#would love to ask this guy more about what his robbie williams ref means

[dearly]

just read this and the part about harry was surprisingly honest https://www.theringer.com/music/2022/4/21/23035076/coachella-weekend-1-review-harry-styles-billie-eilish-lil-baby-jamie-xx

But Styles’s set at Coachella revealed an artist out of his depth. If Beyoncé proved to even inveterate skeptics that a pop act headlining Coachella could supply something as imaginative and visionary as any rapper, DJ, or guitar apostle, Styles doubled as a wicker man for the retro-fried fetishization that has defined the past decade. If he was cast in a West End production of Aladdin Sane: The Musical!, there would be no cause for complaint. But closing out Friday night, the lingering shadow of all immortal predecessors loomed. Roger Waters played Dark Side of the Moon atop the same soil where Harry Styles kicked a KIDZ BOP version of the Almost Famous soundtrack.

The idea is that the former One Direction singer is the Justin Timberlake of his generation: a product who shed his boy-band assembly line past to mature into an artist capable of selling Pepsi on his own merits. The problem is that he’s closer to Robbie Williams from Take That or Donny Osmond, references surely lost on 99 percent of the relatively paltry, mostly under-25 crowd who gathered on the former polo field to listen to Styles’s set.

Harry Styles is an archetypal artist for the late capitalist drain spiral of ambient streaming and social media thirst: simply far too big and slickly packaged to fail. He rose to fame on a reality show, was coached by Simon Cowell, and made brain-fry famous as one-fifth of a boy band whose distinguishing characteristic was loving both kinds of music: boomer rock and pop. They finished in third place on the reality show, but ended up selling millions. Since he went solo he’s been managed by the son of the most powerful man in the music industry, represented by the world’s most powerful talent agency, and signed to a label owned by a multinational conglomerate that made $11 billion in net income during the first year of the pandemic.

As a child, Styles learned to make music by singing karaoke covers, and never learned how to stop. There is no such thing as a Harry Styles song. There are Hall & Oates songs, David Bowie songs, Pink Floyd songs, Elton John songs, Queen songs, and Fleetwood Mac songs, which Harry Styles and his producers and songwriters rejigger into new alignments like a Web3 reboot of Glam Rock Scrabble.

To his credit, Styles made a valiant effort. Wearing a sequin harem outfit that looked made out of a souvenir disco ball from Studio 54, the former One Directionist skipped across the stage, shimmied, and hoisted his microphone to the heavens. He had the moves down as if he’d purchased hundreds of music documentaries on Amazon Prime (and maybe even a few Blu-rays that aren’t available on streaming). He blew kisses to the crowd, cheerfully plinked at a guitar, and holistically indicted boyfriends. He told us that our only job was to have as much fun as possible, and to be whoever we were. But it’s unclear if he even knew what that meant for himself. Over a belabored piano vamp, he bellowed “WOOOMAAAAN,” somewhere between Mike Myers’s beatnik poetry in So I Married an Axe Murderer and Russell Brand’s Jeffrey-puffing rock goofball from Get Him to the Greek. He finished with a song called “Sign of the Times,” which was somehow not a Prince cover. It sounded created for a Disney biopic about Rod Stewart, which has yet to be cast.

The Return of Coachella and a glimpse into our new abnormal