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Publication: The Harvard Crimson, , Harvard University , Cambridge, MA
Photo: Courtesy of Harry Styles
There’s something godlike about Harry Styles. Teenage girls have known since the dawn of One Direction around a decade ago, back when Styles was just the curly-haired, charismatic one out of a fresh-faced ensemble of five. Even before his natural showmanship evolved into fully-fledged stardom, he was engulfed early on by cult-like adoration: Blogs dedicated themselves to the forensic analysis of his tattoos, Instagram captions, and sartorial choices. Update accounts kept the public abreast of his general (and sometimes specific) whereabouts, matching carpet patterns and wallpaper to specific restaurants and hotel lobbies.
Of course, other pop stars have incited similar levels of fandemonium — recall the frenzy of Beatlemania — but the ascendance of social media has enabled devotion verging on the obsessive. It has also allowed Styles to seem simultaneously more available and more distant: Despite the seeming immediacy of Twitter and Instagram, Styles’ disuse of the platforms for purposes other than self-promotion has given him the glamorous mysteriousness of a much older kind of star. Fans are left to concoct imagined versions of his inner life, a practice that gives the illusion of intimacy in place of a much realer distance.
The result is a fandom that feels at its best like a close-knit community and at its worst dangerously close to hero worship. Styles’ alleged romantic partners are scrutinized and harassed online, their Instagram comments flooded with jealousy and vitriol. Anyone levying even reasonable criticism against the singer is met with instant backlash. When someone becomes an idol, it seems, he can do no wrong. For what it’s worth, Styles himself has embraced a much more literal aesthetic of deification. His first album featured baptismal imagery, the body submerged in the waters of spiritual rebirth. As long as the zeitgeist has demanded a pop idol, Harry Styles has delivered.
But to be worshipped is not a wholly positive status to occupy. Idolization, while flattering, inevitably revokes some fundamental essence of personhood. There’s a certain freedom in vulnerability and the ability to make mistakes — a freedom certainly not afforded to Styles, nor any of his bandmates, in their first ventures into solo artist-hood. “When I hear...