The great Harry Styles vs. Zayn Malik debate

Starting from the same boy band, Harry Styles and Zayn Malik have been not only the two most successful former members of One Direction, but two of the biggest pop stars on the planet. The question remains: who is the better artist?

Throughout time, we have had many arguments and debates over who is the greatest in any particular arena of our society. Michael Jordan or Lebron James? Ali or Frazier? McCartney or Lennon? Cliche aside, apples or oranges? Each of these carrying their own weight of importance, we draw battle lines with each other, make arguments for each, and very rarely come to a definitive conclusion as to who is the best.

Recently, another such debate has begun one of clearly equal importance, and that is deciding who is the better artist between Zayn Malik and Harry Styles. The former One Direction band members have become two of the most popular artists on the planet, as just doing a simple Google search will find you within the deep, dark caverns of internet fandom and message boards galore. In other words, Harry Styles vs. Zayn Malik is the least important thing that has ever truly mattered as much as it does.

This isn’t just a matter of who is the more skilled artist because music is highly subjective, and each of these two young men have a particular style much different from the other. Zayn’s music is edgy, sensual, experimental and carnal in its purest form. His music oozes from the speakers when one presses play, and at his best his underrated rangy vocals capture the exact allure artists like Justin Bieber and even The Weeknd have mastered over the last decade. Songs like his hit single “PILLOWTALK” feel like the musical embodiment of an actual pelvic thrust, and even the staunchest critic feels entrapped in its sexuality.

Styles, on the other hand, feels like a glass of aged Scotch compared to Malik’s late night Hennessy vibe. Harry styles debut album, unlike Malik’s, doesn’t care about experimentation, and that isn’t necessarily a slight or compliment. His music feels like the best rendition of some of rock music’s greatest including Bowie, McCartney and Jagger, and what he does so effectively is recreate each distinct characteristic that made those particular artists timeless musicians.

So who has the better album? The answer isn’t as simple as picking a name. Both young men are interested in grownup music. Yet each decided to interpret that particular type of music in different ways. For Zayn , adulthood in music is achieved once one can open themselves up to different genres, encompassing a worldly sound that meshes and blends genres into something unique. For Harry, that musical maturity is achieved by one perfecting a specific sound, in his case that of classic rock, and that journey to becoming a better musician is better learned not by stretching your talents into other genres but by remembering the roots from which your music came from. Each of their albums, Mind of Mine and Harry Styles, find the two artists separating themselves as far as possibly from their bubblegum pop roots, just at completely different ends of the spectrum.

Although each album can be appreciated in some sense for what the artist attempts to do, Harry Styles’ album comes out more polished by a thin margin. His debut album, unlike Malik’s, feels calculated, considerate of its audience in terms of both length and sequencing, and much more inviting. With Zayn’s music, one gets the sense that his sudden departure from One Direction and subsequent album in such a short amount of time, while managing to capture the rebellious, contrarian nature of how Zayn viewed himself in comparison to the public’s image of him, was ultimately rushed and too long. Clocking in at 14 songs, one feels when listening to Mind of Mine that it could have been narrowed to 10 and felt more cohesive. Unfortunately for Zayn, Harry Styles had more time to edit his first project.

Yet the question isn’t just who had the better album, but who the better artist is, and one must factor in success. As stated before, each of these two has a massive fan base that takes no longer than a Twitter hashtag to find out just how deep the rabbit hole goes. The answer here seems more outright than before, especially in the short term: is Zayn is more successful. The reason is that not only did Zayn’s album debut at number one on the Billboard charts, which Styles’ album is more than likely to do as well, but the fact that his music seems to attract a wider possible audience.

Part of what works when an artist dabbles in various genres, especially in ones as trendy and popular as hip-hop and R&B, is that an artist like Zayn casts a bigger net in terms of fans. Despite the fact that Harry Styles, over time, could turn the clock back on a rock genre that so desperately needs a pop-influenced superstar, Zayn’s music has been quite literally designed in a lab to top the charts. His music is constantly changing, adapting to the particular surroundings of what sound is hot at the moment, and Zayn knows how to manipulate that better than most artists manage to figure out this early in their solo careers. In the long run, we may come to find Styles is the more successful artist, especially with critics, but for now he will have to live in the shadow of Malik and his pop-infused sex music.

We have one artist with a better album and another with a higher ceiling for popularity among their respective fans. It’s a student of rock history versus the musical bad boy. It’s the never-ending battle between music for a breakup and music to make whoopie to, and the decision of which is better is much harder than it might seem. Yet between Harry Styles and Zayn Malik, the answer as to who the better artist is to this point is Harry Styles by a hair. For everything that Zayn has managed to musically, stretching one’s self too thin in terms of sound is an all too familiar fault of many fallen pop stars, and one that could lead his music to becoming stale much faster than he might expect. With Styles, that potential seems reined in already, with his debut album channeling its energy as opposed to letting it wreak havoc. Harry vs. Zayn feels like the tortoise and the hare, and just like that old fable, Zayn’s career feels too fast and loose at this point to depend on him as a long-lasting presence in the music industry no matter how big of a fan base he has right now.

Next: Harry Styles' debut album review

There it is. The definitive answer we were all looking for. Let’s check back in a week and see if we all still feel the same about how worthwhile this was.