Over-analyzing ‘Something Great’
‘One day you’ll come into my world and say it all’
He cannot say, or can he? An (over) analysis of ‘Something Great’
This journal looks into the songs written mostly by Harry and Louis, with an emphasis on ‘Something Great’, a song that, I believe, is a bit under-appreciated in the fandom of Larry Stylinson. By studying the lyrics closely, this journal aims at reinforcing the idea that Larry is real. It is written in the spirit of reach but cute, and it celebrates #loveislove, #loveisequal, #LGBTQ, and, of course, the love between Harry and Louis that deserves to be out and proud.
Love denied in the official narrative I want to start this by drawing your attention to ‘Something Great’. There are arguably a number of Larry songs (songs that suggest a relationship between H&L, and were often written by/for them), the most famous among which are ‘If I Could Fly’, ‘Strong’, ‘Home’, and, from Harry’s solo album, ‘Sweet Creature’ (hello stage B), ‘Two Ghosts’, and the one that he (obviously) fell in love to - ‘What Makes You Beautiful’. ‘Something Great’ is from One Direction’s third album ‘Midnight Memories’ (2013). The twelfth song, unlike other hits in this album, seems less well-known, and one cannot find a live performance of it on youtube (I couldn't find a live performance of ‘Home’ either) . However, looking closely, ‘Something Great’ is immensely rich in both the lyrics and the form. It was meticulously written by Harry and two songwriters. The words/ images chosen were repeated in many other Larry songs. Bearing in mind that ‘From the Dining Table’ (the tenth song) is Harry’s personal favourite in his solo album, for a song like ‘Something Great’ that seems under-appreciated, it is likely that it actually tells us more about, well, something great, than others, if we listen to it carefully.
First thing that sticks to my mind after hearing it is Harry’s solo part where he sings
Is it too much to ask for something great?
It indicates (1) something great in life is denied; (2) regardless of the difficulties, one doesn’t give up pursuing it. The two elements repeat themselves in ‘Home’, where the lyrics are
Is it so wrong Is it so wrong that you made me strong
Here, again, something empowering is deemed ‘wrong’.
The parallels between the two songs make me think how 'IICF', ‘Strong’, ‘Home’, ‘SG’ share the same trait which is the love depicted in the songs are, in fact, not unrequited. They are somehow hindered and denied by something big - something that is uncontrollable, something the lovers cannot manage. This thing is not their feelings towards each other. The love is never unrequited. The love is answered and the feeling is mutual. However, there is something that stops them from asking for more of this love, that stops them from telling others that this is the one that makes me strong.
This force - unexplainable, obstructive - is not something between the lovers; it is something exterior. It is the official narrative that is governed by a larger institution: the company, the society, the culture. It denies the love; it denies the very existence of something great.
Home in fluid forms
What poses an interesting contrast with the exterior is the interior, which takes the form of ‘home’ in many songs written and loved by Harry and Louis. There is, indeed, a trace of home in ‘SG’ although it is not explicitly mentioned:
I’ll say we’re better off together here tonight
The ‘tonight’ echos the lyrics of the iconic ‘Home’, in which the singer suggests, ‘It’s alright calling out for somebody to hold tonight’ when the date with a girl doesn’t work out because ‘there’s something missing in her eyes’.
The images of 'home' and 'night' join together in more than one songs. In ‘Two Ghosts’, Harry sings:
The fridge light washes this room white, Moon dances over your good side.
The beautiful lines depict a domestic scene where there is moonlight, a fridge, and two lovers.
Home is a place where one feels safe and is in control of things. It has a door that separates the interior from the exterior. It keeps the unfriendly out of the door. Meanwhile, it locks the secrets inside. Home, nevertheless, does not only exist in one form as a place with a set address. In 'From The Dining Table':
Woke up alone in this hotel room, Played with myself where were you?
It is as if the hotel room was a place that the singer lives with his partner. The hotel room where they part ways (in the case of this song), is a place where the singer later brings in some random girl ‘who looked just like you’. The hotel room is there, before the one-night-stand happens. In this sense, it is no more different from saying ‘Woke up alone in my flat … woke up with the girl who looked just like you in my place’. Talking about secret little rendezvous, here you go:
But if you like causing trouble in hotel rooms
This line from 'Perfect' indicates we are going to be perfect for each other if you travel a lot and know how to cause trouble (and get away with the punishments) in hotel rooms. The prerequisite for us to be partners-in-crime is that we are able to spend a lot of time together. Either having a tender moment at home or having fun in hotel rooms, in the end, someone needs to be there in the first place as a roommate and/or a travel companion.
Be it a home with a postal number or a hotel room, as long as someone great is there, the space is surely becoming a place that feels like home.
Lost is mutual
Outside of the home, it is, however, a malignant space. Without the walls and doors that safeguard, the exterior space is where getting lost seems unavoidable.
In ‘Something Great’, the second line is
You say we'll be together even when you're lost
It seems baffling at the first sight as how, one wonders, can people be lost when they are together with a loved one? The almost paradoxical state of being reappears in 'IICF':
When you’re lonely and forget who you are
The above suggests a more curious condition where the person the singer fly right back home to is somehow at sea with his/her self. The destination is clear yet it is also questionable (‘lost’, ‘forget’). Going ‘Home’, it is as if getting lost was a predicament that had to be taken into consideration (‘When you’re lost, I will find the way/ I will be your light’).
It is important to note that being lost is, in fact, suffered not by one of them only, but by both of them. In ‘Sweet Creature’, the protagonist confesses he gets lost too:
When I run out of road, You bring me home.
Later, he stresses they are in this dilemma together:
We don’t know where we going, but we know where we belong.
As we consider that the exterior condition is what reduces them into this condition of being lost, it is possible to see being lost not as that they lose their ways (due to their directionlessness, no pun intended), but as that they are forced to lose their true selves, or that they are forced to receive and to accept (however unwillingly) a fake identity ('womanizer'), a false image ('boyfriend'), and a faux heteronormative narrative.
The uncomfortable silence
The unexplainable exterior force which stops them from being who they are takes a toll on their life, taking its main form of stopping them from saying what they want to say.
I am stumbling, looking in the dark with an empty heart.
The struggle to utter is prominent in Harry’s solo album. From ‘Tongue-tired like we’ve never known/ Telling these stories we already told’ to ‘We haven't spoken since you went away/ Comfortable silence is so overrated./ Why won't you ever say what you want to say?/ Even my phone misses your call, by the way’ to ‘I always think about you and how we don't speak enough’. Even in ‘Sign of The Times’, there are: ‘We don't talk enough/ We should open up’. In Louis’s ‘Miss You’, there is something curious going on as well: ‘And we can’t even be on the phone now/ And I can’t even be with you alone now’. It suggests the failure to talk freely often comes together with the physical state of being in two places. Therefore, it may be argued that not being able to be together is, in both Harry and Louis’s songs, closely linked with the inability to talk freely.
This is why ‘Something Great’ is a song that deserves more attention (and more streaming), because it is all about a lover’s wish for his partner to be vocal. While to talk or not to talk is one of the important motifs in H&L's songs, ‘SG’ stands out because it screams the wish to say it properly. Indeed, the beginning of the song literally put a ‘say’ in each clause:
One day you'll come into my world and say it all, You say we'll be together even when you're lost, One day you'll say these words, I thought you'll never say. You say we're better off together in our bed.
To understand the politics of being vocal, one cannot miss the drama Harry created during his Tour on Live. There had been a couple of times when he teased the fans by playing the prelude of 'IICF' (and in the last shows, that of ‘Girl Crush’) before saying ‘the next song I’m gonna play is "Just a Little Bit of Your Heart"'. Let’s look at the lyrics of 'JALBOYH':
I don't ever tell you how I really feel 'Cause I can't find the words to say what I mean.
Here, the silence is due to the fact the singer cannot confess his feelings. It portrays a protagonist who is okay with the fact that the one he secretly loves is not with him. He blames himself for that as he cannot put his feelings into words. It is a typical scenario for unrequited love. However, as I have argued in the beginning, the love depicted in Harry and Louis’s songs are everything but unrequited. It is unfair to blame the fact that two lovers are not together on themselves. While the song leaves an impression that the reason why the protagonist cannot say what he wants to say is his failure to confess love, the reality may be that he cannot talk about love because he is not allowed to talk about it.
Regarding the ‘teasings’, I would argue Harry did that because he may no longer agree with his position in 'JALBOYH'. It is never the lover’s fault. It is the exterior force that makes them believe they are the ones to blame, whereas they have nothing to be sorry for. Contrary to 'JALBOYH', 'IICF' is about a wish to fight against the odds, to fly back home, and to ask the lover to listen as the protagonist takes the initiative to talk:‘Pay attention, I hope that you listen/ 'cause I let my guard down’.
This is when 'Medicine', an unreleased song Harry played during Live on Tour, becomes so interesting. In the previous songs, it is all about a wish to be vocal (‘Something great’), or still struggling to say it properly (‘FTDT’ ‘Missing You’). ‘Medicine’, however, celebrates a night out when someone is finally being ‘persuasive’, that is, not only vocal, but on-the-point vocal:
If you go out tonight I’m going out ‘cause you are persuasive.
Although there is no concrete evidence that the vocal one in this unapologetically fun song is Louis, it does not impact that this song is wild as the boys are certainly having a blast thanks to one of them being ‘persuasive’. They are, in the end, mastering the power of talking (and, indeed, mouth). Voice, vocal, and mouth join together in this song about male sexual pleasure. It shows how being vocal is empowering, and mouth, when mastered by oneself instead of being controlled by others, releases and receives pleasures.
Scriptless: Make America Gay Again
Going back to ‘Something Great’, one phenomenal thing to note is the form of this song, where in the end, Louis sings ‘You are all I want/ So much it’s hurting’. The solo performance certainly leaves an impression that he is the one who is asked by the other to ‘say it all’. It is, of course, also possible to see Louis’s solo as part of the monologue of the singer himself. But here, rather than argue if it is a reply to the request in the beginning of the song, I want to draw attention to the ‘all I want’ part - it is ‘all I want’ that links the two songs (‘IICF’ ‘Girl Crush’) with ‘JALBOYH’.
In ‘JALBOYH’, the protagonist is satisfied with ‘Just a little bit of your heart is all I want’; in ‘IICF’, it’s much more than a little bit of your heart, as your heart has become a part of me: No way that I can live without half of my/your heart:
I’m missing half of me when we’re apart [...] I can feel your heart inside mine, I feel it, I feel it.
‘Girl Crush’ is all about what ‘I’ want to be. It is loud and clear: I want to be that girl, ie. your lover:
I want to taste her lips, Yeah, 'cause they taste like you, I want to drown myself, In a bottle of her perfume, I want her long blonde hair, I want her magic touch, Yeah, 'cause maybe then, You'd want me just as much.
The protagonist is no longer okay with being a ‘fool’ when ‘you’ are with her. He wants more than that. He dances and he smirks and he sings loud and proud:
The boys and the girls are in, I mess around with him, And I'm okay with it
The controversial part about ‘Medicine’ is whether Harry (as he pointed to himself when singing the song many times) did ‘mess around with him’ or not. As the song first came out it was hailed, interestingly, as a ‘bi anthem’. Although it seems clearer now that it is ‘him’ rather than ‘them’, it would stay mysterious until an official studio version is released and the official lyrics is out. But we have known better than to buy into the official narrative by now. In ‘Something Great’, it has already been suggested that what is being put out there is not what it seems:
The script was written and I could not change a thing, I want to rip it all to shreds and start again.
It is, therefore, the live, the fluid, the scriptless that is more exciting and telling. And nothing beats the interactions between Harry and the fans during the tour. The scriptless part is where he went wild: the one with the gay-vodka, the one when he helped Pilar to find a girlfriend, the one he outed his fans (twice) after he got the permission to read their signs (‘come out because of you’); the one he waved a ‘Make America Gay Again’ and smirked behind the flag. Oh. And the one he waved the rainbow flag in the very LGBT-unfriendly Singapore. Check: Harry Styles is Gay Culture: A Study by Freddieismyqueen, you’ll know what I am talking about.
He cannot say it, but he finds a way to say it. They both do. On behalf of the fans, Harry said ‘Because of you, I’m coming out tomorrow.’ ‘It’s my birthday. And I’m gay.’ ‘Tina, she’s gay! Tina says … she loves it.’
Because talking is empowering; to say it properly is to be free.
May I read the sign? It says: I’m gay and I love you! I love you as well. I mean, we are all a little bit gay, ain’t we?
--Harry Styles, Live on Tour, July 14, 2018, L.A.
