One Direction’s Harry Styles is sending fans a message, but no one quite gets it yet. Why is everyone so puzzled and misdirected?
When Harry Styles Another Man pics came out, there were headlines talking about Harry in different hair styles, and looking a bit retro, all over the web. Even news writers didn’t realize that Harry was copying the iconic photos of rock icon Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones, predominantly, but also a few suggesting Jim Morrison from the Doors, perhaps Robert Plant of Led Zepplin and so many others.
One Direction’s Harry Styles, king of preteen pop, has also been meeting with the two remaining members of the Beatles, Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr. He’s been talking to Mick Jagger and Elton John. The Red Hot Chili Peppers is giving him a song they wrote.
Since the One Direction Hiatus began, Harry Styles has been making very specific contacts and connections in the music world. Styles has been learning from the best for one thing, but is there even more going on in Harry’s mind?
The Harry Styles Another Man interview discussed his meeting with certain icons. There was even a phone call, in the interview, to none other than Sir Paul McCartney of the Beatles.
One Direction’s Harry Styles is also slated to star in another movie. This time, he will play Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. Wow, there is a huge hint.
The Harry Styles Another Man photo shoot was not about hairstyles, or the stages of a man’s life or any of those unrelated assertions all over the internet.
Now, One Direction’s Harry Styles was spotted wearing black nail polish, and again the twitter posts and even the headline writers are so weirdly clueless. How does Harry keep from screaming? He’s trying to tell people something, without just saying it.
Harry Styles’ Another Man interview was a huge hint, but largely fell on deaf ears. His contacts with Paul McCartney and Ringo Star of the Beatles, Elton John, Mick Jagger, and The Red Hot Chili Peppers should be a clue. Now black nail polish? Here is a huge hint from Alligator.
“Nail polish bent gender lines during the punk rock and grunge movements. Both males and females adorned their nails with the black nail polish that symbolized the gritty music.”
One Direction’s Harry Styles knows his rock and roll history, but most of his young fans don’t. It is actually hard to find a reference online to this time-honored tradition of black nail polish, but in the 1970’s and right through the 1990s, a host of musicians wore black nail polish. Now it is back. Is Styles referencing the past, present or future… maybe a bit of all three? Black nail polish is an almost timeless tradition among real rockers.
Kim Gordon, the lead guitarist for Sonic Youth, explains in Vanyaland what black nail polish means to her.
“Like an option on a voting ballot, ‘none of the above…’ [Kim’s New Album featuring black cover]’Murdered Out’, as a look, is now creeping into mainstream culture as a design trend. A coffee brand. A clothing line. A nail polish color. Black-on-black matte is the ultimate expression in digging out, getting rid of, purging the soul. Like a black hole, the supreme inward look, a culture collapsing in on itself, the outsider as an unwilling participant as the ‘It’ look.”
One Direction’s Harry Styles is sending a bold message with his black polish. Black nail polish has long been seen as a protest to society as a whole, but more than that it is part of rock’s history and its future.
Harry Styles’ Another Man pics also featured black nail polish. Maybe it’s girly… no, it’s not. Maybe it’s gender bending, but… no, not necessarily. Most old time guitar playing rockers, and even very masculine country stars, wore nail polish, for a very practical reason.
Rock guitarists and other fast handed guitarists were trying to keep their fingernails from catching and ripping on the strings. Many chose a discrete clear polish, but some wore black, not only because that made a statement, but because it lent to a thicker application than just a clear coat. Strong smooth nails were increasingly important as fast metal riffs became the norm. Just because a guitarist is shredding doesn’t mean he wants to shred his nails all over the frets.
One Direction’s Harry Styles playing guitar? Wow, that would be so amazing, and while fans can hope, that may not be the case. Black nail polish became commonplace among so many rockers. David Bowie, Lou Reed, Kurt Cobain, Freddie Mercury, and Iggy Pop were just a few among many rockers sporting black nail polish. The fashion followed without even knowing the reasoning behind the trend.
In Harry Styles’ Another Man photo shoot and in recent appearances Styles has been sporting black nail polish in tradition with other rockers. So what is it that Styles is trying so hard to say without saying it?
One Direction’s Harry Styles wants to be a real rock star. Styles wants his music taken seriously, and he wants a career that spans decades. He wants to enliven the spirit of innovation in music and bring it into this century. If any current pop star can do that, it’s none other than Styles.
Harry Styles’ Another Man photo shoot is about music history and especially to the rock genre. Does Harry want to be the next Mick Jagger? If so he has his work cut out for him as the mainstream is losing touch with the icons of rock. The fact almost no one is seeing these hints for what they are is a testament to the possibility that, people aren’t thinking about Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Paul McCartney, and other music icons.
One Direction’s Harry Styles is interested in some things that happened before he was born, and he wants his fans on the same page. Styles wants fans to know he’s getting really serious about the quality and longevity of his musical career. The Statesman summarizes the message of Another Man.
“Styles is, in fact, a very traditional heartthrob – his very appeal may be due to the fact that he is the most traditional heartthrob we’ve had in years. Like McCartney, John Lennon, David Bowie, Jagger, Marc Bolan, or Kurt Cobain, Styles is creative, interested in fashion, androgynous, boyish and followed around the world by a stream of enthusiastic fans, who are mostly young women. And, perhaps in no small part due to that last detail, like all of them, he has been dismissed as a cheap fad by music writers who should probably know better.
Harry Styles’ Another Man photo shoot makes it clear. There’s more to Styles than his previous five years with One Direction. If One Direction is to survive, it will have to take a more mature direction and Harry is leading his fan girls to explore historically significant rock music and its immortalized icons.
The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, The Doors, Black Sabbath and so many others, forged a genre that spanned half a century at least. Harry is leading the charge to more meaningful music in this century. He’s blowing off the new pop for something with a whole lot more substance.
One Direction’s Harry Styles is taking the lead, and taking a stand for better music, and a new genre that will somehow echo the past. Styles has The Statesman quoting TS Elliot
“In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, TS Eliot said that a truly ‘traditional’ writer is that which has ‘a sense of the timeless, as well as of the temporal, and of the timeless and of the temporal together’. This is also what makes that writer contemporary, and aware of his own specific moment in time. ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.’”
Harry Styles Another Man interview does match those TS Eliot ideas, and if Styles new album fulfills the high expectations that interview and photo shoot imply, then Harry is well on his way to being accepted as a serious musician. Already he is embraced by the whole of rock and roll royalty.
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One Direction’s Harry Styles is dressing up like Mick Jagger, sporting the black nail polish and strutting around like a real rock star. His album, though, will come out in 2017, and that more than anything will be proof of Styles’ viability as a real rock star. If and only if his music meets the expectations will Styles join the other true music icons as The Statesman suggests.
One Direction’s Harry Styles, adored by young girls all over the world, and respected among the community of rockers has yet to prove himself in the eyes of a broader audience, but he’s well on his way.
Will One Direction’s Harry Styles live up to the expectations suggested in his Another Man interview?
[Featured Image by Christopher Polk/Getty Images]