I’m Wesley Morris and it’s springtime, y’all. One of my favorite things about spring is a thing I cannot control, which is some artist puts out an album and it just becomes the thing that I listen to for, like, the entire season. Last spring, my album was this thing called “Horror” by this wonderful singer and songwriter named Bartees Strange. I listened to that all spring. I took it everywhere I went. And this spring, my spring album, Harry Styles. “Kiss All the Tme, Disco Occasionally,” best title of the year, already. “We belong together.” – These songs sound so good at this time of year to just be running around New York on your bike, getting off the subway, going for walks. In part because Harry Styles is, at this point, a very famous person. I’m assuming he’s got a lot of responsibilities and there are expectations on him to like, do something important, especially because, you know, the world is in the mess that it’s in. And he’s kind of like, you can dance now. It’s OK. “My friends are in love with American girls.” – He doesn’t want you thinking about what he’s saying. I’m not saying the lyrics aren’t important, but they’re also not deep. And what I love about that is, like, it frees you to just, like, have a bodily response to what is happening on the songs themselves. I just think that this is a rarity in, in male-oriented popular music right now. Harry Styles’s white, North American peers are suffering. You know, take Justin Bieber. Y’all saw him come to the Grammys and perform in boxer shorts, a guitar, and one of those loop jammies and, you know, I was convinced I felt something coming out of this man, including suffering, pain. He was bringing his therapy to us. And, you know, I’m here for that a lot of the time, but not with my spring album. I don’t want your therapy in the spring. Like, Justin is trying to tell us something and I want an artist, for just a little bit, to tell me nothing. Just that he wants to kiss all the time. That’s it. And disco occasionally. These songs are like 12 beautiful little flowers. They’re not supposed to last forever. They’re just supposed to last for the season and six weeks, two months, that is a perfect amount of time for these songs to just blossom in your ears.
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