Ezra Furman and Harry Styles – one week, two artists, two worlds.
On Sunday afternoon, I talked with US artist Liz (known professionally as Ezra Furman) in her dressing room at Berlin’s Columbia Theater. Furman, a Jewish, bisexual and transgender artist whose ten albums are all forms of protest music, was preparing to play to a sell-out crowd that evening. She had just come from a tour of four cities in Austria, whose fans had supported her when she was starting out nearly 20 years before.
The previous day, 37-year old intensive care nurse Alex Pretti had been gunned down by ICE in Minneapolis. Furman, from Massachusetts, whose grandparents survived the Holocaust, was visibly shaken by the horror of Pretti’s death, just two weeks after Renee Good was also shot dead in the city. “It’s hard to talk about what’s happening in the US right now,” she said. “But I want to talk about it.”
At the same time, Harry Styles was preparing to open ticket sales for his Together Together tour. He had at that time announced 50 dates: 30 of them in New York’s Madison Square Garden, with the rest in London, Amsterdam, Brazil, Mexico and Australia. Last Friday he dropped his first new music in several years, the single “Aperture”. Billed as a euphoric dance track, its chorus is a repeated refrain of “We Belong Together”.
If you were on the Internet on Sunday, there’s a good chance the killing of Alex Pretti and Harry Styles’ comeback were the two main stories you saw. This is social media: celebrity mass-marketing fighting human tragedy for your fleeting attention.
Meanwhile, just before our interview, Ezra Furman quietly re-shared a song she’d written nearly a year ago on her Instagram: “My Country is Burning”.
At times like these, amid such global political turmoil that to say “that could never happen here” seems to be tempting fate, art can seem frivolous. But it is not. “Art is an expression of freedom,” Furman told me. “That’s what makes it mean something.” We spoke about Prince and Elton John and how, despite her enduring career and ten acclaimed albums, she often wished she had written a song that strangers might sing collectively at a wedding, that everyone knew. Art has this great power to bring people together, particularly in the worst of times, when we most need it.
Maybe Harry Styles was thinking about this when he wrote “Aperture”. Maybe he was thinking similar thoughts on Sunday about Alex Pretti and Renee Good’s tragic deaths and all the innocent people being persecuted by the Trump regime. Of course, we’ll never know because Harry Styles, unlike Ezra Furman, doesn’t want to talk about it. Harry Styles doesn’t make political statements. Like all individuals and companies with billion-dollar assets to protect, remaining firmly apolitical is the norm.
On Monday morning, as Ezra Furman travelled to Hamburg for another show, Harry Styles tickets went on sale. A front general admission standing ticket for London was priced at £198.95. To stand right in front of Harry and experience belonging together in Harry’s direct eyeline would cost you £279.45. VIP packages ranged from £300 to nearly £800. Of course, travel and hotel costs would have to be added to that for the majority of fans who did not live in the few cities Harry had chosen to visit.
Even devoted fans took to social media to express their anger. A colleague trying to buy accessible tickets got only a recorded message when she called the telephone hotline for London on opening: already sold out. Later, Harry’s team announced that £1 from every ticket sold would be donated to small venues. “£1?” one fan commented. “For those prices he should have made it at least £10.”
Onstage in Berlin on Sunday night, Ezra Furman, a Jewish transgender woman whose grandmother was taken by the Nazis in Berlin, spoke about the horror of events in the US. She spoke of her anger, and also of the joy to be found in collective experiences, of sharing art and singing together. “This is what free people do,” she said, before launching into her song “Tell Them All to Go to Hell”. There was barely any standing room in the packed Theater. The ecstatic crowd, made up of all genders, ages and races, roared and cheered and sang along.
“There are a lot of dehumanising forces in the world. I’d like to be a humanising one,” Furman had told me that afternoon. I hope she felt every bit of that force that was so present in Berlin. We need art right now, and we especially need art like hers. She told me she often has fans coming up to her at shows, telling her she saved their lives. She likes to think of her music as instead giving them a tool that helps them save themselves.
Harry Styles, too, will have been told in the past his music has saved lives, but in these unimaginably shocking times, he no longer seems like the kind of artist many want to look up to. “We belong together” can only seem like a performative, empty statement when his tour prices and chosen venues lock so many fans out of seeing him live. Styles co-opting queer imagery to market that tour whilst continuing to tell the media variations on “I don’t believe in labelling myself” can only seem ignorant and tone deaf while LGBTQ+ people around the globe see their legal rights stripped away. Try telling a non-gender conforming lesbian who can’t use a public bathroom without anxiety right now that gender and sexuality don’t matter. There are no humanising forces here.
For sure, millions of fans will still buy tickets to see Harry anyway but there’s enough anger rumbling on the internet to suggest Styles’ sequined sheen isn’t quite as sparkling as it once was. When times are hard, we need art more than ever, but we also want our artists to stand for something. We want to know they care about the world and they care about their fans, that there is a relationship that goes beyond the merely transactional.
“We belong together” is a throwaway line for Harry Styles. For Ezra Furman it’s a whole artistic philosophy that is so palpable it doesn’t need bald lyrics. It speaks for itself. There is no question for me, and many others, about what our world most needs at this moment.