Although the 2022 musical year has been dominated by a handful of female powers (critically, since the odyssey of Beyoncé on the dance floor, Renaissanceand commercially, from the synthpop monster of Taylor Swift, midnight), top male pop stars (Harry Styles, the bad bunny and Jack Harlow) have succeeded in challenging old-school masculinity in original and subversive ways.
In April, during his headline performance at Coachella, the reigning prince of pop, Harry Styles, summoned a surprise guest, Shania Twain, to the stage to sing a suggestively chosen duet: Man, I feel like a woman (Wow, I feel like a woman).
Dressed in a low-cut silver sequined jumpsuit, Styles strutted, twirled and sang the cheeky lyrics to the anthem. “This lady taught me how to sing,” he told the crowd of more than 100,000 when the song ended. “She also taught me that men are trash.”
Play with gender roles
The performance was funny, headline-generating, and relatively radical — it’s hard to imagine Styles’ generational predecessor, Justin Timberlake, or even Timberlake’s successor, Justin Bieber, playing gender roles so quickly and freely.
This is in part because the Justins have embraced hip-hop and R&B – genres where experimentation is less welcome – more directly than Styles. But it’s also because the cultural forces that shape the norms and expectations of what a male pop star can and should be are evolving.
Styles and Harlow seem to know how to position themselves as protagonists in a cultural moment where being a man, especially if you’re straight and white, can feel like a minefield of potential mistakes, transgressions, and overblown privilege. Bad Bunny, in an even more subversive way, broke the British pop star’s playbook and offered a broader view of gender and sexuality.
aesthetic leaps
Bad bunnythe Puerto Rican superstar whose summer hit “Un verano sin ti” has spent more weeks on the Billboard charts this year than any other album, has gleefully rejected the boundaries of machismo.
Instead, she’s embraced gender-fluid fashion, condemned male aggression in her songs and videos, and even made out with one of her dancers during her performance at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards, decisions that have an added weight. his pop of great aesthetic leaps has roots in reggaeton, a genre that is based on heteronormativity.
Styles has also won fans and admirers by treating his gender presentation as something of a playground, whether it’s 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 the director of Don’t worry honeyOlivia Wilde, 10 years his senior.
None of this was bad for business: How it was by Styles was Billboard’s longest running No. 1 song of the year and globally, Spotify’s most streamed song of 2022.
But also there is a fine line between teaming up and pleasurea line that fans don’t hesitate to point out all over the internet. Styles and Bad Bunny accused of the very contemporary crime of ‘queerbaiting’which involves cultivating a false mystique around one’s sexuality to attract an LGBTQ fan base.
However, overemphasizing heterosexuality and alpha male stereotypes has its perils, especially after #MeToo. What is a man to do then?
The case of rapper Jack Harlow
Harlow, a 24-year-old rapper from Kentucky, has spent 2022 trying to find out. A technically savvy rapper with easy charisma and a Shirley Temple-esque head, Harlow is known for making artistic choices that showcase his skills and convey his seriousness as an emcee.
He has also cultivated a public image of an irrepressible hummingbird with a special attraction to black women.
He is famous for confronting Saweetie on the BET Awards red carpet, repeatedly appearing on Doja Cat’s Instagram live streams, and even parodying her reputation during a stellar performance as the host of Saturday night live when he played himself in a sketch that envisioned him seducing Whoopi Goldberg on the set of the show The sight.
Harlow’s music also actively attracts female listeners. As he explained this year in an interview with The New York Times, “I always think if I was in a car and the girl I’m in love with was drunk and I had to do the verse to get her, would I be proud to do the verse for her?” verse?”
During their second album, Come home, the kids miss you, Harlow is portrayed as elegant and sensitive, a man who has clean nails and talks about his romances in therapy. In the great tradition of her older brother Drake, Harlow often uses the pronoun “you” to directly and intimately address the women in his songs.
His biggest solo hit to date, First classwhich spent three weeks at No. 1 this spring, has toured fascinatingFergie’s 2007 hit about luxury and hard-earned success, in a chivalrous invitation for a lady to enjoy the good life at Harlow’s expense: “I could put you first class,” she clarified.
stylistically, Harlow’s music is light years away from Styles’, but both share a kind of glorification of female listeners.a lyrical attention to their pleasure and a subtle insistence that they are fonder mates than all those other men who, in Styles parlance (and in superhuman ballads like fiancés Y Matilda), are “junk”.
The old hyper-straight domain
In one sense, this is certainly progress. Consider that Timberlake’s success in the early 2000s was putting down his ex Britney Spears or that a performance in which he feigned some kind of hyperheterodom over Janet Jackson had virtually no effect on his career, but it’s almost over. with his.
Harlow’s partnership with gay pop star Lil Nas X and his public support for the singer and even the adulation of his female colleagues are a far cry from his predecessor Eminem, who negotiated his complex position as a white man in a predominantly black genre . people. Misogyny and homophobia aren’t very good for business anymore, thank goodness.
It’s hard to imagine these men making the same mistakes as their predecessors, and overcorrection is somewhat welcome given the alternative. (Bad Bunny has taken even bolder risks, like vehemently criticizing the Puerto Rican government over island-wide blackouts.)
But even the privilege exercised responsibly remains, after all, a privilege. And the music of Styles and Harlow often betrays that with its relative levity, its sense of living in a space devoid of major existential concerns.
Styles’ songs in particular seem devoid of any introspection; The most of Harry’s house they pass like great masses of clouds.
The focus of Harlow’s music swings between girls and ego, with small gestures toward bolder political statements she’s made on red carpets (calling out homophobia) and social media (attending protests demanding justice for Breonna Taylor ).
The inability to see yourself as part of a larger problem is also a symptom of privilege. Even if he wears sequins, a man declaring that “men are trash” is just a very subtle way of saying “not all men.” And the guy who says that?
What does it mean to be a man right now?
In the part of the gangan emotional and long-winded single released this year by British group The 1975, frontman Matty Healy imagines he overheard a snippet of conversation between two young women: “I like my men like I like coffee, full of soy milk and so sweet that it offends no one.’
The implication is that Healy is definitely not one of those men, and indeed it is hard to imagine a listener – especially a non-male – listening to all eleven tracks of Being funny in a foreign language from the 75s without feeling embarrassed by anything Healy says. (Just one example: “I thought we were arguing, but you seem to be enlightening yourself.” Yuck.)
But there is something in Healy’s musings that is often missing from the music of Harlow or Styles: a genuine sense of self-examination and an active inner monologue about what it means to be a man at this time in the 21st century.
Healy’s songs, as critic Ann Powers puts it in a clever essay tracing the “motherfucker’s” cultural lineage, are excavations into the “curses and blessings of his genre existence.”
Under his relentless microscope, white (sort of) straight masculinity happily sheds his default humanity status and becomes a curiosity to be browsed, exposing his inner contradictions and simmering anxieties.
“I’m being ironic woke up?” Healy wonders later in Part of the Band. “Am I the butt of my jokes? Or am I just some skinny post-cocaine kid calling the ego his imagination?” Shame on others, if you will. He’s man enough to leave the question hanging in the air.
Lindsay Zoladz/The New York Times
Translation: Elisa Carnelli
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Source: Clarin
