The “Lights Up” Music Video Introduces a New Harry Styles
The Old Harry is Dead.
The “Lights Up” single released on National Coming Out Day celebrates Harry’s LGBTQ+ fans. It’s a song that celebrates embracing your identity. However, the music video released the same day which embraces the same themes of perception, and identity, kill the Old Harry and introduce a New Harry — a more vulnerable, sex and depressed Harry.
The music video features a Harry surrounded by beautiful under-the-influence folk. At first, Harry struggles to move with the bodies pushing up against him. This scene is intercut by different scenes of Harry in a blue suit, by designer Harris Reid, bumbling around the room, and another of him standing in water again looking confused. All of it suggesting a person who can’t seem to find their bearings.
Before the bridge, there is a call back to Harry’s debut album.
A Harry floating in pink-tinted water, presumably having drowned. The old Harry is dead, and before viewers can even register its meaning there is the revelatory and epiphanic bridge. The song reaches its climax here. A cacophonic build that is at once lucid, revelatory, and freeing.
When the bridge hits Harry is hit with a spotlight, alluding perhaps to the way he stumbled into stardom. The way he all of a sudden belonged to the public and the person he was in private was packaged into a consumable way for fangirls everywhere. But now that Harry is no longer a part of One Direction, no longer expected to be a certain type of person, no longer expected to protect his image, and fulfill contractual obligations he is now free and never going back.
With this video, Harry is killing the old Harry and introducing a new Harry. Someone now free to make the type of music they want, record music at the pace they want and enjoy the regular pace of everyday life.
After the bridge, the second half of the song revisits the first half but takes on new meaning. The song is no longer someone struggling to find their place, bumbling around looking for someone else to guide them and tell them how they should live there life, this is someone who has stepped into their identity and is now embracing it.
By the end, Harry is moving with the crowd of beautifully sweaty people. Rather than question the situation he has surrendered to it. He even goes so far are to transplant the question, do you know who you are onto the listener. He now knows who he is, but do you?
Fans across social media are calling the album HS2, Harry Styles 2. In many ways reiterating Harry's intentions to share the more vulnerable parts of his personal life in his music.
For once, it seems the fans and the artist are on the same page.
This era even has Harry tweeting — without finishing it off with his popular sign-off, HS. Watermelon Sugar. What will 2020 reveal?
