One Direction’s Harry Styles’s debut solo single, Sign of the Times, is being hailed as a momentous art-pop culture moment-thingie, because it doesn’t sound like something you’d expect from a boy band member and… Well, that seems to be about it.
SOTT has been likened to David Bowie, but in truth it’s a bewildering, bellicose dirge that mistakes “far too long” for “epic” and sounds a bit like Snow Patrol shared one tiny spliff between them listening to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Throughout the song, Styles wails, as wise, tragic and gnarled as only a 23-year-old could be, when he’s lumbered with a signature look that sports all Mick Jagger’s rejected 1980s haircuts at once.
Call me old fashioned, but, if just being a boy band member, and releasing an overlong song, gets you hailed as a counterculture genius, then something has gone very wrong with the counterculture and maybe even with boy bands. Please be clear, I bear Styles no malice – in fact, as a spiteful past-it former music journalist, my ear trumpet will be earnestly cocked, awaiting the solo album. However, Bowie, or even Bowie-esque, Harry most definitely is not.
