November 21, 2022

The Harry Styles Franchise

Seeing Harry Styles 3 times in 3 months has left me with a very unexpected feeling, which is one of disillusionment. The closest thing I can compare the feeling to is when a food tastes so good that I eat it many days in a row and tell everyone about how delicious it is, and then I reach a threshold at which I don’t want it anymore. It hasn’t suddenly become bad and yet I know that I have to avoid the probably excessive amount of that food that’s in my fridge because otherwise it will becomes a thing I can’t enjoy anymore.

When I went to my first Harry show, I was excited to relay to my uninitiated friend all his bits. This is a family show! Dads! I knew these bits because I had watched hours of videos on YouTube from his other shows. To finally be there, in person, felt like I was a part of something - I was in on the joke.

I still largely felt that way, four years later, standing in the crowd at Madison Square Garden in September. I was days away from my birthday, with two of my most favorite people, and just so incredibly happy to be there. When Harry performed “Cinema” - a song I had spent months bitching about - I turned to Christina and yelled, “I take back everything I said about this stupid song! It is meant to be consumed live!” I wore a feather boa because on the last tour so many people had been wearing them and I wanted to be in on the fun.

That I bought tickets for three different shows this year was something of an accident. When tour dates were announced, I had already been loosely planning a trip to New York to celebrate my birthday, and the fact that Harry was going to be there around the same time seemed like a special opportunity. Then, the week before on-sale, I received a large, unexpected bonus at work which resulted in my freaking out about money and what I was supposed to do with it. After I got tickets to the New York show I thought, “maybe I should get some in LA in case the trip falls through. And going to multiple shows might be fun.” And once I had that second set of tickets, the part of me that was uncomfortable with my recent influx of funds said, “Buy a third set of tickets. Because you can.”

There was something in the repetition, and in my growing physical exhaustion, that wore off the shine for me. What had felt seamless at my first show in New York was fraying at the edges by my third show in Los Angeles. One of the first ways I started to notice it was when Harry gave, word for word, the same thank you message in LA as he had in New York. It was a small thing to snag on because both times seemed very genuine in their delivery, and there are probably only so many ways to thank a crowd for changing your life, and of course, he doesn’t make everything up fresh every night. But that moment started making the invisible visible to me, and then I couldn’t unsee it. So much of the show was a mirror image of what he had done before, down to the uniformity of the crowd he was performing for.

At my last show, one of the people standing around me talked about not being able to get a regular pre-sale ticket and having to buy a premium ticket (meaning that ticket cost 50-100% more than my same ticket¹). “I had to do it though, you know? It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” Not knowing anything else about this person, maybe this was a special, can’t-miss-it chance that will never come again. But as someone seeing him for the fifth time in four years, with a strong sense that Harry will go on many more tours, I found myself questioning how true that could really be.²

There was, at that same show, someone standing on the opposite side of the pit wearing a top hat. “What a power move,” I had said, “to be a tall person and wear a top hat while standing at the front of the crowd.” In the middle of the show, during the ‘talking to the audience’ portion, Harry commented on the hat. “I will tell you two true things tonight. One, I have never seen The Jersey Boys. I know, I know. I’ve never seen it. Two, I love a man in a top hat.” I laughed, I watched the overjoyed face of this fan in the crowd, and then I thought, slightly annoyed, “now everyone on the next tour is going to be wearing top hats…”

If you are Harry Styles, and you pride yourself on giving a good show, and you know that there are people in the crowd who spent a lot of money to be there (and who may even consider this a once-in-a-lifetime show), I can see why you might aspire to deliver a uniformly excellent experience. Everyone desires a great show, no one should leave feeling they missed out. I can also see the energy savings of having a template - especially on a tour like this, which used a mini-residency model, where he was playing 6-15 shows in each city. It makes sense, and I don’t want to imply that at any point I felt as though Harry was phoning it in or that each individual show wasn’t great. But one of the things that I love about live shows is the magical, dynamic, lightning-in-a-bottle quality that they can have. I don’t associate a uniformity of experience with magic, I associate it with chain restaurants and fast food.³

My favorite part of any of the shows I saw was, at my first LA show, Harry telling the audience that it was a big night because his therapist was at the show. There went on to be several more therapy jokes, including the reading of someone’s therapy-related sign. I was absolutely delighted by this moment, going so far as to tell my own therapist about it several days later (she also thought it was great). I can see now that part of the reason I loved it is because he won’t make that joke at every show – it was responsive to the context of the night. It was, in its way, special. You had to be there.

I guess what I’m wondering now is, when it comes to Harry Styles concerts, do I have to be there?

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The Vibe

ICYMI

I do still love Harry’s dancing.

Christina and I talked about the “Harry’s House” album for a bonus episode of The Bi Pod.