In April, during his headlining set at Coachella, reigning pop prince Harry Styles invited a surprise guest, Shania Twain, onstage to sing a provocatively chosen duet: “Man I feel like a woman.”
Dressed in a low-cut jumpsuit with silver sequins, Styles paraded, twirled and boomed the lyrics to the cheeky anthem. “This lady taught me to sing,” he told the boisterous crowd of over 100,000 when the song was over. “She also taught me that men are garbage.”
The performance was fun, made headlines, and was relatively radical: it’s hard to imagine Styles’ generation predecessor, Justin Timberlake—or even Timberlake’s successor, Justin Bieber—playing gender roles so quickly and loosely. That’s partly because the Justins embraced hip-hop and R&B—genres where such experimentation is often less welcome—more directly than Styles ever did. But it’s also because the cultural forces that define the norms and expectations of what a male pop star can and should be are evolving.
While the year was dominated in music by a handful of female powerhouses (critically, through Beyoncé’s critically acclaimed dancefloor odyssey “Renaissance” and commercially, through Taylor Swift’s moody synthpop juggernaut “Midnights”), top male pop stars—Styles, Bad Bunny and Jack Harlow – all found success while offering refreshingly subversive challenges to old-school masculinity.
Styles and Harlow seem acutely aware of how to position themselves as heartthrobs in a cultural moment where being a man — especially one who scans straight and white — can seem like a minefield of potential indiscretions, insults, and exaggerated privilege. Bad Bunny, even more subversive, tore up the English-language pop star’s rulebook and offered a more comprehensive view of gender and sexuality.
Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican superstar whose summer hit “Un Verano Sin Ti” topped the Billboard chart for more weeks this year than any other album, has gleefully rejected the boundaries of machismo. Instead, he has embraced gender fluid fashion and expressed male aggression in his own songs and videos and even kissed one of his male backup dancers during a performance at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards — decisions that carry extra weight, given that his aesthetically leaping pop is rooted in reggaeton, a genre that leans on heteronormativity.
Styles, too, has won fans and admirers by viewing his gender presentation as something of a playground, whether that means wearing a dress on the cover of “Vogue,” refusing to label his sexuality, or flipping the older male author’s familiar script. younger female muse in his highly publicized relationship with his ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ director Olivia Wilde, who is 10 years his senior. It wasn’t bad for business either: “As It Was” by Styles was the longest-reigning Billboard No. 1 of the year and Spotify’s most-streamed song worldwide of 2022.
But there’s also an increasingly fine line between alliance and pandering, one that fans aren’t shy about calling out online. Styles and Bad Bunny have been charged with the very contemporary crime of “queerbaiting,” or cultivating a false mystique around one’s sexuality to appeal to an LGBTQ fanbase. However, placing too much emphasis on straightforwardness and alpha male stereotypes carries its own risks, especially in a post-MeToo moment. What should a man do?
Harlow, the 24-year-old Kentucky-born rapper, spent 2022 trying to figure it out. A tech-savvy rapper with easygoing charisma and a head of Shirley Temple curls, Harlow is known for making artistic choices that showcase his skills and convey his seriousness as an MC. He has also cultivated a personality as an irrepressible flirt with a particular appeal to black women. He famously snapped photos with Saweetie on the BET Awards red carpet, popped up repeatedly on Doja Cat’s live broadcasts on Instagram, and even parodied his reputation during a star-spinning “Saturday Night Live” hosting gig when he played himself in a sketch that depicted him seducing Whoopi Goldberg on the set of ‘The View’.
Harlow’s music also actively cultivates the female listener. As he explained in an interview with The New York Times earlier this year: “I always think if I was in the car and the girl I had a crush on was in the shotgun and I had to play the song, would I be proud to play the song?”
On his second album, Come Home the Kids Miss You, Harlow portrays himself as classy and sensitive, a man who keeps his nails clean and discusses his romantic encounters in therapy. In the grand tradition of his elder Drake, Harlow often uses the pronoun “you” to address women directly and intimately in his songs. His biggest solo hit to date, “First Class,” which spent three weeks at No. 1 this spring, turned “Glamorous,” Fergie’s dazzling 2007 hit about luxury and hard-earned success, into a chivalrous invitation for a lady to come and enjoy it. good life on Harlow’s dime:I could put you in first class,” he clarified.
Stylistically, Harlow’s music is worlds away from Styles’, but both share a sort of glorification of the female listener, a lyrical focus on her pleasure, and a subtle emphasis that they are more caring partners than any of the others. other men who, in Styles’ parlance (and on superhumanly empathetic ballads like “Boyfriends” and “Matilda”), are “garbage.”
In a sense, this is certainly progress. Recall that Timberlake’s early success had to do with the outrageous slander of his ex Britney Spears, or that a performance portraying some sort of hyper-heterosexual dominance over Janet Jackson had virtually no effect on his career, but almost ended hers . Harlow’s collaboration with and public support for the gay pop star Lil Nas X and even his flattery of his female peers are worlds away from his predecessor Eminem, who negotiated his complex attitude as a white man in a predominantly black genre by women and queer people. Misogyny and homophobia aren’t really good for business anymore – and thank goodness.
It’s hard to imagine these men making the same mistakes as their ancestors, and over-correction is welcome in a way, given the alternative. (Bad Bunny has once again taken even greater risks, such as fierce criticize the Puerto Rican government in response to island-wide power outages.)
But even privileges exercised responsibly are still privileges in the end. And Styles and Harlow’s music often betrays that through its relative weightlessness, its sense of existence in a space free of major existential concerns. Styles’ songs in particular seem eroded out of some introspection; most of them on “Harry’s House” pass like cumulus clouds. The focus of Harlow’s music vacillates between girls and ego, with few gestures toward the riskier political statements he’s made on red carpets (dismissing homophobia) and social media (attending protests demanding justice for Breonna Taylor). That failure to see oneself as part of a larger problem is also a symptom of privilege. Even when wearing sequins, a man declaring that “men are garbage” is just a very subtle way of saying “not all men.” What about the man who says it?
On “Part of the Band,” a moody, extended single released this year by British band the 1975, the frontman Matt Heally imagines overhearing a snippet of banter between two young women: “I like my men like I like my coffee / Full of soy milk and so sweet it won’t offend anyone.” The implication is that Healy is definitely not one of those men, and indeed it’s hard to imagine any listener – especially a non-male one – enduring all 11 tracks of the soft-focused 1975 “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” without cringing at something says Hely. (Just one example: “I thought we were fighting, but it looks like I was gaslighting you.” Yeesh.)
But in Healy’s musings, there’s often something missing from Harlow or Styles’ music: a genuine sense of self-examination and an active internal monologue about what it means to be a man right now in the 21st century. Healy’s songs are, as the critic Ann Powers astutely put it essay tracing the cultural lineage of “the dirtbag,” excavating “the curses and blessings of his gendered existence.” Under his unforgiving microscope, straight(ish) white masculinity, blessed, is liberated from its status as the standard human condition and instead becomes a curiosity to poke and prod, exposing its internal contradictions and latent fears.
“I’m ironically awake?” Healy later wonders in “Part of the Band.” “The crux of my joke? Or am I just a post-coke, average, skinny dude who calls his ego imagination? Cry if you want. He’s man enough to leave the question hanging in the air.