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justaconstantdissapointment · 3 years ago

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only angel - a close reading

hey guys, gals and nonbinary pals, here is a close reading i did of ‘only angel’ by our babe, harry styles. i want to make it VERY CLEAR that this is just my opinion and my reading, talking from my own experiences and how i’ve learned to interpret art. i’m an eng lit major so i actually am not talking out of my ass on this subject, for once. i am also not cis or straight, if that makes a difference in your reading of this post. yes, this post is about harry being genderqueer. if you are absolutely not open to this possibility, then you can just ignore this post and scroll by. (unhelpful anons will be ignored, but i’m happy to go into dialogue if some things aren’t fully clear. this masterpost can help with a lot of questions too)

i’ll be using he/him pronouns to refer to Harry. He’s been called both he/him and she/her by close friends and family members, and seems to accept both. for the sake of keeping things clear in this post, he/him is what i’ll go with.

thanks to my gc friends for the brainstorm session and helpful insights, you’re all so intelligent ily (and sorry ari for bringing harry’s love for bukowski’s poetry to your attention)

if anyone is interested, i also did a (less heavy) analysis of meet me in the hallway!

TW/ alcohol, sex, self-harm

NOW LET’S GET INTO IT

(intro, spoken, excerpt from Barfly) I saw this angel, I really saw an angel

Barfly, film with screenplay by Charles Bukowski, introduces the atmosphere of the song. The film deals with alcoholism, adultery, violence. The story is partly autobiographical, with Bukowski representing himself as his alter ego. One of the main characters, an adulteress, at one point proclaims she can see angels.

Angels are usually a positive force in a story, despite being imaginary or appearing in dreams. In Bukowski’s work, ‘angel’ is often used as a derogatory term:

dogs and angels are not

very far apart

Bukowski is known as a misogynistic ass - pardon my french - since he loved to depict women as inferior beings he could ‘conquer’ during sex, etc. He was a self-proclaimed “dirty old man”, owning up to his terrible characteristics (that often got the better of him) and this ownership of that part of him that he hates is something to keep in mind. (Bukowski struggled with depression and alcoholism after an abusive childhood but this does not excuse any abuse on his part.)

My own interpretation of his work, since I do appreciate his poetry because I like free verse, down-to-earth use of words and themes, and I have a terrible soft spot for tortured artists (we all need our flaws, right?), is that he was intelligent but incredibly self-destructive, so with every smart and earnest word that he uttered he felt like muttering two that took all of it back and slapped you in the face while he was at it. “Can’t they see through my skin, can’t they see that I am nothing?” Self-hate, self-destruction. (sign me up bc i’m a sucker and a fool)

Open up your eyes, shut your mouth and see

Who is this “you”?

the general public (gp)/media. Open your fucking eyes and stop spewing what you think you know, because if you actually look, the answers are all there.

“I” talking to himself, who I will identify as Harry from now on

That I’m still the only one who’s been in love with me

“I”, H, is the only one who knows who he is. Also an allusion to narcissism: “in love” is usually said to/about someone else, not oneself. “With me” instead of “with myself”; natural phrasing would usually be different. Invested in himself, in his self. (Would he maybe say “I love myself” if he were more familiar with what that self entails?)

“Who’s been in love with me”: continuous tense implies the continuity of these emotions: any other lovers/forms of attention have been fleeting, temporary (or so he thinks)

I’m just happy getting you stuck in between my teeth and there’s nothing I can do about it

gp’s opinion of Harry Styles™️: compulsive womaniser, Aggressive Man in patriarchal heteronormative society

him biting into his life, his self, everything that makes him him. He can’t help it, he can’t shut (parts of) himself down.

Broke a finger knocking on your bedroom door, I got splinters in my knuckles crawling ‘cross the floor

again, CisHet Harry, Aggressive Man

basically going mad trying to knock his own walls down. It fucking hurts to try to figure out what’s going on inside of him; trying to fight it

Couldn’t take you home to mother in a skirt that short, but I think that’s what I like about it

couldn’t take any of his many ‘conquests’ home bc it’s too superficial, ‘dirty’

this self is not something he shows at home, because it’s about sex and physicality, so not something he’d share with his mom, but it is something he wants to own and embrace (～Bukowski)

She’s an angel, Only angel, She’s an angel, My only angel

Het Harry and his latest fling, possessive (～Bukowski)

Harry and the ‘angel’, the ‘she’ who lives inside of him

(verse 2)

I must admit I thought I’d like to make you mine

Very ambiguous, insecure phrasing. Where is the macho, Aggressive Man (1)?

→ H and his internal struggles (2)

As I went about my business through the warning signs

Het Harry, Aggressive Man pushing through. Relationship/fling with red flags, but lust takes over

making his ‘angel’, his ‘she’, a part of him, embodying her. The struggles that come with that: possible loss of sight of self. At what cost does ‘she’ come out (self-destructive lifestyle)? How deep is ‘she’ buried? (How many drinks does he need?)

End up meeting in the hallway every single time

‘Meet Me In the Hallway’: relationship struggles, loss of self, “I gotta get better”

The hallway is neutral ground: not the bedroom, not the kitchen (themes in H’s other lyrics). No one is dominant here: no Aggressive Man, no ‘angel’. Just Harry, trying to figure it all out. He keeps ending up in the hallway because neither the Man nor the ‘angel’ embody him completely, so he has to start afresh with his self-discovery.

And there’s nothing we can do about it

SWITCH. First time “we” is used.

For H, there is no ‘I’, it’s always ‘we’. He can’t ‘choose a side’ or ‘figure out’ which of his pronouns he is. He is all of the above.

Told it to her brother and she told it to me

(What the hell does this mean? Literally no clue. What are these pronouns doing? The ‘angel’, “she”, isn’t “you”, which would’ve made interpretation (1) make sense. Now, any woman H would be mentioning in verse 1 (when saying “you”) is not “she” in this verse, otherwise “you” would still be used. Either it’s sloppy writing, or it means something else. You tell me, for real. What’s this “brother” doing here? (I think ‘brother’ could easily be replaced by ‘lover’ and then it would at least make sense for the womaniser interpretation.)

That she’s gonna be an angel,

She’s going to be nothing but imaginary. Another interpretation is that “she” is threatening to go so far and actually self-destruct. Implications of s******.

just you wait and see

General “you”, the listener/etc. Taunting message: ‘she’ needs to prove something.

When it turns out she’s a devil in between the sheets

And there’s nothing she can do about it

Antithesis of ‘angel’ and ‘devil’. Both beings not present in the real world.

→ Even “she” can’t run away from dualities.

Sex, acceptance of his self as a sexual being.

Wanna die, wanna die, wanna die tonight (3x)

Implied ‘I’, but left out

→ metre reasons

→ omission of pronouns as a conscious choice

Heavy sentiment.

self-destructive - “just you wait and see” - hints at lifestyle that could ruin you, mentally and physically (～Bukowski)

self-harm

SOUND: musically, it sounds similar to ‘Kiwi’, ‘Woman’ and ‘She’; the themes also overlap: the woman as seductive, sexy, devious, imaginary

SYNTHESIS

Harry as a writer finding himself in Bukowski’s writing: womaniser image that has always been projected onto him from a very young age. Harry does not identify with this persona, but plays with it in his mind after years of having to play pretend, and with the knowledge that the gp sees him that way. He deliberately uses imagery that could lead to his songs being easily interpreted in multiple ways. You can hear this song and think it’s about Harry the CisHet Womaniser, who has casual sex all the time, is dominant and aggressive. (After, back tf off)

Or you can think it’s about Harry showing his internal struggle, his fight with himself, his gender, trying to figure out who he really is. Why can’t he identify with this image of Man that’s been projected onto him all these years, an image so accepted in the patriarchal heteronormative society he was raised in? And why is this “she” so unreachable? Why is she only an imaginary being, like an angel or a devil? Why are the doors closed?

Self-destruction as a theme in this song, with implications of self-harm (breaking his finger, splinters in his knuckles, wanting to die), underlines the heaviness of the lyrics, the difficulty of his struggle. References to Bukowski then hint at alcohol use, which brings out these personas that reside in Harry’s imagination, in how he sees himself and how he knows others see him.

The references to Bukowski, in my opinion, reveal Harry’s struggle with his self-image. Part of him wants to be famous, to be a rockstar, to indulge in parts of that lifestyle. Does that make him a bad person? Has he sometimes lost sight of who he is because of that? (Harry finding recognition in Bukowski hurts my heart, bc to me it implies H’s self-hate, an inclination/attraction to self-destructive tendencies and his dismissiveness of his artistic abilities. not to be dramatic. brb crying)

The ‘she’ in Harry’s ‘we’, in Harry’s self, is seductive and reckless, and since the release of Fine Line we have been able to see an evolution in his experience of her. Character development, if you will. In ‘Only Angel’, she’s part of a fight, someone who only comes out at desperate times, as a reaction to his forced CisHet persona, or after some sort of substance abuse. In ‘She’ or ‘Fine Line’, her presence is less lethal.

My interpretation of the pronouns used in this song is exactly that: Harry is every single one of them, either a persona or actually him. Harry is genderqueer in some way or other.

read my other lyric analyses here

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