Watching Harry Styles\u2019s performance of \u201cAperture\u201d at the Brit Awards, there was a moment when I thought: is this the loneliest man in the world? I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s what I was supposed to think. In the interviews for his new album Kiss All the Time. Disco, Occasionally, Styles has talked a lot about how he\u2019s recently been through a process of reconnection: spending time with his family, making new friends, going to clubs in European cities and passing under the radar to party as one of the crowd.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But even sharing the stage with a throng of dancers and a gospel choir, Styles looked isolated. Dancing in sync, but never touching. The video feels lonelier still: in it, Styles is chased through a barren hotel by a hulking, long-haired man before he ends up back in his room, by himself again. Meanwhile, the lyrics suggest love (\u201cWe belong together\u201d) but also, and maybe more importantly, painful self-knowledge: \u201cIt\u2019s best you know what you don\u2019t\/ The aperture lets the light in.\u201d<\/p>\n
It makes sense that Styles would use a camera as a metaphor for introspection. Since he auditioned for The X Factor at the age of 16, Styles has been one of the most filmed, photographed and looked at men on the planet. Though he didn\u2019t progress in the competition as a solo artist, judge Simon Cowell spotted his potential and put him together with four other contestants to form One Direction. They came third overall, but once the show was over, they were unstoppable. 1D became the biggest boyband on the planet. The only adult life Styles has ever known has been a public one.\u00a0<\/p>\n
And boyband fame is possibly the most brutal kind. There\u2019s a scene in the 2013 documentary One Direction: This is Us that has stuck with me since I first watched it. The band attempts a shopping trip in Amsterdam, and gets mobbed. The boys are grabbed and clawed at by desperate, shrieking girls. After taking refuge in a Nike store, band member Liam Payne talks to the camera. \u201cOne of them had my ear and wouldn\u2019t let go,\u201d he says. \u201cI think she wanted to keep it. I said, you can\u2019t have that, it\u2019s mine.\u201d Payne laughs, but his expression suggests someone who has looked into the abyss.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One Direction broke up in 2016. Payne died in 2024 after falling from his hotel balcony. It was the kind of messy, horrible, drug-fueled death where misadventure is hard to tell from suicide. Shortly before he died, he reportedly told an onlooker: \u201cI used to be in a boy band \u2014 that\u2019s why I\u2019m so fucked up.\u201d Not long after Payne\u2019s death, I interviewed a number of ex-boyband members for a feature, and almost all of them described their experience of celebrity as a kind of trauma. \u201cYou are a commodity, and not a human,\u201d Ritchie Neville, formerly of Five, told me. \u201cPeople crack, but I\u2019m surprised more people don\u2019t crack.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBoyband fame is possibly the most brutal kind.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fame can be intrusive and sadistic for women (I wrote a book, Toxic, about exactly that). Men rarely attain the kind of \u201ccar crash\u201d status that is often thrust on a female celebrity, in which watching her decline becomes a kind of spectator sport: think of Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears. But talking to Neville made me wonder whether there was something even more destructive in male fame. Female popstars are sexualized, but they don\u2019t become the focus for mass performances of hysterical lust in the way that boyband members do. To be desired so violently \u2014 desired to the point that your fans would rip you apart just to have something of you \u2014 must do something terrible to a person. Of course it would fuck you up.\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
One of the striking things about Styles, in fact, is how not fucked up he\u2019s always seemed to be. He seems to have a protective reluctance to give too much away: characteristically, he has said very little about his feelings on Payne\u2019s death beyond a short statement in the immediate aftermath, though he did address it in an interview with the DJ Zane Lowe for the new album. \u201cFull transparency, it\u2019s something that even the idea of talking about it I struggle with,\u201d he said. \u201cI really struggled with how strange it is to have people own part of your grief in a way.\u201d Fame means that even the most devastating personal experiences can be turned into public property.<\/p>\n