For the first time at a gig, I spent much of Harry Styles’s show thinking about the maths. He’s cunningly doing his 68 shows in seven cities, with 12 of them at Wembley Stadium, which means he has transferred a significant amount of the costs of touring to the fans. In other ways fans are rewarded.
As is common when stars play stadiums, Styles spent little time on the main stage. Instead he peddled his wares from a series of walkways – around 350 yards of them, apparently – stretching way out into the crowd, along which he remained in near-constant movement. That meant an awful lot of people got to be at the barrier. At an estimate there were maybe 20,000 people who got within a few feet of Styles. That’s as many people as fit in the whole O2.
Clever. Because what Styles offers above all else is vibes. There are no big dance routines; no grand theatrics. What there is choreographically all comes down to what Styles does himself. It’s enough. He moves beautifully: loose and confident, throwing a few shapes, a couple of dance steps. He’s not particularly voluble between songs, his voice is nothing out of the ordinary. All he’s selling is himself: I’m Harry and I make everything better.
That’s not to say that he’s musically dull – even if he’s never made a consistently good album from front to back. He had no problem filling a couple of hours without flagging; ‘Watermelon Sugar’ and ‘As It Was’ are the kind of tent poles most singers would love to have in their set. And around these was a sprinkling of plenty of other things: the taut funk of ‘Dance No More’, the churning synths of ‘Aperture’, the gorgeous ballad ‘Fine Line’.
That stylistic slipperiness is central to Styles’s cultural identity. He is someone who will not be pinned down. He drapes his work in gay imagery, but won’t discuss his sexuality (this has led to accusations of ‘queerbaiting’: attracting gay fans under false pretences, as it were). The music website Stereogum once claimed that he had replaced Lana Del Rey as the most apolitical pop star in the world. Even the slogan on his merch – ‘Respect Your Mother’ from ‘Dance No More’ – speaks to both traditional values and progressive ones.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this. Like many people, perhaps he doesn’t care enough to want to put his name to bald statements. Or perhaps he simply doesn’t want to risk annoying one group or another. Taylor Swift has shown that you can be a huge pop star and take risks – she’s been unafraid to accept the consequences of what she says or does. And Styles isn’t far short of Swift’s cultural reach. But with Styles, it’s hard to work out what he is, or whether he matters, or why he’s so hugely popular.
You sense that he is aware of this slight vacancy. He’s been very careful about doing Serious Artist things this year: mentioning cool references for his new album, curating the Southbank’s Meltdown festival, putting on Kamasi Washington and Mulatu Astatke. And on stage, at points, he took to a keyboard rig and gave it the full Brian Eno, yanking knobs to distort the sound. The effect was slightly dulled by it continuing after he’d stopped twiddling. And if wanting to be Brian Eno is annoying, at least he doesn’t want to be Roger Waters.
I like Harry Styles. But I’d like to be given a better reason to like him than just ‘vibes’.
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