RAMBLE ON: "Perfect" by One Direction

“Style” by Taylor Swift still hits me so hard it makes me ill. It might be my favorite song of the decade. It’s Taylor’s hottest song by a substantial margin but Taylor is never going to be entirely comfortable with adult situations or adult language (most notably, she can’t drop an f-bomb properly to save her life). If you want sexy songs, Taylor’s not going to be your go-to artist. For me it hits because it’s Taylor grappling with her own shallowness – she was always the girl singing about fairy tale romances, prince charmings, popular boys who just needed to see that he belonged with her. Her real life didn’t resemble that at all -- it was a never-ending array of short flings and high-profile hookups that got her a reputation as a serial dater (shockingly, for all the famous men she’s dated, she’s never been part of a power couple until the present moment). “Style” is a song about attraction but it’s also a song about pain. Taylor wants this to be more. It’s not going to be. Taylor finds this guy who treats her badly irresistible, not because he’s so attractive, but because they’re so attractive. They just look too good together on the Insta. The idea of them as a couple is too powerful. Taylor, now a young woman, has discovered that she’s much more superficial than she thought she was when she was 17. It hurts.

Taylor never confirms who her songs are about but you don’t exactly need to be Batman to figure it out. The queen of sneak disses that aren’t very sneaky and subliminals that aren’t very sub, Taylor’s subjects are always sussed out pretty easily by anyone who bothers to look. In this case (like so many), they didn’t have to look very hard – the title is close to a namedrop to Harry Styles, who she’d been seen with more than once over the past year. How lucky that his name fit the theme of the song – it doesn’t matter that they weren’t a good couple, or even a couple at all, they were stylish.  

I have no way to know for sure how Harry Styles took that song, except for the song he wrote in response, “Perfect.” And judging by “Perfect,” he took it the only way he could, and the way I believe it was intended: as a massive compliment. Putting the biggest pop star in the world in so much emotional turmoil that she writes “Style” about you has to be a giant ego boost, so naturally he wrote a response. Taylor says that Harry is an irresistibly glamorous, unserious dirtbag? I sure fucking am, says Harry Styles.

But Harry Styles wasn’t quite Harry Styles yet – he was still “One Direction’s Harry Styles” at the time, still that English kid with the wild hair that seemed larger than his head. And just as Taylor’s image (and self-image) evolved as she aged into adulthood, so too did One Direction. “I might never be your knight in shining armor,” this song opens, and it feels pointed. Just as Taylor was always singing about knights in shining armor, One Direction were always being the knights in shining armor she was singing about. If Taylor Swift had unfairly high expectations of Harry Styles, it’s not hard to see where she got them from. One Direction’s first few songs are sickly-cutesy, so unctuously pandering to innocent teenage girls that I detested them immediately. You’re cute with no makeup, girl. You’ve got that one thing. You hate that you can’t fit in your jeans but I love that about you, baby. Barf.

But within a shockingly short period, One Direction had somehow become a pretty decent power pop group. (Curiously for a boyband, they were never really conversant with r&b.) Their come-ons became less oily. Their songs just plain got better, and the band was clearly moving in more sophisticated, uh, directions. (And styles!) In 2015, as Taylor dominated radio and reached new peaks of stardom, One Direction were clearly not who they were just four years earlier. They were now down a member, and those who remained were clearly eyeing the next phase of their careers, one where they wouldn’t be limited by the teen idol format. The band wouldn’t last much longer; “Perfect” was their last big single. Listening to it, you can hear at least one of them, probably all of them, ready to drop their boyband image for good.

Anyway, Harry Styles can give as good as he gets, as it turns out. (Harry shares a writing credit with another of his love interests, Louis, but Harry is obviously the main character here.) If the subject of “Style” was unspoken but obvious, “Perfect” is even more so. It’s not just a response to “Style,” it practically is “Style,” with a tune so similar it borders on legally actionable – Harry hammers the hell out of that ninth in the melody the exact same way Taylor does, JAMES-DEAN-DAY-DREAM, if you LIKE-CAUsing TROUBle-UP-in, etc. It’s the cheek of someone who is wildly high on themselves, and I can’t deny that I admire the cockiness. He saves his slyest dig for the bridge – “If you’re looking for someone to write your breakup songs about, baby I’m perfect. Baby, we’re perfect.” Early One Direction songs were deliberately generic and broad enough so that all their fans could imagine it was about them. “Perfect” is written to one person only.

Harry one-ups Taylor in one major regard – self-awareness. 1989 is probably my favorite Taylor album, and it has some very self-aware songs (“Style” being one of them) but it suffers from Taylor still being under the delusion that she’s the underdog; “Perfect” revels in superstardom. The cheap-looking video (One Direction rarely ever had good videos) was clearly shot in the middle of a tour or something, in their hotel suite, and it works at least at conveying that these are guys who can get you the fanciest room in exotic cities. I’m hot. I’m famous. I’m here for a good time, not a long time, baby. I’m too famous to be tied down. I’m here if you want to have fun. You don’t really want a real relationship. You want to have a good time with me. I’m jetting off to Kyoto tomorrow and you’re not going to see me again anytime soon. I rarely understand what makes teen pop idols attractive to women, but I get it here – boy do I.

Someone with enough ego to write a song like this clearly has outgrown the need for a band, so the band broke up and Harry went on to superstardom. “Perfect” did not at all indicate what his solo career was going to be like. Harry wants to be hot, I’m sure, but he much more wants to be respectable, he has constantly talked up the greats of classic rock and said he’s inspired by them, and though he has made many songs I like, there is something very middle-aged about the Harry Styles phenomenon. Harry no longer has the wild-man hair, and in my head I picture him as prematurely balding – he hit his mature phase too early. Harry was probably never going to follow Justin Timberlake’s path and he didn’t have to, he always intended to be a rock star, but there are many kinds of classic rock. He could stand to be a little trashier, listen to a little more Van Halen and a little less Steely Dan. That’d be perfect.