How Harry Styles Created a New Kind of Pop Star

“I’ve no more tricks up my sleeve,” Harry Styles sings on “Aperture,” but it’s pretty hard to believe him. The song itself is a left turn towards pulsating dance music that is somehow both shocking and inevitable after the synths that crept in amidst the balladry on 2022’s Harry’s House. Given the rest of his career so far, it seems safe to say that the rest of March 6’s Kiss All The Time. Disco Occasionally will be at least as fresh. 

As Rob Sheffield discusses with host Brian Hiatt on the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Styles spent his first three solo albums opening up a new lane for pop stardom. At least since Justin Timberlake, or possibly since New Kids on the Block, white-boy pop singers’ path to the charts has largely been paved with takes on current R&B, at varying levels of authenticity and quality. But Styles, following the rock-inflected path of One Direction, has explored other influences entirely, from the Brit-pop, classic rock, and indie of his debut to the Laurel Canyon explorations of Fine Line and the Eighties feel and occasional funk of the uptempo tracks on Harry’s House. (To hear the entire discussion, which goes through Styles’ discography, touches on his upcoming live shows, and more, check out Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above.)

By ignoring trends, Styles ended up creating new ones, and in his four-year absence, a few singers have followed in Styles’ footsteps. Sheffield compares their situation to that of upstarts like Fabian and Bobby Vee when Elvis Presley returned to his recording career in 1960 after his stint in the U.S. army.   ”They all filled the void while Elvis was in the army,” Sheffield says. “And they knew once Elvis got his discharge papers, it was gonna separate the boys from the men, so to speak. We would see who was going to stay a pop star and who was just taking up Elvis’s lane while Elvis was marching and drilling and getting addicted to speed pills.” 

The episode also goes deep on “Aperture,” with Sheffield hearing traces of Talking Heads and Depeche Mode, along with Chicago house and Detroit techno. (Styles said he was listening to LCD Soundsystem, which tracks.) And in a shift in perspective for Styles, the lyrics are about a collective, with its dance-floor chant of “we belong together.” Sheffield calls it a song about “a multiplicity of voices gathering on the dance floor.” Overall, the song could be read in part as a dare to Styles’ imitators — just try to follow him this time.

Sheffield notes what seems to be a deliberate echo of one of Leonard Cohen’s most famous lines — “there is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in” — in the song’s central image. “It says a lot about Harry’s musical ambition,” Sheffield says, “that you can make people think of Leonard Cohen in this really electro song about hitting the dance floor.”

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