“This one,” Rihanna says pointing to a picture of Harry Styles in a 2012 Hot 30 Countdown interview. “I’ve watched their (One Direction) videos, and I remember thinking, wow. He’s a star.”
From the beginning of Harry Styles’s career, this is all we’ve heard. It didn’t help when the comparisons with Rolling Stones frontman and rock-n-roll legend Mick Jagger started. Styles played into it, doing a young Jagger-inspired shoot for his Another Man magazine spread, and even impersonating an erratic Jagger on SNL. All of this only contributed to the great expectation of his so-called legacy, but it was lost on me. How was this kid from One Direction being compared to a counterculture icon? Was it simply the slight resemblance, some secret musical prophecy, or was the public onto Harry Styles becoming the new age rock star?
“He wasn’t destroying hotel rooms and he didn’t have an entourage of underage groupies hanging around backstage; his reputation was seemingly flawless despite the rock star image.“
Styles was discovered on UK’s X Factor as a charming, curly-haired 16-year-old from Cheshire and morphed into the still charismatic but fiercely private One Direction member that Rihanna adored. His quiet charisma was confusing. He wasn’t destroying hotel rooms and he didn’t have an entourage of underage groupies hanging around backstage; his reputation was seemingly flawless despite the rock star image. But after the boyband’s split in late 2015, everything changed.
In 2017, he released his debut single, “Sign of the Times,” a post-apocalyptic ‘70s-esque ballad comparable to Bowie’s “Space Oddity” with its ethereal, melancholic quality. In his self-titled freshman album, things got interesting for the first time since his discovery in 2010. This otherworldly star quality that we’d been hearing so much about was finally surfacing. In his lyrics, he was opening up to the world, confidently discussing intimate details of his life— they were even edgy. “It’s New York, baby, always jacked up. Holland Tunnel for a nose, it’s always backed up. When she’s alone, she goes home to a cactus,” he sings in “Kiwi.” The debut made a ripple in the robotic mainstream music scene and proved that maybe this One Direction kid was something to see.
Speaking with Apple Music from his picturesque Malibu beach flat, he emphasized his approach comes with vulnerability, a quality that shines in his music. The refreshing honesty from a collection of songs coming from a “mainstream” star, something with actual substance, is the key to Harry Styles. The pure hedonism found in the vulnerability of a Stones or Bowie song is what he’s tapped into. It’s the right kind of selfish, not comparable at all to the superficiality of “radio music.” It’s the fact that he’s taking his platform and using it to learn about the process and the self-exploration rather than the end goal and the Grammy awards. With lyrics from pop hits of today like Justin Bieber’s “She got that yummy yummy,” Styles is rejecting the easy way out, and the results are outstanding: he actually cares, and it shows.
Maybe Harry Styles is the new and improved rock star after all, even though what we know as the “rock star” is, in fact, extinct. Icons like Mick Jagger and David Bowie will never happen again in the same way due to various factors, but Harry Styles just might be the closest thing we have to a revival. He’s the modern rockstar, the new mainstream messiah, call it what you want. I call it the future.
For more of SCAD Radio’s take on Harry Styles, click here.
