Harry Styles won the Album Of The Year Grammy in 2023, and everyone heard him say the wrong thing. The line that sent Twitter into a fury was simple: “This doesn’t happen to people like me very often.” It was a humble attempt to thank his collaborators, and it landed as a boast.
The Number Ones is a recurring column that looks back at every #1 single to reach the Billboard Hot 100, and this edition zeroes in on Styles’ biggest hit, “As It Was,” which spent 15 weeks at #1 during 2022.
The Grammy Speech That Backfired
Styles accepted the award for Harry’s House in February 2023. He thanked all the other nominees without naming them, and he insisted there is “no such thing as ‘best’ in music.” Then he stumbled. Just before passing the mic, he said that line about “people like me.”
The response came quickly. Critics and fans alike took it as a swipe at Beyoncé, whose Renaissance was the album everyone expected to take home the prize. Beyoncé had already lost Album Of The Year to Taylor Swift, Beck, and Adele before — all artists who could be called “people like Harry Styles” for reasons going beyond skin colour.
The Grammys have a long habit of picking safe, well-made records instead of bold ones, and Styles is far from the first artist to feel their sting. Year after year, the awards choose blandly acceptable, slickly recorded old-school musicianship over anything with vision or viscera.
Why The Reaction Stung So Hard
Album Of The Year was never Styles’ goal. He came from a small town in England, where his mother kept a pub, and reached stardom through a singing contest and a boy band. None of his One Direction bandmates were threats to win it. His closest precedent, Justin Timberlake, holds two nominations but no wins.
Styles found himself among peers who had spent their whole lives in show business, while he was not one of them. His mind must have been reeling with it all. That line came from a place of wonder, not pride.
The setting was poisonous. Beyoncé was obviously the crowd’s top pick. Losing her stung badly, and it had been festering for years.
A Year Of Charmed Failure
Styles had been everywhere in the previous year. He starred in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, appeared in the end-credits scene of the 2021 Marvel bomb Eternals, and landed the male lead in Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling after she fired Shia LaBeouf.
The film held more weight than the comic-book cameo. During production, Styles might have played some part in the end of Wilde’s marriage to Jason Sudeikis. The couple broke up, and she reportedly dated Styles, 10 years her junior, for a little while. Now, Styles is engaged to Zoë Kravitz.
The set of Don’t Worry Darling was reportedly quite stressful. Styles’ career was a whirlwind of magazine spreads and gossipy internet deep dives. He spent months at #1 with “As It Was,” a synthpop song critics described as a “blank little nothing.”
The universe refused to let Harry Styles fail.
The Career That Made The Comment Land
Styles’ first #1 hit came in the 2020 pandemic summer, when “Watermelon Sugar” finally reached the top for a single week after waiting in the wings. The song was a breakthrough, but it was not the album that won him the Grammy.
Styles took the prize after beating nine other albums, and Harry’s House was the record that secured it for him.
- Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti
- Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers
- Adele’s 30
- Lizzo’s Special
- ABBA’s Voyage
- Coldplay’s Music Of The Spheres
- Mary J. Blige’s Good Morning Gorgeous
- Brandi Carlile’s In These Silent Days
- Beyoncé’s Renaissance
This roster is packed with some of today’s biggest names in music. Beyoncé stood above the rest, and her defeat was an open sore that had been festering for years.
| Album | Artist |
|---|---|
| Un Verano Sin Ti | Bad Bunny |
| Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers | Kendrick Lamar |
| 30 | Adele |
| Special | Lizzo |
| Voyage | ABBA |
| Music Of The Spheres | Coldplay |
| Good Morning Gorgeous | Mary J. Blige |
| In These Silent Days | Brandi Carlile |
| Renaissance | Beyoncé |
Styles’ victory was a relief to some and a provocation to others. Lots of people didn’t bump on the comment. Lots of others immediately knew exactly what he meant and didn’t hold it against him. But many more took it as a weird, deluded gloat.
The adoration for Beyoncé was on the rise, yet there was another current running alongside it. There was also exhaustion with Harry Styles. When a person enjoys a life filled with good fortune, people sometimes wish to see them suffer a setback.
The Line That Changed Everything
This story is told in a certain style’ comment was a stumble, not a strategy. He was in a big room full of his peers, many of whom had grown up in show business. That wasn’, and it is easy to imagine that his mind was whirling with confusion.
What he mostly meant, I think, was: Whoa.
He didn’t mean fresh-faced, scrubbed, affluent white pop stars who make blandly acceptable, slickly recorded old-school hits. That’s what Styles is, and that’s who almost always won Album Of The Year, at least up to 2024.
The response went too far. Styles was not gloating; he was marveling. Yet the moment stuck because the Grammys had already failed Beyoncé so many times.
Beyoncé has finally won Album Of The Year, but the prize no longer serves its purpose, since her winning record falls short of Renaissance in quality. When Styles accepted the award instead, the response among everyone I know was the same: These motherfuckers got us again.
The frustration of a generation of listeners who had watched the Grammys pick the wrong winners year after year is summed up by that line. Styles became the latest victim of a system that hands out trophies to blandness instead of rewarding ambition.
What upset people was a moment of wonder from a man who had never expected to be where he found himself. The world took it as arrogance. A reading more generous toward Styles sees it as humility instead. Both readings hold some truth.
The judgment carries a sly twist. The Grammys follow their own course, as they always have. Styles did nothing wrong. The trouble lay in the very space he entered.
What altered everything was not a boast nor a slight, but a simple stumble — a moment of wonder from a man who had never expected to be there.
See the video the story is built around at Stereogum.
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