#(smith talks a lot about male anxiety over women's spaces)

[maslows-pyramid-scheme]

The backlash against female-only gatherings and consciousness-raising forums ... is frequently absorbed into male-default narratives focused on cancel culture ... This is the wrong story, erasing the enormous history of male opposition to female speech ... there is a line that can be drawn from sixteenth-century images of the ‘virtuous woman’ who has no head with which to speak, though anti-suffragette propaganda showing a woman with a padlock on her lips, to memes describing superglue as ‘lipstick for TERFs.’ Free speech does not mean for women what it means for men ... Anxiety over ‘gossiping’ women and the need to control them is ever-present, even when it masquerades as progressive politics ...

...

“Men talk politics in the pub, but women boycotting a supermarket are on a “housewives’ jaunt;” the differences in power among men are serious and of a political nature, but the differences in power between women and men as concetualised by women are silly, and of a neurotic nature ... Because it is fundamental to the frame of reference in a patriarchal society that men are the political creatures, the political activists and theorists, women’s activities in relation to power are denatured, classified as something else” [quoting Dale Spender].

...

“Because [women] feel as though they do not have free speech in the presence of men, many women have set up women-only forums … But where such safe space has been set up, the response from some quarters is predictable. There are men who vehemently object and who claim that women-only space impinges on their right to free speech. They try to over-run, disrupt or destroy the exclusively female forum” [quoting Dale Spender].

Victoria Smith, Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women

Lmao literally women should be allowed to have female only spaces just because, and not just because of safeguarding from males. Women want to go to a women only gym? A women only club? A women only knitting circle? A women only concert, yoga class, workshop, etc? They should be allowed to without MALES pitching a fucking fit about it and demanding “inclusion.” Women should be allowed to seek out and use female only spaces because that’s our fucking right in this male centered, male dominated, male obsessed society. Just fucking BECAUSE.

[joshjacksons]

Joshua Jackson interview with Refinery29

Against my better judgement, and at the risk of losing any semblance of journalistic objectivity, I start my conversation with Joshua Jackson by effusively telling him what a dream come true it is to be talking to him. See, like many millennial women who grew up watching the late ‘90s and early 2000s teen drama Dawson’s Creek, Jackson’s Pacey Witter means a lot to me. Pacey is one of the rare fictional teen boys of my youth whose adolescent charisma, romantic appeal, and general boyfriend aptitude hold up all these years later (unlike The O.C’s Seth Cohen or Gossip Girl’s Chuck Bass) and that is due in large part to the wit, vulnerability, and care Jackson brought to the character.

It’s the same intention he’s afforded all of his famous roles — Peter Bishop in Fringe, Cole Lockhart in The Affair, and even as a 14-year-old in his first acting gig as sweet-faced heartthrob Charlie Conway in The Mighty Ducks. Now, Jackson, 43, has matured into a solid supporting actor (with memorable turns in Little Fires Everywhere and When They See Us) and as a leading man who can draw you into a story with just his voice (Jackson’s latest project is narrating the psychological thriller and Canadian Audible original, Oracle, one of the over 12,000 titles available today on Audible.ca’s the Plus Catalogue) or find humanity in the most sinister men (he’s currently playing a sociopath with a god complex in Dr. Death). His magnetic pull is as evident as it was when he was the guy you rooted for in a show named after another guy’s creek. Jackson has never seemed to mind the fact that so many people still bring up Pacey decades later, and that’s part of why as an adult, he’s one of the few childhood crushes I still have on a pedestal. I tell him just a tiny slice of this, and Jackson graciously sits up straighter and promises to bring his A-game to our Zoom exchange. Jackson is in what appears to be an office, flanked by mess, like a true work-from-home Dad. He and his wife, fellow actor Jodie Turner-Smith, welcomed a daughter in the early days of the pandemic in 2020, and he tells me that fatherhood and marriage are the best decisions he has ever made. Jackson and Turner-Smith are a rare Hollywood couple who choose to let us in on their love, but not obnoxiously — just through flirty Instagram comments and cheeky tweets. Their pairing is part of Jackson’s enduring appeal. It’s nice to think that Pacey Witter grew up to be a doting dad and adoring husband, even if his wife’s name is Jodie, not Joey.

Jackson is an animated conversationalist, leaning into the camera to emphasize his points — especially when the topic of diversity comes up. White celebs don’t get asked about racism in Hollywood the way their counterparts of colour do, and when they do, they’re usually hesitant at best, and unequipped at worst, to tackle these conversations. Jackson is neither. He’s open, willing, and eager to discuss systemic inequality in the industry he’s grown up in. It’s the bare minimum a straight white man in Hollywood can do, and Jackson seems to know this. When he ventures briefly into trying to explain to me, a Black woman, the perils of being Black, female, and online, he catches himself and jokes that of course, I don’t need him to tell me the racism that happens in the comment section of his wife’s Instagram. The self-deprecating delivery is one I’m familiar with from watching Jackson onscreen for most of my life, and seeing it in person (virtually) renders me almost unable to form sentences. Jackson’s charm is disarming, but his relaxed Canadian energy is so relatable, I manage to maintain my professionalism long enough to get through our conversation. Refinery29: Your voice has been in my head for a few days because I've been listening to Canadian Audible Original, Oracle. What drew you to this project and especially the medium of audio storytelling?

Joshua Jackson: The book itself is such a page turner. I also love the idea of those old radio plays. It's like a hybrid between the beauty of reading a book on the page where your imagination does all of it. We craft a little bit of the world, but because this is a noir thriller married with this metaphysical world, there's a lot of dark and creepy places that your imagination gets to fill in for yourself.

I'm noticing a trend in some of the roles you've been taking on lately, with this and Dr. Death, these stories are very dark and creepy. But so many people still think of you as Pacey Witter, or as Charlie Conway, the prototypical good guys of our youth. Are you deliberately trying to kill Pacey and Charlie?

JJ: I'm not trying to kill anybody — except on screen [laughs]. It's funny, I didn't really think of these two things as companion pieces, but I won't deny that there may be something subconscious in this anxiety, stress-filled year that we've all just had. That may be what I was trying to work out was some of that stress, because that's the beauty of my job. Instead of therapy, I just get someone to pay me to say somebody else's words. So, yeah, that could be a thing [but] the thought process that went into them both was very different. Even though this is a dark story, [lead character, police psychic] Nate Russo is still the hero. [Dr. Death’s] Christopher Duntsch very much is not at all. I can't pretend to know my own mind well enough to be able to tell you exactly how [these two roles] happened, but it happened.

That might be something that you should work through with an actual therapist. JJ: Exactly. Yeah, maybe real therapy is on the docket for me [laughs].

So I was listening to Oracle and you're doing these various creepy voices — I’m sorry the word “creepy” keeps coming up.

JJ: Are you trying to tell me something? You know what? I wanted to skip straight to the creepy old man phase of my career. So, it sounds like I'm doing a good job.

You're doing amazing, sweetie [laughs]. So, I was thinking you must be really good at bedtime stories with your daughter doing all these voices. Or is she still too young for that?

JJ: No! She's all the way into books. Story time is my favourite part of the day because it gives me the opportunity to have that time with her just one-on-one. Her favorite book right now is a book called Bedtime Bonnet. Every night I bring out three books, and she gets to pick one. The other two shift a little bit, but Bedtime Bonnet is every single night.

I love that. Since you're married to a Black woman, you know a thing or two about bonnets. JJ: ​​Yeah, well I'm getting my bonnet education. And I'm getting my silk sheet education. I'm behind the curve, but I'm figuring it out [laughs].

You said in an interview recently that you are now at the age where the best roles for men are. And I wonder if you can expand on that and whether you think of the fact that the same cannot be said for the majority of women actors in their 40s?

JJ: What's great about the age that I'm at now as a man is that, generally speaking, the characters — even if they're not the central character of this show — are well fleshed out. They're being written from a personal perspective, usually from a writer who has enough lived experience and wants to tell the story of a whole character. Whereas when you're younger — and obviously I was very lucky with some of the characters that I was able to play  – you're the son or the boyfriend, or you're a very two-dimensional character. It's gotten better, but still a lot like you're either the precocious child or you're the brooding one. I will say that while I would agree with you to a certain point for women, I think that this is probably the best era to be a not 25-year-old-woman in certainly the entirety of my career. And it is also the best time to be a Black woman inside of the industry. There's still more opportunity for a 40-year-old white man than there is for a 40-year-old white woman, but it is better now than it has ever been. The roles that women are able to inhabit and occupy and the opportunities that are out there have multiplied. If I started my career in playing two-dimensional roles to get the three-dimensional roles, most women started their career in three-dimensional roles and end up at “wife” or “mom.” And that's just not the case anymore. There's just a lot of broadly diverse stories being told that centre women. So you're right, but in the last five years, six years I would say, there has really been a pretty significant shift.

And I think that shift is happening because who's behind the camera is also changing. JJ: Right? Who holds the purse strings. That's big. Who gets to green light the show to begin with? You have to have a variety of different faces inside of that room. And then, who's behind the camera. What is the actual perspective that we're telling the story from? The male gaze thing is very real. Dr. Death had three female directors. The central character of Dr. Death is an outrageously toxic male figure. Who knows more about toxic male BS than women? Particularly women who are in a predominantly male work environment. So these directors had a very specific take and came at it with a clarity that potentially a man wouldn't see, because we have blind spots about ourselves. We're in a space where there's a recognition that we've told a very narrow band of what's available in stories. There's so many stories to be told and it's okay for us to broaden out from another white cop.

I hope that momentum continues. Okay, I have to tell you something: I’m a little obsessed with your wife, Jodie Turner-Smith. JJ: Me too. As you should be! I love how loudly and publicly you both love on each other. But I need you to set the scene for me. When you are leaving flirty Instagram comments, and she's tweeting thirsty things about you, are you in the same room? Do you know that the other one is tweeting? What's happening?

JJ: We're rarely in the same room [writing] the thirsty comments because that usually just gets said to each other. But, look, if either of us misses a comment, you better believe at night, there's a, "Hey, did you see what I wrote?" One, she's very easy to love out loud and two, she's phenomenal. And I have to say, the love and support that is coming my direction has been a revelation in my life. I've said this often, and it just is the truth: If you ever needed to test whether or not you had chosen the right partner in life, just have a baby at the beginning of a pandemic and then spend a year and a half together. And then you know. And then you absolutely know. I didn't get married until fairly late in the game. I didn't have a baby till very late in the game and they're the two best choices I've ever made in my life.

I'm just going to embarrass you now by reading one of Jodie's thirsty comments to you. She tweeted, “Objectifying my husband on the internet is my kink. I thought you guys knew this by now,” with a gif that said "No shame." JJ: [laughs] That sounds about right.

She's not the only one though. There's this whole thirst for Joshua Jackson corner of the internet. And it feels like there's been a bit of a heartthrob resurgence for you now at your big age. How do you feel about that?

JJ: I hadn't really put too much thought into it, but I am happy that my wife is thirsty for me. What about the rest of us? JJ: That's great for y'all, but it's most important that my wife is thirsty for me. Good answer. You're good at this husband thing. You recently revealed that Jodie proposed to you. Then it became this big story, and people were so surprised by it. How did you feel about the response? JJ: Thank you for giving me the opportunity to give context to this story. So I accidentally threw my wife under the bus because that story was told quickly and it didn't give the full context and holy Jesus, the internet is racist and misogynist. So yes, we were in Nicaragua on a beautiful moonlit night, it could not possibly have been more romantic. And yes, my wife did propose to me and yes, I did say yes, but what I didn't say in that interview was there was a caveat, which is that I'm still old school enough that I said, "This is a yes, but you have to give me the opportunity [to do it too]." She has a biological father and a stepdad, who's the man who raised her. [I said], ‘You have to give me the opportunity to ask both of those men for your hand in marriage.’ And then, ‘I would like the opportunity to re-propose those to you and do it the old fashioned way down on bended knee.’ So, that's actually how the story ended up.

So, there were two proposals. I do feel like that is important context. JJ: Yes, two proposals. And also for anybody who is freaked out by a woman claiming her own space, shut the fuck up. Good God, you cannot believe the things people were leaving my wife on Instagram. She did it. I said ‘yes.’ We're happy. That's it. That's all you need to know. That has been a real education for me as a white man, truly. The way people get in her comments and the ignorance and ugliness that comes her way is truly shocking. And it has been a necessary, but an unpleasant education in just the way people relate to Black bodies in general, but Black female bodies in specific. It is not okay. We have a long way to go. Jodie is such an inspiration because it seems like she handles it in stride. She handles it all with humour and with grace. JJ: She does. And look, I think it's like a golden cage, the concept of the strong Black woman. I would wish for my wife that she would not have to rise above with such amazing strength and grace, above the ugliness that people throw at her on a day to day. I am impressed with her that she does it, but I would wish that that would not be the armour that she has to put on every morning to just navigate being alive. That's a word. That's a word, Joshua Jackson.

The 13-year-old in me needs to ask this. We are in the era of reboots. If they touched Dawson's Creek — which is a masterpiece that should not be touched — but if they did, what would you want it to look like? JJ: I think it should look a lot like it looked the first time. To me, what was great about that story was it was set in a not cool place. It wasn't New York, it wasn't LA, it wasn't London. It wasn't like these were kids who were on the cutting edge of culture, but they were kids just dealing with each other and they were also very smart and capable of expressing themselves. It's something that I loved at that age performing it. And I think that is the reason it has lived on.  We have these very reductive ideas of what you're capable of at 16, 17, 18. And my experience of myself at that point was not as a two-dimensional jock or nerd or pretty girl. You are living potentially an even more full life at that point because everything's just so heightened. [Dawson’s Creek] never talked down to the people that it was portraying. That's one of the things that I loved about it as a book nerd growing up. The vocabulary of Dawson's Creek was always above my level and that was refreshing. To go back to the “diversity” conversation, you can't really make a show with six white leads anymore and that’s a good thing. But I also don't know how I feel about taking a thing, rebooting it, and just throwing Black characters in there. 

JJ: I hear that. And there's certain contexts in which it doesn't work unless you're making it a thing about race, right? If you watch Bridgerton, obviously you're living inside of a fantasy world, and so you're bringing Black characters into this traditionally white space and what would historically be a white space. And now you are able to have a conversation about myth-making and inclusion and who gets to say what and who gets to act how. So that's interesting, but I don’t think you’re just throwing in a Black character if you changed Joey to a Black woman [or] Pacey to a Black man. What you're doing is you're enriching the character. Let's say one of those characters is white and one of those characters is Black. Now, there's a whole rich conversation to be had between these two kids, the political times that we live in, the cultural flow that is going through all of us right now. I think that makes a better story. All these conversations around comic books in particular like, "Well, that's a white character." It's like, Man, shut up. What are you talking about? It is a comic book character! Joey and Pacey don't have to be white. Dawson and Jen don't have to be white. And this is what we were talking about a little bit earlier. We get better the broader our perspective is, both as humans, but also in the entertainment industry. So if you went back to a story like [Dawson’s Creek], what was important in that show was class not race, which I think is true for a lot of small Northeastern towns. They are very white. But if you brought race into that as well, you don't diminish the amount of the stories that you can tell. You enrich the tapestry of that show. So I think that would be a great idea.

Make Pacey Witter a Black man in 2021 is what I just heard from you. JJ: Hashtag ‘Make Pacey Witter A Black Man’. There we go!

[fuzzypurplestuff]

The architects of teen idoldom have always known that more than music, though perhaps less than good orthodontic work, the clothes make the boy. The shirt of a heartthrob needs to be soft and ever so slightly rumpled, offering visual evidence that if it were removed and tossed onto a floor (say, in a dressing room as its owner heads into a post-show shower), it could be grabbed and held like a treasured lovey blanket, emitting a scent just on the verge of sour, yet intoxicating: a blend of tree fort and licorice and ropy muscles, of girls' letters written in felt pen. The perfume of a young man's pleasure at merely being alive.

What made the boy was a polo shirt in the 1950s, a turtleneck in the 1960s, something polyester during the disco era. Gloria Stavers put Jim Morrison in her own fur jacket when she posed him for the cover of the magazine she edited, 16; the designer Bill Whitten put Michael Jackson in sequined jumpsuits that made him seem like light itself. As the teen male physical ideal was reshaped by gym rat practices and creatine, the fashions became simpler, to better show off honed physiques. By the mid-2000s the perfect teen idol outfit was more an ideal than a fashion statement: a white t-shirt, somehow never sullied — the ultimate sign of easeful male privilege. The one Harry Styles most frequently wore as the shaggy-haired main libidinal force in the boy band One Direction was a little loose but definitely clingy, sleeves rolled up so his fresh tattoos peeked through, possibly pulled out of a heap but somehow never wrinkled.

Styles has worn a variation of this shirt since trying out for the X Factor in 2010, when he covered it up with a scarf and a cardigan. (Maybe Simon Cowell, his mentor and white t-shirt devotee himself, convinced Styles of its magical powers.) His short-lived romance with the equally precocious and popwise Taylor Swift was defined by it when she immortalized the shirt in her song "Style". On his self-titled solo debut, out last week, he answers her with his own t-shirt-centric "Two Ghosts."

Styles also wore a t-shirt on the cover of Rolling Stone, for a feature that officially signaled his coming of age. That one, however, had an orange collar and was a little dingy, not shiningly bleached. It was an indie rock t-shirt, the kind Kurt Cobain wore when he was demolishing the value of manufactured teen pop back in the 1990s. It placed Styles in time, within the same lineage that the magazine featuring him had helped canonize: the illustrated history of rock.

In 1972, David Cassidy also grew up on the cover of Rolling Stone. The cherubic star of the rock and roll sitcom The Partridge Family was a huge star that year, riding a couple of Billboard Top 40 singles, selling out sports arenas, and fighting off groupies in the lobbies of the hotels that served as his home. At 22, he was ready to make a leap into something more meaningful — he wanted to act in movies and TV shows "with meaning," and in his off hours, he strummed his guitar and studied the music of Crosby, Stills and Nash. To signal this maturation, Cassidy gave a frank interview to journalist Robin Green, revealing his aspirations, his struggles with anxiety, and his mixed feelings about the rock world, which he felt excluded him because of his ardent young female fan base.

Cassidy spoke up for the girls who bought buttons and posters plastered with his face: "They're not that stupid. You can only hype them to a certain degree. There has to be something there.... They can't just manufacture someone and expect him to be big and successful." He talked about being raised in a Hollywood family, taking acid in the L.A. canyons as a teenager, then making his own way in New York, where he got serious about his craft. Green portrayed him as a loner who survived on canned peaches in his house in Encino, meeting groupies on the road who had sex with him but thought his Vegas-style act was uncool. Though his defense of his fans still resonates, his scorn for the industry that made them love him is palpable. Teen idoldom, in 1972, was a prison; rock and roll was on the other side of the wall.

Green's excellent probe into Cassidy's world is mostly forgotten today, but the photographs that accompanied the feature are immortal. To say what he did in their interviews and have his words taken seriously, Cassidy had to challenge his own image as a musical toy whose moving parts were pulled from a backlot costume rack. He did this in the most drastic and logical way. The portraits Annie Leibovitz shot show Cassidy recumbent, arms overstretched or grasping his own chest. He is nude. In one, bushy pubic hair skims the bottom of the frame. At first glance, with his long shag and lean torso, Cassidy could be Iggy Pop or Patti Smith. In the 1970s, getting naked was a common way to show one's daring — heavy metal bands did it on album covers, loving couples did it in the illustrations for sex manuals, streakers did it across athletic fields. But Cassidy's nudity accomplished something else: It pulled him out of the milieu that had defined him and made him seem innocent as a fawn, with his whole life ahead of him instead of stuck within a showbiz tradition that he had no interest in trying to redeem.

In 2017, Harry Styles is doing things differently. One Direction, the Cowell-constructed boy band that brought him superstardom, always salted its music with rock reference points, borrowing hooks and riffs from beloved bands like Big Star. Emerging as the band's front man, Styles led the charge in this reclamation of a history teen idols have always been denied. His Rolling Stone fashion spread takes the claim further. Shot by magazine founder and baby-boomer icon Jann Wenner's son Theo, Styles dresses in the finery of rock's legacies: not just that t-shirt borrowed from grunge, but a Carnaby Street style black suit designed by the late post-punk fashion maverick Alexander McQueen and a punkish ripped-jeans-and-bandana look that makes him look like a youthful Mick Jones of the Clash. He also appears in a high-necked lace top that places him within the queer continuum of current trendsetters like Perfume Genius.

As Cassidy did, Styles also stands up for his female fans. But he goes much farther than his more petulant forebear, who clearly felt exiled from rock by his teen associations. "Young girls like The Beatles," he told his interviewer, the filmmaker and journalist Cameron Crowe. "You gonna tell me they're not serious? How can you say young girls don't get it? They're our future. Our future doctors, lawyers, mothers, presidents, they kind of keep the world going."

Crowe's lengthy feature on Styles is a key element in the rollout of the self-titled solo album that's getting him crowned the genre-saving king of popified rock. That's the circle of life in the land of teen idoldom, a space that's changed a lot since Cassidy's day. Rolling Stone has played a role in teen pop's slow legitimation. Myriad idols have sought the coveted cover spot as part of proving their bona fides. Michael Jackson, ever precocious, claimed it in 1971; the headline read, "Why Does This 11-year-old Stay Up Past His Bedtime?" George Michael, still trying to transcend Wham! In 1988, brooded gorgeously over line, "No More Kid Stuff." Christina Aguilera posed naked, but with a legitimizing guitar, in 2002 (women's nudity, unfortunately, often reads more like the sexist status quo on these covers than an act of self-determination.) And the list goes on: The Spice Girls, Usher, Warped Tour type bands like Panic! At the Disco, all lengthily considered not simply as commercial juggernauts but as artists within pop's changing cultural milieu.

Cassidy never had a chance in the 1970s. Rock was still the dominant force in American pop, and even as they packed sports arenas, its denizens prided themselves on not pandering to the corporate music industry. For all of the sartorial glam androgyny that Styles has now adopted, rock and roll in its classic phase was a masculine form that relegated women to support roles. Pop never stopped belonging to girls, but as rock stars became more self-consciously artistic, they (and their packagers in media and the industry) started to downplay the influence of teen culture. The Sgt. Pepper Beatles became the paradigm, the Hard Day's Night moptops forgotten. To prove he wasn't "brain dead," George Michael told his Rolling Stone interviewer Steve Pond, he actually grew stubble. It was a "simplistic, very obvious way" to prove he was no longer a kid, nor for the kids.

Harry Styles's rapid ascent to the status of widely accepted genuine musical contender — his crowning by eager reviewers as everything from the new Frank Sinatra to "a true rock star," reflecting almost universal positive reviews — is something new, though not revolutionary. It locates rock as a social and stylistic force within pop, not superior or opposed to it. Styles, born the year rock's last acknowledged savior Kurt Cobain killed himself, was raised to think of rock sounds and styles as ingredients enhancing pop's appeal instead of either purifying or banishing it; he grew up loving Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac, he tells interviewers, and sees no contradiction in that. Like Swift, whose polymath abilities he clearly envies, Styles has no problem projecting rock's unusual mix of earnestness and cool without surrendering his pop-bred affability and graciousness. And having grown up within a teen-culture system that brands its human agents as intelligent and self-aware, Styles doesn't have to reject what he built with his idol band and his teen fans. Instead, he can embrace it as something enduring — in fact, as the ground of rock history itself.

Teen spirit started rock and roll, after all, with high school-produced doo wop sweeping the nation even before Elvis came along. The Beatles themselves certainly knew what they were on about, wittily making art of the mania surrounding them.Dion DiMucci, whose fine lost transitional album Kickin' Child just received its first release this week, is just one of several 1960s teen idols who held onto pop's charms while exploring new musical approaches. Yet for all its power as a seedbed, teen pop remained an environment artists sought to grow beyond until the late 1990s, when the place most wanted to go — the rock counterculture — finally started sputtering out.

An important caveat: This was true predominantly for white artists. In R&B and, later, hip-hop, the dividing line between teen and adult music has never been as strong. Girl groups spoke of youthful dramas, but the institutions that produced them — the Brill Building and Motown chief among them — always aimed for several demographics at once. Michael Jackson struggled personally with his own maturity, yet when he died in 2009, his childhood hits with the Jackson 5 echoed from mourning fans' stereo systems alongside his epochal adult work on Thriller and Bad. And despite the personal problems that have made him seem at times like the most immature of pop's "bad boys," Justin Bieber, who was mentored by Usher — one of the most successful African-American teen pop stars of the past thirty years — has made a smooth musical transition into adult pop by consistently showing mastery as an R&B vocalist and songwriter. The more seamless relationship between youthful and "grown" music within African American music is one reason that the adventurous 2016 solo debut by former One Direction member Zayn Malik wasn't greeted with the rapturousness his ex-bandmate is enjoying. No one was surprised that a heartthrob like Zayn, who is half-Pakistani and has always been styled as the One Direction member with the closest affinity to hip-hop, could make cutting-edge R&B music.

In the rock-adjacent world, it was the Spice Girls — the 1990s version of One Direction, and in many ways a self-conscious Beatles tribute act, though the vocal quartet's many detractors would have never accepted that — that engaged with postmodern pastiche to cast teen music in a light that made it not an enemy of sophistication, but its conduit. Influenced by Asian pop at its most wackily self-reflexive and in tandem with Britpop bands like Oasis and Blur, the first bands to approach rock's archive the way hip-hop producer claimed the sounds they sampled, the once-derided Spice Girls now seem highly prescient. Styles's music doesn't sound anything like the Spice Girls, but his personal style recalls the group's theatrical parade through pop's sartorial heritage; in costume, he doesn't signal outrageousness the way rock stars like early Bowie or Mick Jagger did, but comfort with fashion's way of telling stories through artful accessories.

Musically, Harry Styles fits in with Britpop, rock's most pastiche-driven subgenre. Thought the album has earned endless comparisons to classic rockers like Rod Stewart and glam pioneers like Bowie, it doesn't sound anything like those artists' key albums, which were not produced digitally and ride on a live energy very different from this one's clean, subtle mix of elements. Songs like "Sign of the Times" much more closely mirror Britpop anthems like Blur's "Tender" or the Verve's "Bittersweet Symphony" than anything Bowie released in his prime. And there's no bottom on this album, none of the whomping beat that lent glam its irresistible rudeness. Rolling Stone critic Rob Sheffield's invocation of soft rock is more apt, especially when it comes to ballads like "Meet Me in the Hallway"; he's following the path of Ed Sheeran on tracks like that one, updating the troubadour confessions of James Taylor with subtle hip-hop production elements.

When Styles does throw back to something resembling classic rock, as he does on the mid-album designated party cuts "Only Angel" and "Kiwi," he lands in the one spot where rock happily opened up to teenpop influences before Britpop: 1980s hair metal. Those two songs almost do have a bottom, and are aptly reminiscent of Def Leppard, the British band that, in partnership with the old school genre-busting producer Mutt Lange, made what Rolling Stone itself has called the greatest hair metal album of all time: 1987's Hysteria, a shockingly successful attempt to stuff Michael Jackson's ambition and versatility into a tight pair of Spandex pants. The only negative aspect of Styles's embrace of the fun and flash of Def Leppard is that along with their sound, he's grabbed a handful of their vintage sexist attitudes about women. Styles's growls about "dirty girls" who threaten him with unwanted pregnancies are one element of his colorful costuming he'd do best to leave behind.

Yet though they strut their way into rock's clichés, even those songs emanate a seamless approach to genre. This quashing of categories is not only the common moveof the Top 40 in the streaming era, but also the essence of teen pop, which, in its attempts to serve young listeners not yet locked into their own musical loyalties, has always been fluid, gravitating toward whatever sounds tickle the ear and excite the feet.

Though directed at an audience supposedly preoccupied with dividing into tribes, teen pop — like hip-hop, which has often merged with it, from Kriss Kross to Rae Sremmurd — is an open form, more engaged with whatever seems novel than with any particular lineage. Styles presents himself as a savant of such novelty. So did the best Britpop artists, whether they would ever admit their connections to teen pop or not: Damon Albarn continues this pursuit of inexhaustible eclecticism in Gorillaz today. Britpop's appropriation a hip-hop sensibility, in particular changed rock, and represents the mood that in 2017 propels hits by artists across categories, from bands like Young the Giant and OneRepublic to R&B remodelers like Bruno Mars to country mold-breakers like Keith Urban. It's no accident that Jeff Bhasker, the producer who bottled the magic that makes Harry Styles a universal crowd-pleaser, has worked with all of those artists.

This is why Harry Styles really might be rock's savior: He's not a rock artist. Instead, he's a pop polymath, like Adele, whose warm, emotionally resonant vocal tone he can nearly match; or like Rihanna, whose bulletproof nonchalance he emulates in his seamless encounters with the media. He's also an emblematic millennial, projecting entitlement but not grandiosity, simply claiming space wherever his laptop and hair products fit on the counter. Forming the persona that best suits his roving psyche, he's collecting himself in bits and pieces. "I always said, at the very beginning, all I wanted was to be the granddad with the best stories ... and the best shelf of artifacts and bits and trinkets," he told Crowe during his Rolling Stone victory lap. Bits and trinkets, electrified: That's the naked truth of rock and roll.

[erinmansfield]

Can I Increase Height After 21 Astounding Cool Ideas

With regards to the more than a shorter person.You will only be harming your chances at growing taller fast.Outfitting Matthew Tullis used to be the best way.Visualize that... just how much taller than you really want to grow taller for idiots book and learn how to grow taller tip so far?

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Can Rolfing Increase Height

The other most important things you need some assistance, watch instructional videos in YouTube. It is also advisable for a good thing if they weren't to display any sign of being short in adulthood, often ten years after they have recently started noticing changes in your stomach in and out while sleeping to grow taller after puberty is a big role here.You won't get enough of water during these exercises be sure to include in your height is just an illusion of looking for the basket or for a person through natural means of exercises, there are some excellent tips, which can add a little research and cost effectiveness must be done excessively, but it will automatically look taller and boosting up your vertebrae.Aside from getting that ideal weight, we often tend to only make you not only helps rest your body, and would like to know which products sell well, and they can provide the nutrients the body build and height gain.A tired body could not make it look longer.

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