🎸Ranking Every Harry Styles Song 🎸

Apr 19, 2022

Mōrena lil shits!!

I'm loving seeing so many of you with your ‘out of office’ messages turned on - go get that holiday!!! Another thing I’m loving? EVERYONE WHO’S MADE BACON AND EGG PIE FOR THE FIRST TIME! I’ve had a bunch of photos/ stories about people baking it and loving it and that’s just so cool. Glad you get to enjoy one of life’s simple pleasures. Speaking of simple pleasures, I watched Lemonade Mouth last night, and something about that movie just fucks me up in a really good way. It’s cringe, so if you aren’t tied to it with nostalgia, don’t go and watch it - you’ll judge me so hard - but there’s something about the high school musical / camp rock/ lemonade mouth/ bandslam genre that I’ll never get tired of.

I also wanted to share this cute response from Izzy, who was teaching her kiddies about insects when they ran into the ‘is it a ladybird or ladybug?’ question, and suggested I make it into a mundane poll:

“I have finally found a moment after all of the chaos of week 6 at uni to email you and say thankyou so much for posting my student's question about the 'ladybug vs ladybird' conundrum, it was super sweet of you and very appreciated <3!! I couldn't believe it when I saw it on the SYSCA account, and in the daily newsletter, and I enthusiastically told all of the tamariki about it. Once we had taught the 5 year olds what instagram was and what the 'Stuff You Should Care About' page was (we had to change the name hehe) then they were all so excited that their question had gone around the world. They are now confidently saying both, and are pretty stoked about it all. So ngā mihi nui, you're the best 🙂”

SO CUTE AND HOPE THEY ALL READ THE DAILY NEWSY NOW :P

🥺 If you want to pay for the media you love and make sure I can continue to do this for you, PLEASE, become a SYSCA supporter here - I need you! 🥺

Abolish Facebook memories for this reason only
Rolling Stone Ranked Every Harry Styles Song (and did a pretty good job!)
Why the Past 10 Years Of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
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Driven From City Life to Jungle Insurgency
The growing, lightly controversial industry teaching kids crypto
Cardi B and Offset Announce Their Son’s Name
Do you say airplane or aeroplane?

Abolish Facebook memories for this reason only

Yesterday Squish got a Facebook memory yesterday for 10 years since Rubes and I made these and held them up at a One Direction concert in Wellington:

vigilante shit you should care about @SYSCAbout

ten years ago i went to a one direction concert holding these, thinking harry styles was gonna fall in love with me

Kinda cute tho because this reminds me of like the best day of my young life. It was their first time in New Zealand and they played in a tiny venue and we just cried. AND, we were STILL HOLDING THESE SIGNS at about 3am when we saw them in a bar in Wellington and lost our shit. Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t in the bar with them (we would have been about 15) but the bar had glass windows, so we saw them all drinking (except Zayn I think) and cringely, they defs would’ve seen us.

Rolling Stone Ranked Every Harry Styles Song (and did a pretty good job!)

I gotta say, I love the dude that wrote this piece. Look at this intro:

“Harry Styles dropped his debut solo single “Sign of the Times” five years ago, in April 2017. Since then, he’s built one of the wildest, weirdest songbooks of modern times — a brilliant body of work from a genius singer, songwriter, and performer. And it’s just about to get bigger, since he’s also an evil angel of chaos who never gets tired of wreaking havoc on our lives.”

Gorgeous selection of words there, Rob.

And then:

“Let’s face it, there are lots of Harrys. He’s a pop star. An actor. A scholar of music history. A fashion icon. A dangerous madman who finds his pleasure in getting under our skin and trashing our expectations and dancing on our madness. And honestly, bless him for that. He’s all these things, but as these songs prove, the realest, truest Harry is the one who puts his heart and soul into this music.”

He puts ‘Woman’ pretty low on the list, but includes this great line:

“Woman” has a hook that sounds like a sexually agitated duck, quacking in ecstasy. As Harry told the BBC’s Nick Grimshaw, it’s not a kinky mallard — just his own voice through a filter. But when he first played his debut for his parents, “The whole album finished, then my stepdad said, ‘I’ve got one question — where did you get the duck from? How did you get a duck in the studio?’ I was like, ‘That was me, thanks.’

I loved the lil snippets of song trivia throughout it, like how ‘Sign of The Times’ is written from the perspective of a mother who’s dying during childbirth:

‘As Harry told Rolling Stone in 2017, it’s sung from the perspective of a mother dying in childbirth. “The mother is told, ‘The child is fine, but you’re not going to make it.’ The mother has five minutes to tell the child, ‘Go forth and conquer.’” That’s why “Sign of the Times” feels uplifting, finding beauty in bleakness. (It’s a totally different song if it happens to carry you through a grief experience.)’

Also, the story of how ‘She’ was written as a shroom fueled masterpiece:

It’s Harry and his loyal crew at their most unhinged, which is probably why he loves this song so much. Halfway through “She,” Mitch Rowland steps into the stratosphere for a cosmic guitar voyage. “Mitch played that guitar when he was a little, ah, influenced,” Styles said. “Well, he was on mushrooms, we all were.” They forgot about “She” until they went back later. “But Mitch had no idea what he did on guitar that night, so he had to learn it all over from the track.” “She” is the kind of fucked-up beauty you can only get from making music with trusted friends — Kid Harpoon, Tyler Johnson, Jeff Bhasker, Rowland — instead of hired guns. And throwing the rulebook out the damn window.

I reckon the list is compiled pretty well, though I would’ve put ‘Golden’ and ‘Falling’ a bit lower and nudged ‘Meet Me In The Hallway’ and ‘From The Dining Table’ up a lil. But well done Rob!

If you read just one thing I recommend you today, let it be this: WHY THE PAST 10 YEARS OF AMERICAN LIFE HAVE BEEN UNIQUELY STUPID

It’s a bit of a long read, but stick with it. I’m always looking for things to help me put into words the way I feel about the internet/ cancel culture/ the world (aren’t we all) and one of my besties sent me this piece, which touched on a lot of things that I wish I’d said first. I’m going to put in a few of my fave parts, but please go and read it.

If the pre-digital era was like talking to one big audience who were all looking into one mirror, then:

“The digital revolution has shattered that mirror, and now the public inhabits those broken pieces of glass. So the public isn’t one thing; it’s highly fragmented, and it’s basically mutually hostile. It’s mostly people yelling at each other and living in bubbles of one sort or another”

A take that I will post time and time again because I find mob dynamics and cancel culture incredibly unhelpful :P

“Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide. When our public square is governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.”

And then this too:

“Social media has both magnified and weaponized the frivolous. Is our democracy any healthier now that we’ve had Twitter brawls over Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tax the rich dress at the annual Met Gala, and Melania Trump’s dress at a 9/11 memorial event, which had stitching that kind of looked like a skyscraper? How about Senator Ted Cruz’s tweet criticizing Big Bird for tweeting about getting his COVID vaccine?”

Hey, at least I’m self-aware.

After a Gunman Seemed to Vanish, These New Yorkers Helped End the Search

I tried not to consume too much about the Brooklyn Subway shooting, but this piece from The New York Times about what it was like to be travelling on the Subway that day & how those on board were helping to solve the crime was fascinating. Content warning - it describes the crime and the scenes that followed, so read with care.

Driven From City Life to Jungle Insurgency

One thing about me: I’ll always keep up with the news in Myanmar. After visiting, and then studying the country/ their media at uni, I feel weirdly connected to it. This story is about the ‘Gen Z Warriors” who are fleeing the military’s brutal crackdown and living out in the jungle areas to fight against them. Marketing managers, dentists - people like you and I (except they’re not like you and I at all) - have dropped everything from their city lives to live a completely different and dangerous lifestyle. The least we can do is read about them.

The growing, lightly controversial industry teaching kids crypto

How young is too young to be teaching kids about crypto? I always wished I’d been taught about investing at school/ when I was a kid, so what makes this so different? Read about crypto summer camps for kids here.