The Number Ones: Harry Styles’ “As It Was”

April 16, 2022STAYED AT #1:15 WeeksIn The Number Ones, I'm reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart's beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present. The column is now biweekly, alternating with The Alternative Number Ones on Mondays. Book Bonus Beat: The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music."This doesn't happen to people like me very often." That's the line that really pissed people off. It was February 2023, and the bedazzled young pop prince Harry Styles had just won the Album Of The Year Grammy for Harry's House. In his acceptance speech, he tried so hard to stay humble. He shouted out all the other nominees in the category, though not by name. He made a big point to say that "there is no such thing as 'best' in music," to underplay the sense of competition that necessarily surrounds awards season. But just before he passed the mic off to his collaborators, he blurted out that "people like me" line and sent the internet into a searing rage. On Twitter, it was torches and pitchforks.You know why. Don't act like you don't know why. I'll tell you anyway. To earn that Album Of The Year trophy, Styles had to vanquish Bad Bunny's Un Verano Sin Ti, Kendrick Lamar's Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, Adele's 30, Lizzo's Special, ABBA's Voyage, Coldplay's Music Of The Spheres, Mary J. Blige's Good Morning Gorgeous, Brandi Carlile's In These Silent Days, and Beyoncé's Renaissance. That last one was the one that really incensed people. In the years that she was nominated, Beyoncé had already lost Album Of The Year to Taylor Swift, Beck, and Adele — all of whom could be considered people like Harry Styles, for reasons that go beyond whiteness. Beyoncé's Renaissance will figure into a future edition of this column, so I won't go too deep on it here, but it's an audacious late-career concept-album triumph from a generational artist who had never won the award. It's the kind of thing that's supposed to win awards. It did win awards, too. Beyoncé literally has more Grammys than any other person in history. But people noticed that she always ended up losing in the major pan-genre categories. To anyone who took the Grammys even the slightest bit seriously, this was a developing crisis.That's the trap, of course. If you have even the slightest smidge of regard for the Grammy Awards voting body, you're a sucker. The Grammys will always do what the Grammys do. They'll anoint a piece of blandly acceptable, slickly recorded old-school musicianship over anything with any vision or viscera. Even in this latter-day era, trying desperately to atone for its sins and to adapt conventional wisdom, the Grammys can't help but pull some bullshit. Right now, in 2026, the point is pretty much moot, as Beyoncé finally won herself an Album Of The Year for a record vastly inferior to Renaissance. But when Styles took the award, the reaction, at least in all of my circles, was: These motherfuckers got us again.It wasn't really Harry Styles' fault. When he said "people like me," Styles didn't mean fresh-faced, scrubbed, affluent white pop stars who make blandly acceptable, slickly recorded old-school hits. That's what Styles is, and that's who almost always won Album Of The Year, at least up to 2024. (Time will tell whether the past two years have been a departure or a blip.) Harry Styles is from small-town England. His mother ran a pub. He found his way to fame through a singing-contest show and a boy band, two routes that don't guarantee you any Grammys. Justin Timberlake, Styles' most obvious progenitor, has two Album Of The Year nominations and zero wins. None of Styles' One Direction bandmates are threats to win the big one anytime soon. That night, Styles was in a big room full of his peers, many of whom had grown up in show business. That wasn't his story. His head must've been spinning. What he mostly meant, I think, was: Whoa.I'm sure that lots of people — Grammy watchers, even — didn't bump on Harry Styles' "people like me" comment. I'm sure lots of others immediately knew exactly what he meant and didn't hold it against him. But I saw many, many more people took that line as a weird, deluded gloat. Beyoncé hero worship, an ailment from which I have certainly suffered, was spiking in that moment, but it wasn't just that. It was Harry Styles fatigue, too. Over the previous year, Styles had been all over the fucking place. Movies. Magazine spreads. Gossipy internet deep dives. He'd spent months at #1 with a blank little nothing of a synthpop song. When someone lives such a charmed life, you just want to see them fail sometimes. The universe refused to let Harry Styles fail.Harry Styles scored his first #1 hit in the 2020 pandemic summer, when "Watermelon Sugar" finally elbowed its way to the top for a single week after waiting in the wings for a while. He'd already made his acting debut a few years earlier in Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, a pretty good place to start. Then he popped up again in an absurd end-credits scene for the 2021 Marvel bomb Eternals. The appearance seemed to promise a whole lot of Styles in the Marvel Cinematic Universe's future, but it didn't happen because nobody liked that movie. I guess that's one Styles failure, anyway. A year before Eternals opened, however, Styles got himself cast as the male lead in Olivia Wilde's twist-happy allegory Don't Worry Darling after Wilde fired Shia LaBeouf. That picture proved a little more consequential.While filming Don't Worry Darling, Styles may have had something to do with the end of Wilde's marriage to Jason Sudeikis. That was the widely held assumption, anyway. In any case, Wilde and Sudeikis split up, and she reportedly dated Styles, 10 years her junior, for a little while. (Today, Styles is apparently engaged to Zoë Kravitz. Lucky bastard.) The Don't Worry Darling set was apparently quite stressful. When it finally premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2022, cameras captured what sure looked like Styles leaning over and spitting on his co-star Chris Pine. People went through that clip like it was the Zapruder film, even as everyone involved denied that there was any spitting. Sure looked like it, though! That video popped up again in my feed pretty recently, and guess what? Still funny.Point is: Harry Styles was very much in the public eye when he went to work on Harry's House, his third solo album. During production, Styles kept everything low-key, working with few people outside of his regular collaborators Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson. To hear them tell it, the songs all sprang organically from casual conversations and jam sessions. Styles claimed that the album was influenced by city pop, the ultra-chic Japanese style from the '70s, and that the title was a play on Haruomi Hosono's 1973 record Hosono House. When he brought in big-name outside musicians to play on Harry's House, however, Styles went for dorm-room cheesemeisters like John Mayer and Ben Harper.Harry's House is fine, OK? It's a beach read. I played it for the first time in a long while while prepping this column, and I was surprised at how often my toes got to tappin'. Nothing grabbed me, but maybe that was never the point. Back when he was in One Direction, Styles sang a few hooks that could seize you by the shoulders and shake you all around. As a solo artist, that's never been his bag. Instead, he makes smooth, frictionless ditties that fade pleasantly into the background. That's a skill, and sometimes it's a valuable one. Pop songs don't have to sound like suns exploding. Sometimes, they're just there to make a trip to CVS feel slightly less unbearable.This was always my issue with "As It Was," a perfectly agreeable little number that simply does not fit my idea of how a 15-week chart-topper should sound, how it should feel. This is my issue. I know that. Harry Styles did not engineer "As It Was" for months-long chart dominance. He didn't put out a new remix every time its numbers started to fade like Lil Nas X did with "Old Town Road." Instead, Styles' song simply became a default choice for the radio programmers of the United States. "As It Was" came out on April Fool's day in 2022, and it didn't fully relinquish its hold on the #1 spot until six months later. No fewer than six songs came along and interrupted Styles' run at the top of the Hot 100, but they all faded, and "As It Was" kept coming back like Jason Voorhees.There's no great story behind the writing of "As It Was," but there's a pretty good one behind the intro. Before the track actually starts, we hear a slightly fed-up little kid demanding, "Come on, Harry, we wanna say goodnight to you!" That voice belongs to Styles' goddaughter Ruby, whose father Ben Winston produced an Apple Music documentary for Styles and served as executive producer on James Corden's late-night show. Apparently, Ruby would call Styles every single night and then get annoyed if he didn't pick up. That's pretty cute, right? The glamorous international pop star who's almost never too busy to answer the little girl's phone call? Styles liked the voicemail message so much that he put it on the song. Charming! Good thing we got that little flourish in there because the song itself offers very little in the way of narrative.Styles co-wrote "As It Was" with Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson, and it was the last song that they finished for Harry's House. For whatever reason, the three of them were staying at a house owned by Sony Music exec Rob Stringer, where they set up instruments after pushing all the furniture up against the wall. Styles himself came up with the idea for the central riff. The song started off slow before they had the idea to speed it up. It was an in-the-moment thing, and they finished up the whole track, lyrics included, within a few days.I can believe that the lyrics came quickly because they don't seem to be about anything. Styles later told Apple Music that the song is "about metamorphosis and perspective change, and the whole thing of, like, when you have that, it’s not something you have time with, and people go, like, 'All right, we’ll give you a couple more days with this moment and you get to say goodbye to your former self,' or whatever it is, and by the time you realize, it’s already gone." Great. Brilliant. I might've nodded off in the middle of that sentence. Styles is one of those celebrities who's so media-trained that he never, ever says anything remotely interesting. So there you have it. Things change, and then you know it's not the same as it was. I think we've really reached a breakthrough here today. Same time next week?Styles sings "As It Was" in a sleepy murmur, mostly describing a bemused fugue state in the vaguest of terms. At one point, he quotes what people are supposedly telling him, and you know that he's not singing to someone else because he uses his own name: ""Harry, you're no good alone/ Why are you sitting at home on the floor?/ What kind of pills are you on?" Later on, he describes someone who sure sounds like Olivia Wilde — "Leave America, two kids follow her" — before shrugging, "I don't wanna talk about who's doin' it first." That's the celebrity dance. You have to give the public a bit, just to keep their minds working, but you never give it all away. Harry Styles is the subject of a handful of Taylor Swift songs, so he knows how this works.I wish he could write hooks like Swift, though. The centerpiece of "As It Was" is a wormy little one-finger riff. In both rhythm and tone, it's very similar to the keyboard riff from a-ha's "Take On Me," to the point where I wonder whether Styles just played that song's riff and then changed enough notes that he wouldn't get sued. The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights," the biggest hit of 2020, also has a slightly mutated "Take On Me" keyboard riff. But that song has drama and severity, and "As It Was" doesn't have any of that. Coming just a couple of years after "Blinding Lights," it felt like a distant echo.The two tracks don't really sound similar, but I think of "As It Was" in the same way that I think about Glass Animals' "Heat Waves," the song that immediately preceded it at #1. Both of those tracks are Spotify-core festival pop — warm and comforting little nuggets that are built to be ignored, to leave as little impression as possible before they disappear. It's like your brain is an Airbnb and these songs are the considerate guests who clean up after themselves and don't leave shitstains on your mental toilet bowl. I guess I have now written my way into a predicament where I'm saying that I want songs to leave shitstains on my mental toilet bowl, so maybe it's time to abandon this analogy.I listened to "As It Was" so many times, and it never stuck. Its success seemed so mysterious. I kept forgetting that I'd ever heard it. Every week when the Hot 100 came out, I'd be like, "Wait, what's 'As It Was'? Have I heard that?" Then I'd play it again and be like, "Oh yeah, that one," and then I'd forget about it all over again. Right now, there's a lot of online conversation in which people are saying that they've never heard the current record-breaking #1 hit, one that we'll get to in this column eventually. That was me with "As It Was," kind of. I had heard it, but I kept forgetting all about it, so the effect was the same.If "As It Was" didn't dominate the Hot 100 for half of the damn year, I would never have any cause to resent it. I don't think the song is especially good or bad. I don't think about it at all. This column is a whole lot easier to write when I hate the song. I always have to re-listen a ton of times, and that part is a drag, but writing a string of invective can be pretty fun. It's the songs like "As It Was" that really make me sweat.In that era, Styles' various fashion experiments left a much deeper impression than most of his songs. He played around a lot with gender, wearing skirts and nail polish and feather boas. Some of those choices are on display in the "As It Was" video, which Styles made with Tanu Muino, a Ukrainian director whose work has appeared in this column a few times. The clip happened to be shooting when Russia invaded Ukraine, a situation that's still ongoing and that seems unlikely to end anytime soon. In the clip, Styles dances across a series of fancy-looking London locations while wearing sparkly jumpsuits and generally being extremely foxy. They shot part of the clip at London's Barbican Centre and part of it at the London Zoo's penguin pool, which just makes me wonder what the penguins were doing when they filmed. Did they have to stand around not swimming for hours on end, or did they get to swim in some alternate pool? Does Harry Styles owe a bunch of penguins an apology?"As It Was" was the first Harry's House single, and it did huge numbers upon release, getting more first-day streams than any song since the 10-minute version of Taylor Swift's "All Too Well." Naturally, "As It Was" debuted at #1. Even from the beginning, the song had a weak grip on the #1 spot, and it fell from the top in its second week. But then it just kept coming back. A month and a half later, Harry's House came out, and three more album tracks crashed their way into the top 10. (The quietly funky "Late Night Talking," the biggest of those chart hits, peaked at #3. It's a 6.) The album was huge right away, but the Styles media blitz was just starting.For the rest of the 2022 calendar year, Harry Styles would not leave us alone. He headlined Coachella, performing "As It Was" for the first time and bringing out Shania Twain to duet on "Man! I Feel Like A Woman!," which peaked at a criminally low #23 in 1997. Styles introduced Twain to the Coachella crowd by telling them, "This lady taught me how to sing. She also taught me that men are trash" — a great little vignette for a Lindsay Zoladz Times trend-piece about a long-bygone moment of male pop stars attempting to dismantle their own masculinity. Styles showed up in Don't Worry Darling and in Amazon's queer-romance streamer My Policeman. I've never seen either of those movies, and Styles' performances did not get the best reviews. He hasn't acted again since then. (I thought he was pretty good in Dunkirk, anyway.) Styles also toured arenas and played a sold-out 15-night run at Madison Square Garden. He did a Gucci collection or something, I don't know. I'm sick of looking at his Wikipedia page.After a solid year of total dominance, though, Harry Styles disappeared. Once he won the Grammy, he simply became a private citizen for a few years. I appreciated it. It was a relief, frankly. Every once in a while, you'd see paparazzi shots of Styles running a marathon or some shit, but he mostly refrained from bothering us. That almost never happens — the charm offensive, followed by the charm retreat. But Styles inevitably came back, and we'll see him in this column again.GRADE: 5/10BONUS BEATS: Here's Harry Styles' Columbia labelmates Arcade Fire covering "As It Was" in the BBC's Maida Vale Studios in 2022, when the song was still brand new and Arcade Fire themselves were about to succumb to soft cancellation:(Arcade Fire's only Hot 100 hit is 2013's "Reflektor," which peaked at #99.)BONUS BONUS BEATS: Here's Jorja Smith doing her own BBC-mandated "As It Was" cover, giving the song a laid-back R&B read in the Live Lounge:(Jorja Smith doesn't have any Hot 100 hits as lead artist, but she's been on a couple of Drake songs that charted. The biggest of those is "Get It Together," which peaked at #45 in 2017.)BONUS BONUS BONUS BEATS: Rick Astley, an artist who has been in this column a couple of times, has randomly made "As It Was" covers a regular feature of his live show. Here he is, singing it on a 2023 New Year's Eve special for (hey, look at that) the BBC:THE 10S: The above-mentioned Lindsay Zoladz trend-piece also invokes Bad Bunny, a past and future Number Ones artist, as one of the masculinity-deconstructing male pop stars of that fleeting moment. Harry Styles and Bad Bunny were the twin kings of that year. As it happens, Benito released his album Un Verano Sin Ti while "As It Was" was having its #1 run. A bunch of Bad Bunny's tracks debuted in the top 10, though none of them could dislodge Styles. The best of those tracks, the hornily fired-up dembow/bachata fusion "Tití Me Preguntó," peaked at #5 behind "As It Was." Es un diez.