Written by Styles with producers Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson, it begins with a cute voice-note from his goddaughter before self-admonishing lyrics, set to a melancholic melody, kick in. Today, songs go straight to number one thanks to careful social media hype, playlist positioning and the nature of how music is consumedĪ second reason for the song’s endurance is, well, the song itself. Throughout all this, he seems to have retained a sense of humour and, that even rarer quality among handsome young pop stars, perspective. In the public eye since One Direction’s teenage run on The X Factor in 2010, he has grown into a modestly magnetic figure with a Bowie-channelling flair for costume, an acting side-career you might have heard about, a personal life that generously sustains publications and a Gen-Z fanbase that won’t tolerate a word said against him. Much of the durability of As It Was is down to Styles. This is a business in which hits are staying hits, propped up in the higher echelons of the charts by streaming users either reluctant to move on to the next big thing or not persuaded to do so at the rate they once were. Even if its non-consecutive reign is over, the song’s repeated boomeranging back to number one makes it both an outlier and a one-track reflection of the state of the music industry. In the process of racking up 15 weeks at the top of the US’s Billboard Hot 100, the fourth-highest total for any track and the most for any by a UK artist, As It Was is the only song ever to have had five separate stints as US number one.Īt the time of writing, As It Was is number two. Courtesy of his stealthily good hit As It Was, British pop star Harry Styles is a record-breaker.
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