The extraordinary life of Harry Styles, the artist who went from working as a baker to becoming a music superstar

Harry Styles sings, acts and also bakes.

Or at least he did before starting a spectacular career that has led him to become one of the biggest phenomenon in the music industry today.

The British artist won the most coveted of the music industry awards this Sunday, the Grammy for best album of the year.

It was thanks to his album Harry’s Housewhich since it was launched in May 2022 has been accumulating awards and praise among music critics for Styles’ “fabulous reinvention”“one of the most beloved stars of pop music”.

Rolling Stone magazine even mentions him as “a Mick Jagger” of our time, who is able to naturally assume his role as a gender-fluid megastar and seamlessly transition from rock to rock. soul and from there to ballads with “abundant charm”.

Although his lyrics are not quite convincing and Will Hodgkinson, critic of The Times newspaper, considers that it is your weak pointbelieves the album itself is a masterful work that allows him to “become a credible artist without alienating the hordes of teenage fans that made him a pop sensation in the first place.”

the initial factor

Harry Styles became known in 2010 when he auditioned to participate in the reality show X Factor from British television.

I was 16 years old, had just finished high school and He worked on Saturdays, he said, in a bakery in Holmes Chapel, the village where he grew up in the North West of England.

On social networks, the edition of a video about that day in which Harry is seen talking with Simon Cowell, a well-known music magnate, producer and judge of that talent scout program, has been circulating for years.

Cowell asks why he was on the show, and Harry tells him that his mom told him he was a good singer.

“Moms usually don’t know”was Cowell’s emphatic response.

Harry sang a cappella Isn’t She Lovely by Stevie Wonder and surprised two of the three judges (Cowell himself and Nicole Scherzinger) to get into the contest.

He didn’t do well when he was eliminated in the solo category, but he was among those chosen to be part of a five-piece boy band that finished third on the same show.

The name of the band? one direction.

meteoric rise

One Direction broke records around the world and reached number one on the Billboard 200, the list that ranks the most successful albums in the United States, with his first four albums between 2012 and 2014.

Awards rained down, their concert tickets sold out, and their members became famous all over the world.

But in 2015, to the surprise of their fans, and after the departure of one of the band members, Zayn Malik, it was announced that they would take a break in order to try their luck as soloists.

Initially, fame followed their individual projects and both Styles and Zayn and Niall Horan managed to reach number one with their first works.

But the only one who has kept rising since then has been Styles, who also reached the top with his album fine line in 2019 and now with Harry’s House.

To this is added the success of your song As It Was with which he spent 15 consecutive weeks at number one in the United States and was the most listened to worldwide in 2022 on the Spotify platform.

He also had his first leading film role opposite Florence Pugh in Don’t Worry Darling (“Do not worry honey”).

One of the keys to this phenomenon being his ability to connect with people with musical substance and a style that puts him on a par with iconic figures like David Bowie, as he wrote in The Conversation University of Technology Sydney Professor of Communication Liz Giuffre.

“Pop music is important because it brings people together,” Giuffre explained.

“And Harry Styles does it on a grand scale with his music. Regardless of whether his style is to your liking or not, its value is not only demonstrated in the millions of sales, but in the power of the connections that he creates among his fans”, he concluded.

All with only 29 years just turned. (AND)