeals to multiple demographics, too. Multiple ages of women can find him cute.”
She says there is also a history in popular music of men who don’t present as typically masculine having a strong appeal among straight women. And there are many more examples than just David Bowie and Prince.
“Mick Jagger, for sure. That was scandalous in his time. That was way more scandalous than what Harry is doing now. Even The Beatles, their haircuts, my goodness! They were going to ruin the American family! Harry puts a big bow on and wears some jewellery, but The Beatles’ haircut – that was just going to destroy the fabric of society. And you know what? Maybe it did.”
Kate Harris is a University of Auckland academic who wrote a dissertation on Styles in 2020, titled, “Twenty-first Century Dandy: The Femme Fashion and Genderplay of Harry Styles”.
She says: “He’s definitely very good at changing himself. And I think that’s why quite a broad swathe of audiences are interested, including guys. Guys listen to Harry Styles and like him, and they’re interested – I know guys who saw him in a pearl necklace and thought, ‘Oh, s***, I could wear a pearl necklace, and that doesn’t have to threaten my masculinity or emasculate me in any way.’ Because masculinity is changing. What we academics like to call hegemonic masculinity, basically the masculinity that is dominant at any one time, has definitely started to go away from a more aggressive or man’s man, rugby-blokey kind of masculinity, towards different ways of presenting – ways that seem more towards that what we used to call feminine.”
While many male music stars have worn gender-bending fashions in the past, Styles’ impact has been to take them mainstream. Valencia says, they’ve gone from being, “A thing that only musicians do, or rock stars do, to something that the average teenage boy can do.”
Because of Styles’ fashion choices and statements like, “We’re all a little bit gay” and his starring role as a closeted gay man in last year’s movie My Policeman, some have accused him of “queer baiting” but Valencia rejects that.
“One of the things that Harry Styles has very specifically said is that he doesn’t want to put a label on himself, which I think is very much the definition of queerness, is to not have to put a label on yourself. And so, while, yes, there might be sort of this desire for people to label him, he’s very much rejected that invasion of his own autonomy.”
Zemke says another issue with the queer-baiting claim is that what Styles is doing is performing gender, not sexuality. Dressing “femme”, she says, is performing gender. It has nothing to do with sexuality.
Also, she says, the notion that Styles might be queer-baiting implies that being a queer artist will make him more successful. “And I don’t know if that’s the case. It implies that homophobia and queerphobia are over and that heterosexuality is not the norm and that you’ll gain more money by being queer or gay, which, I don’t know if that’s the case. There’s still a lot of stigma.”
Maybe the point is that Styles doesn’t care what people think of him. He’s prepared to look and act in ways that fit who he is rather than what he or anyone else believes will make him the most rich and famous. This is very rock ’n’ roll, but it’s also very authentic, and that is a word that – like Styles himself – is very much of the current moment.
“In the same ways that you could study The Beatles to understand something about the 1960s,” Valencia says, “you can study Harry Styles to understand something about the world that we live in today. And that includes his music, his movies, the art that he puts out there. And really the message is that you can and should be critical of the world around you, but also hopefully do it with a little bit of kindness, maybe have a little bit of self-love thrown in there - and really also learn how to do audio editing.”
Harry Styles performs at Auckland’s Mt Smart Stadium on March 7.
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