People are calling Harry Styles the new Bowie, and I’m sorry but you have to be freaking kidding

In case you didn’t already know, Harry Styles just premiered his fist solo single, Sign of the Times, on BBC Radio 1, and it’s actually quite good. I’ve never been a massive One Direction-er, but I’m also not afraid to shout someone out when I think they’re talented.

Do yourself a favor, and listen to it here if you haven’t already.

That said, this morning I woke up to hordes of people calling Harry Styles the new Bowie, and I’m going to have to draw the line. Harry Styles doesn’t have as much talent in his pinky fingernail — not a dig at Styles, but Bowie literally shaped popular music.

Character aside, Bowie’s sales, estimated at 140 million worldwide, made him one of the world’s best-selling artists. In the UK, he was awarded nine platinum album certifications, eleven gold and eight silver, and in the US, he received five platinum and seven gold certifications.

But the awards were just one-hundredth of what made Bowie the musician he was. His identity blurring, his disregard for artistic norms, his passion for experimentation, his deconstruction of pop music itself.

“As a credible piece of indie-pop balladry that moves Styles into a new arena, I’d say he just about pulls it off,” The Guardian wrote today — alluding to his apparent pulling-off of a Bowie-esque character, and GQ have said, “Style’s new single is more Bieber than Bowie” — but I’m still trying to work out what the most offensive part of that sentence is. Another author wrote, “Harry Styles’s new song Sign of the Times is David Bowie via Oasis.”

All I’d like to say is, no it absolutely is not. Styles is fine — in fact, he’s talented, and I’ll probably listen to his song a number of times today — but he falls far, far short of Bowie in terms of stage presence, character, and overall artistic genius. Everyone does.