Originally posted February 17th, 2023.

It used to be niche, not vibing with Harry Styles’s music. Or his acting. Or his fashion sense. Not particularly caring for the guy was one of those sexy and dangerous unpopular opinions one did not dare express on Twitter. He had a massive fanbase and critical acclaim on his side. He survived the transition from talent competition contestant to boy band member to indie singer-songwriter. He was inexorable, this Harold. It was his world — or at least, his house — and we were just living in it

And then. 

Beyoncé was supposed to win the Grammy award for Album of the Year in 2015 for her self-titled album, but instead Beck won for Morning Phase. Then in 2017 Beyoncé was really supposed to win Album of the Year for Lemonade, but Adele won for 25, and used her acceptance speech to highlight how bizarre even she thought that was. And then last week Beyoncé was supposed to win Album of the Year for RENAISSANCE, but instead Harry Styles won for Harry’s House. These are not my opinions; all three of Beyoncé’s losses baffled critics and the public alike.

So how the fuck did this happen?

Maybe it was a conflict of interest. Or maybe it was that weird stunt the Grammys pulled with fans — like, maybe you didn’t want Harold to win, but could you really live with yourself if Grandma Reina’s favorite little guy didn’t win? Maybe he actually had a better alb— okay, that’s not true. It simply is not.

Even though the Recording Academy is truly at fault here, I’ve seen far more ire directed at Harry Styles. After the acceptance speech he made, where he purported that “people like [him]” (white British men who make rock music?) don’t win Album of the Year very often, it almost felt like a moral imperative to challenge him. For some, it was even necessary to reexamine the quality of his body of work. No one wanted to be caught dead enjoying the guy who somehow stole Beyoncé’s third rightful Album of the Year Grammy, even though his album had the cocaine sideboob song, and hers had “CUFF IT”.

Only now, with everyone else writing him off as grossly overrated, have I felt it a worthwhile endeavor to try understanding the guy’s appeal. I dismissed him before it was cool, and I will humor him afterwards. Like I said, it’s not his fault the Academy hates Beyoncé. Her album being better does not mean his is bad. I am going to spend this week speedrunning the complete Harry Styles experience, and if I have to brainwash myself into liking him, so be it. My identity as a contrarian depends on it.

PART ONE… DIRECTION

In his X Factor audition, sixteen-year-old Harry Styles tells judges Simon Cowell, Nicole Scherzinger, and Louis Walsh he works in a bakery, and it’s boring. Maybe that’s what he meant — Album of the Year Grammys don’t happen for people who worked in bakeries as teenagers very often. That’s probably it.

Harold expresses great disdain for his hometown (relatable) of Holmes Chapel, bitterly calling it “quite picturesque.” If he doesn’t make it as a singer, he’s going to study law, he says, and I am instantly curious about an alternate universe where Harry Styles is a barrister, and he has to wear one of those ridiculous fucking wigs with which they are eternally cursed. He’s not hurting for confidence, I will give him that. It lights up (ha) the big neon sign in my brain that says INSUFFERABLE, but until last week, my opinions were not universal. 

Now, allow me to impart the bombshell that there are two uploads of Harold’s audition on the verified X Factor YouTube channel: the “full version” and the “extended cut”. The difference: in the full version, Harold wows the judges with an acapella rendition of “Isn’t She Lovely”. In the extended cut, he initially tries his hand at “Hey, Soul Sister” with musical accompaniment, and he starts out so wildly off-pitch that it’s frankly miraculous a giant cane didn’t manifest to yank him offstage. Then Simon Cowell requests an acapella performance, and he wows them with “Isn’t She Lovely”. He wows Simon and Nicole, anyway, which is enough to put him through to the next round. Louis Walsh still hates him and wants him dead, and gets booed for this with the fervor I would not expect from someone who doesn’t actually have a fanbase yet. This is troubling.

You know what happens next. Simon Cowell forms a boy band called One Direction out of Harold and four other contestants: Zayn Malik, Niall Horan, Louis Tomlinson, and the guy whose Twitter is fucking hysterical. They sing Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn,” and Harold gets the pre-chorus lyrics more wrong than I thought was possible of a fellow ’90s baby, which haunts me for years. They place third in the competition, but first in the hearts of millions. And the musical journey begins.

We got five albums out of these guys, (four before Zayn Malik left) and they’re all roughly an hour long. What the fuck. If this were a 1D retrospective, I’d make the time, but since it’s a merely Harold-centric endeavor, I downloaded just the band’s seventeen singles to listen to on repeat while I walked to my local library to check out a movie. Here are my ratings:

WHAT MAKES YOU BEAUTIFUL: 11/10. Is it good? No. Was it popular when I was sixteen years old? Yes.

GOTTA BE YOU: 3/10. Sucks.

ONE THING: 6/10. Fine.

MORE THAN THIS: 2/10. Sucks and is way too slow for me.

LIVE WHILE WE’RE YOUNG: 6/10. It’s the exact same song as “One Thing.”

LITTLE THINGS: 0/10. AWFUL. Ed Sheeran wrote this and then gave it to One Direction instead of doing the humane thing and putting it directly into a garbage can. The thesis of this song is that you’re wrinkly, and fat, and addicted to caffeine, and fat, and your voice sucks, but Ed Sheeran One Direction is into it, so it’s fine. I had to listen to Good Charlotte to recover.

KISS YOU: 6/10. Would’ve been 7 if not for the ill-advised “chinny-chin-chins” lyric.

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER (TEENAGE KICKS): 8/10. It’s a mashup of “One Way or Another” by Blondie and “Teenage Kicks” by The Undertones, and it’s not better than either of those songs, but I have embarrassingly fond memories of group dancing to it at prom.

BEST SONG EVER: 10/10. I mean… it’s called…

STORY OF MY LIFE: 8/10. On all levels except physical, this is a My Head Is an Animal-era Of Monsters and Men song.

MIDNIGHT MEMORIES: 7/10. POUR SOME SUGAR ON ME…

YOU & I: 2/10. Yawn. I wish Jo Calderone was here.

STEAL MY GIRL: 7/10. The cool piano and Danny DeVito’s presence in the music video try valiantly to make up for the creepy and possessive lyrics, but they don’t quite succeed.

NIGHT CHANGES: 7/10. I love when songs about change have key changes. Also, Zayn’s last appearance. In the music video he feeds you (the camera) spaghetti. I didn’t want him to do that. 

DRAG ME DOWN: 9/10. UH-OH ZAYN IS GONE. They go to space in the music video, I guess to prove the extent to which nobody can drag them down. I wish this Zaynless album was called And Then There Were Four like that Genesis album And Then There Were Three. Partially because pettiness is funny, and partially because having subsequent albums named Four and And Then There Were Four would confuse the fuck out of everyone. It would be hilarious. What was I talking about?

PERFECT: 8/10. Sounds exactly like “Style” by Taylor Swift, on account of it being a direct response to “Style” by Taylor Swift.

HISTORY: 7/10. Another Zayn diss track??? The video is full of black and white X Factor clips, interspersed with the remaining members of the band in color singing in front of some sort of brick fortress. Louis crushes the bridge, but this isn’t about him.

AVERAGE RATING: 6.3/10

CONCLUSION: I had fun with these songs! Even the bad ones! Except “Little Things”! Harold has a ton of opportunities to sing lead — like, more than the other guys, usually — and he sounds pretty good! He sounds like a singer! Like a real, you know, you open-up-Spotify music singer, that, you know, kind of the reason why you listen…

PART TWO: HAROLD’S SOLO CAREER

…and then he went solo and his confidence shattered.

Okay, that’s not true. He went solo and was fine for one album. He survived for a second. Then people started taking him seriously. His second album won a Grammy. His third album won even more Grammys, including, shockingly, Album of the Year. Which, as you know, is why we’re here. If Beyoncé had won, you could all be doing something more worthwhile with your time. 

The point: I listened to Harry Styles’s three solo records, and found his vocals and voice as a songwriter more timid each time. I expected the opposite.

Zayn Malik was the first to depart One Direction; thus he was the one with Justin Timberlake-sized shoes to fill, and he beefed it so hard with “PILLOWTALK” that the prospect of other solo music by members of One Direction thrilled no one outside of the preexisting fanbase. On the other hand, when they put the band on indefinite hiatus, the rest of them had a relatively low bar to clear. Louis Tomlinson and Snake Habitat stuck with pop. Niall Horan went folk. And Harry Styles decided to embrace the power of rock.

I listened to Harold’s 2017 self-titled debut on another walk. Track one is called “Meet Me in the Hallway,” and it is, as are most of the songs on the album, perfectly fine. A little too slow and woozy for my personal tastes, but not bad. Then we get the sad times ballad with which Harold reintroduced himself to the world as a solo artist. Under normal circumstances I would find this an odd choice, but it was 2017. No one was happy in 2017. “Sign of the Times” being the lead single was, in fact, a sign of the times, and I commend Harold for reading the room, unlike Smelly Pasta House.

Track three, “Carolina”, is where I first began detecting problems. This one’s about a specific fan he went on a blind date with, and she’s been Manic Pixie Dream Girl’d I suspect beyond recognition. It made my skin crawl a little, but also by this point I was wandering around a cemetery, so maybe I just walked through a ghost. Speaking of ghosts, that’s what track four is about! It’s called “Two Ghosts”, and it was the second single. It’s also fine. This one doesn’t actually have any problems. It kind of reminds me of “High and Dry” (Radiohead’s least favorite Radiohead song).

Track five, “Sweet Creature”, opens with a guitar riff so obviously cribbed from The Beatles’s “Blackbird” that I actually yelled, “Oh, come ON!” in the middle of a graveyard at 2:30 P.M. on a Tuesday. It’s made worse by Harold’s failure to disclose the titular creature’s species, so I had no choice but to spend the whole (otherwise totally okay) song picturing a blackbird.

So at this point the album’s halfway over, and I have yet to encounter the only song I remember liking enough to listen to more than once back in 2017. Maybe it’s next— oh, nope. “Only Angel” is next. Fittingly, it opens with some angelic strings and vocals… before exploding into the kind of electric guitar I wasn’t expecting yet. Hell yeah. “Kiwi” finally shows up afterward, thank God, so the energy of “Only Angel” just builds instead of being undermined by yet another ballad. And for the span of two songs, I got it. I got the Harry Styles thing.

Track eight, “Ever Since New York”, is a pretty good mid-tempo song about receiving bad news, but I could not at all connect with the sadness therein because I was still riding high on the euphoria of getting it. Did I even need to listen to any more albums or watch any more movies? This article was going to be such a reasonable length. All hail Harry St—

“Should we just search ‘romantic comedies’ on Netflix and then see what we find?”

This voiceover by a colleague is how Harold opens track nine, “Woman” — a sort of evil “Bennie and the Jets”, punctuated by these godawful distorted… bleats? Honks? You tell me. It’s one of those, “I know I’m terrible, but if you leave me for someone tolerable, I’ll fucking die,” songs, which are rarely fun.

“From the Dining Table” closes the album as mildly as “Meet Me in the Hallway” opens it. While I was listening to this one, I swiped a copy of Jane Eyre from a Little Free Library. I thought this was very “Carolina” protagonist of me. Anyway, Harold repeats the lyric, “Even my phone misses your call,” with the frequency of a writer who thought it was really, really clever, and I can’t necessarily say I agree. In fact, at the time I disagreed, with prejudice, because I was still so angry about the goose noises permeating “Woman”.

One bad song can’t ruin an entire album, though, (see: “Boys Will Be Boys”) so I award Harry Styles 6 out of 10 stars, or roughly the same average score I gave One Direction. Onward.

For the Fine Line listening experience, I completely revamped my strategy. I stayed inside, did a few shots, and hit play at 10:00 P.M. I do not remember liking Fine Line when it came out in late 2019. I remember actively disliking “Watermelon Sugar” until it reached the point of inescapability where my only options were to either tolerate it or relocate to the woods. I was not excited for this album. Here are some drunken thoughts from my notes app:

• golden Bop

• *watermelon emoji*

• has he really read brautigan

• oh right i hate his voice and it’s this song’s fault

• beginning of adore you would sound SO GOOD WITH RUNNING UP THAT HILL

• sober me is gonna hate these chorus vocals so goddamn much

• LIGHTS UP IS GOOD IF YOU ARE NO LONGER COMFORTABLE LISTENING TO ROCK WITH YOU BY MICHAEL JACKSON

• cherry Boring

• hello sober ashton i know you are going to hate these songs so very much BUT i am vibing so hard you should try it sometime *middle finger emoji* *sunglasses emoji*

• harry styles makes music for people who have done two and a half shots of uv cake vodka

• but did he WRITE this epic guitar solo at the end of she

• BEGINNING OF SUNFLOWER, VOL. 6 SCARY

• also why vol. 6

• reminds me of me in entry-level college poetry classes just doing unexpected things because i thought that was the same thing as being creative

• this is a vampire weekend song

• WHO THE FUCK IS JENNY

• treat people with kindness has the choir from you can’t always get what you want

• should i be treating harold with more kindness am i mean

• TITLE TRACK TOO LONG TOO SLOW YOU HAVE TO PICK ONE

(Don’t worry, I listened again sober.)

In fact, the next day I woke up with the “Treat People With Kindness” hook lodged so deeply in my brain that it felt like karma. Like this specific part of the song had been composed to retroactively guilt-trip me for making fun of Harry Styles. The knife twisted at the top of each measure — And[TWIST] we can treat [TWIST] people with kind[TWIST]ness. 

“I think Harry Styles is making me a worse person,” I texted a friend.

On my second listen, I found myself agreeing more with my drunk self than I expected to. “Golden” is a bop. “Adore You” would sound so good mashed up with “Running Up That Hill.”  “Sunflower, Vol. 6” does sound like a Vampire Weekend song.

Regarding that fourth bullet: I think Harold is a capable singer on a purely technical level, but I don’t particularly care for his voice, and I’ve never been able to articulate why; thus I’m not sure I can be cured. Even “Kiwi”, which rules, (and is supposedly, in some sense, a prequel to “Watermelon Sugar”) does nothing for me vocally.

Still, I’ll give Fine Line a 7/10. It doesn’t have any songs I enjoyed as much as “Kiwi”, but it also doesn’t have any songs I hated as much as “Woman”. King of improvement!

(Also, to give credit where credit is due, the guitar solo at the end of “She” was written by Harold’s collaborator Mitch Rowland. On shrooms.)

One album left. Maybe I’ll get it. I just awarded seven stars to an album that I hated three and a half years ago. I can treat people with kindness—

“Come on, Harry, we want to say good night to you!”

The Harry’s House era began with a cover of “Take On Me” by a-ha. No, excuse me, it began with a very original composition by Harold and his two producers, featuring the daughter of a Grammys producer. Remember that?

Alright, look, maybe I’m just not running in the correct circles of the internet, but I saw very little mention of the fact that “As It Was” sounds exactly like “Take On Me”. I saw even less mention of the massive gap in quality between the two songs, particularly vocals-wise. Morten Harket from a-ha is singing for his life; Harold is all but mumbling into the microphone. I don’t know what happened, but at some point between his second and third albums, Harry Styles became afraid to sing, and it makes for a worse listening experience.

His very first vocal on Harry’s House is actually a sustained yell, but it’s distorted, and he instantly transitions into very apologetic falsetto scatting. Following the most timidly sung verse of all time, he triggers the infectious horns and hides behind them intermittently until the song is over. Like “Watermelon Sugar” before it, “Music For a Sushi Restaurant” battered its way into the outermost layer of my good graces through pure exposure, even though I think his singing is some of the worst I’ve heard yet. Not because it’s bad, or because I objectively dislike the sound of his voice, but because it’s boring, and this is otherwise the most interesting opening track he’s released. “You know I love you, babe,” he sings into the ether each time he wants to summon the horns, but I do not know. He isn’t selling it. 

“Late Night Talking”, the second track and second single, is the best song on the album. This is not up for debate. It’s the only song here that’s a) about something, b) memorably catchy, and c) not a ripoff of “Take On Me”. He sounds as unenthused about the song’s subject matter as always, (or, more charitably, as afraid to sing about it) but you can just assume he’s exhausted from doing all this. Late night. Talking. He makes it work!

Musically, none of the other ten tracks left enough of an impression that I was ever able to pause the album while writing about them. “Grapejuice” is the obligatory song named after a fruit. There’s some piano, and it does nothing for me. “Daylight” is driven by some relatively intense distorted guitar, and it kind of sounds like it could’ve been on Fine Line. It would’ve been the worst song on Fine Line, but it would’ve fit. The horns are back for the funk-adjacent “Daydreaming”, (I would not have done this to my tracklist, but my confusion here is technically on me) and Harold generously contributes a few “WOO-OOH!”s that I really wish I could make myself enjoy. “Satellite” borrows from Counting Crows’s “Accidentally in Love”, (which somehow doesn’t bother me like “As It Was”) and the instrumentation gradually spirals into something reminiscent of how we all like to pretend the silent vacuum of space might sound, but Harold’s vocals are as pedestrian as ever.

Things are just as bleak lyrically. “Cinema” is maybe about Harold’s relationship with Olivia Wilde. I didn’t want to care, but I needed something to focus on since I wasn’t entertained musically, and also, “I bring the pop to the cinema/You pop when we get intimate,” is such a weird, off-putting innuendo that I’ve been thinking about it for days. “Little Freak” and “Keep Driving” are unenthusiastic lists of hashtag justmyrelationshipthings that I’m sure are very meaningful with context I have not been provided. Acoustic ballad “Matilda” is vaguely addressed to the Roald Dahl character, but Harold doesn’t bother encouraging her to harness her telekinetic powers, I guess to make it more relatable to the rest of his audience. “Boyfriends” is similar, but without an implied intellectual property tie-in. 

Harold musters stronger vocals than he has for the previous twelve tracks for album closer “Love of My Life”, which is built around ominous bass, and probably would’ve fit on Harry Styles. I certainly don’t know what it’s doing here, if not to serve as a desperate reminder that better music from this guy is still possible. 

Harry’s House is the Harry Styles album I feel most passionately about, but the one I’ve had the hardest time making myself explain. It’s just so fucking boring. It’s not fun to talk about. I don’t want to be doing this. If Beyoncé can’t win a Grammy for Album of the Year, then RENAISSANCE at least deserved to lose to something interesting. 3/10.

PART THREE: HAROLD’S ACTING CAREER

Harry Styles’s acting debut was actually the “Best Song Ever” music video, where he plays Marcel, a cringey marketing guy with an unplaceable accent. And also himself. All five band members pull double duty as themselves and as music industry caricatures, (including Niall Horan as a Harvey Weinsten pastiche, which has aged like a fucking avocado) so Harry Styles has to perform the role of Harry Styles against a fictional marketing executive, and he is more convincing as the latter. I fear Marcel may in fact be his best role ever.

Harold’s film acting debut was as a soldier in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk — a casting choice that Nolan compared to that of Heath Ledger’s Joker when questioned about it. I watched a scenepack with an amazing thumbnail, and Harold is decent in it. Not the best Scottish accent I’ve never heard, but decent. Dunkirk is a very wet movie, with little dialogue, and Harold’s starring scene is essentially a game of Among Us in the bilge of a sinking ship, where he repeatedly accuses a French guy of being a German spy so that they can kick him out and stay afloat. One jarring cut later, (given the nature of scenepacks; it’s not Nolan’s doing) Harold, covered in Venomesque black sludge, turns away from a corpse to face his friend and tell him, “He’s dead, mate.”

After Dunkirk, Harry Styles exited the film industry to make Fine Line, and then presumably to quarantine. He briefly returned in 2021 to phone it in as Thanos’s brother Eros in a mid-credits scene at the end of Eternals. He still has a British accent, for some reason. I wonder why that is.

And then.

I’m not interested in rehashing what a shitshow Don’t Worry Darling was behind the scenes, so all I can tell you is that it was not in service of a movie that I would consider worthy of anyone’s time.

Harold plays Jack Chambers, husband of Florence Pugh’s protagonist Alice, employee of Chris Pine’s antagonist Frank. They live in the quite picturesque simulation company town of Victory, California in the early 2020s 1960s. Jack is unemployed an engineer on Frank’s “Victory Project,” which is dedicated to “the development of progressive materials.” Alice is a surgeon housewife, who grows increasingly suspicious of the company, the town, and her husband over the course of the film, culminating in the reveal that Victory is a simulated world created by Frank. All of the men are aware of this and participating voluntarily; most of the women have been brainwashed and trapped against their will.

The role of Jack demands that Harold oscillate between loving British husband, evil American boyfriend, and violent ambiguously-accented yell man, and he is not up to the task, I’m afraid. His attempt at an American accent during the few scenes set outside the simulation gets blown out of the water by Florence Pugh’s, and she’s doing it for the entire movie. The Watsonian explanation is that simulation participants are allowed to adopt nationalities different from those of their real-world counterparts; my Doylist conspiracy theory is that Jack was supposed to be American the whole time, but Harold was so abysmal at doing the accent that Olivia Wilde took pity on him and let him retain his regular speaking voice. I’m not sure why real-world Jack couldn’t have also been British, but I don’t work in Hollywood, so what do I know?

There is a scene about halfway through the film that really felt like a microcosm of my whole experiment, like the movie knew what I was up to. Jack and Alice go to a party at Frank’s house, and Frank interrupts the bangin’ soundtrack (which I was really enjoying after so many hours of One Direction, goddammit) to pull Jack up on the stage and give him a promotion. And make him tap dance.

Alice, who by this point is being eaten alive by paranoia, flees the room to have a panic attack in front of a bunch of mirrors. Her best friend Bunny (played by director Olivia Wilde) follows her, comforts her, and then berates her for daring to question the safety of Victory. Meanwhile, Jack is tap dancing for his fucking life, looking like he wants to die, and Frank is yelling things like, “Doesn’t that just make you believe?!” And I felt like I was Alice. And Harry Styles was Jack. (Which he was, but I mean this metaphorically.) And Olivia Wilde was Bunny (again, metaphorically). And the Recording Academy was Frank. Since the advent of Harry’s House, the entire world has been lauding Harold as one of the greatest singer-songwriter-actors of his generation, trust us, while he flounders in the studio and on the screen. Nothing he has done since Fine Line has made me believe in his talent. But he did act in a scene that briefly convinced me I was a fictional character played by Florence Pugh in a real go-to-the-thea’er film movie with a deserved 38% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Don’t Worry Darling seems to have effectively killed off any hype for the continued existence of Actor Harold, but his Amazon-distributed cop movie (that’s like six moral code violations in one!) was released in the United States just over a month later, because it’s not like they could stop it at that point. My Policeman actually has a lot in common with Don’t Worry Darling — it’s the mid-twentieth century, and Harold is lying to his wife. She confronts him about it, he yells at her, the quality of his acting drops anywhere between 10 and 30% compared to when he was speaking normally.

Another movie with which My Policeman shares… basically every single component, pretty much, is Brokeback Mountain. It’s the “As It Was” to Brokeback’s “Take On Me”, not to still be mad about that. My Policeman at least had the decency not to take over the entire world and land itself towards the top of almost every major publication’s year-end film ranking, though.

The gist: Retired cop Tom’s (played at different ages by Harry Styles and Linus Roache) wife Marion (Emma Corrin; Gina McKee) appoints herself caretaker of their estranged friend Patrick (David Dawson; Rupert Everett) after he suffers a stroke. Patrick moves into their seaside cottage, and Tom is angry about this to the point of ignoring Patrick entirely. Through flashbacks, we learn that the three of them were involved in a love triangle in the 1950s. At first it appears as though Tom and Marion are a happy couple, and Patrick is the third wheel; then it turns out that Patrick and Tom met and began an affair before Marion was in the picture. The plot of Brokeback Mountain ensues. Okay, that’s not totally true — Patrick is an amateur artist, and there’s a scene where he draws Tom, because this movie is also Titanic occasionally. Marion finds out, gets jealous, anonymously reports Patrick to the police, Tom is conflicted about it because he sucks, Marion testifies to try to help Patrick avoid jail, it doesn’t work, and she and Tom decide to just. Never speak of him again.

Until the present day, when Marion invites post-stroke Patrick to move in, because she feels she owes it to him after what she did. And then, even though Tom has been nothing but hostile toward their guest, Marion decides to end the marriage and leave Patrick in his care, forcing them to reconcile. Marion also sucks, to be clear.

But how does Harold fare? He doesn’t have to tap dance or affect a different accent, so that’s a relief for all involved. I don’t think there was any great chemistry between him and David Dawson, (or Emma Corrin… or Florence Pugh, for that matter) but the situation is far from dire. Like I said, it’s the argument scenes where he really flounders, and it’s much more noticeable in a quiet drama like My Policeman than a complete mess like Don’t Worry Darling. If you’re going to watch either of those films, watch the latter. You’ll have more fun. I think My Policeman was made by and for people who don’t know that Brokeback Mountain is on Netflix now, and Titanic is back in theaters for its 25th anniversary. And if ever there was a real go-to-the-thea’er film movie…

CONCLUSION

Remember the text I sent about Harry Styles making me a worse person? He didn’t. It wasn’t his fault. It just turns out that if you spend several days eschewing media you like while bombarding your senses with something you feel neutral-negatively about, you will become tense and irritable.

And I’m still neutral-negative. Just neutral, at the very least. I like a lot of One Direction songs! Harry Styles is nearly a no-skip album! The Don’t Worry Darling behind the scenes drama was really, really funny! Still, Harold is a singer, and if I can’t get myself to connect with his voice, then I think we are at an impasse. If he decides to keep making albums that sound like Harry’s House, (Harry’s Lake Cottage? Harry’s Summer Home In The Hamptons?) there is certainly no hope.

But he doesn’t have to do that. Yes, he won a Grammy for Album of the Year, which indicates a demand for Harry’s 1500 Sqft. 3 Bd. 2 Ba. Townhouse In The Suburbs. But with it he unfortunately also won the ire of millions, and so there is a good chance that nothing he does next will be well-received. That can be scary, and it can be freeing. He could return to the sound of Harry Styles, (or even One Direction) or he could make Fine Line II: Finer Line, or he could experiment with totally new genres (personally I hope he gives death metal a try). He could take another break from music after his current tour wraps up in July and audition for more go-to-the-thea’er film movie roles, (although I don’t advise this). I don’t know! I just hope Harold does whatever makes him happy. Maybe I’ll even like it.