Here Are a Bunch of Writers Putting a Nice Spin on Harry Styles Eating Shit Last Night

Harry Styles, the man of your dreams, performed a secret concert Wednesday night at Brooklyn’s Rough Trade, a medium-sized venue inside a record store which usually hosts midrange indie acts. Less often, I guess, it also has solo shows by arguably the biggest former boy-band member in the entire world.

In addition to 1D’s super-fans, a handful of publications were in attendance and have turned in the expected effusive reviews. Some even wrote about the music. But one fact included in every report is that Harry Styles tried to stage dive for the first time ever (finally getting to do something he could never have done in an arena with One Direction) and—holy shit!—no one caught him. Directioners, probably the most devoted fans in the world, allowed their god to bite the dust. It’s a cold world, everyone! The only consolation for this harrowing existential crisis is seeing the extremely nice ways these writers are describing the fact that Harry Styles totally ate shit.

Teen Vogue, aka Politico, was most sanguine of all:

Harry even tried to stage dive, but it didn’t go over too well. The crowd was either not ready for his stage dive or simply couldn’t hold him up, and he quickly hit the floor. After a few seconds of chaos, all involving parties got up and it thankfully appears that nobody was seriously injured. He got up on the stage and deeply apologized with a smile about the failed attempt. Additionally, he said something along the lines that he has wanted to stage dive for a while now and that the moment felt right.

Nylon’s report was more of an “oopsies!” that also tsk-tsked the youth who failed to catch him for not being strong enough:

As it turns out, the young folks these days don’t really know how to participate in a stage dive and maybe also, as teenage girls, have limited upper-body strength, and so when Styles jumped into the crowd, rather than being uplifted, he immediately sank to the floor.

Just Jared Jr. came with a typically sunny outlook:

We’re glad no one was injured! Hopefully if he tries again, he will give the crowd a heads-up so they can be better prepared.

Seventeen apparently also thinks that teen girls need to work out more!

As someone who got the life-changing opportunity to attend the intimate gig, I watched as Harry leaped into the eager crowd without a care in the world. He bobbed in the air for a short, glorious second, but it seems his adoring fans lacked the upper body strength to hold him up, because he immediately sank down to the ground pretty much where he landed in the crowd.

Harry was fine, though, according to Elle—who WOULD say that because the writer MOVED AWAY from his leap! Classic crowd mistake in a stage-dive scenario:

It wasn’t a moment security or anyone had been planning, which created some momentary chaos. “I’ve always wanted to do that,” Styles explained returning to the stage, undamaged. “It felt like an appropriate time.” And the girls squealed, though social media would later reveal that one fan was slightly injured, and Styles apologized directly to her. She called it the best day ever. I, meanwhile, chose to step back before he dove, fairly certain I’d get crushed.

Even though, according to MTV, these freakin teen girls don’t even lift, bro!

The intimacy we had cultivated over an hour emboldened him to stage dive. He had never done it, he said, and had always wanted to. After working up the courage, he leapt into the, um, apparently very weak arms of his adoring fans.

Huffington Post connected the stage dive to the album PR cycle and Styles’s chameleonic nature:

After the dive, it took Styles several minutes to emerge from the circle of fans that surrounded him to climb back over the barrier and onstage, leaving in his wake an epic story to be detailed and rehashed on Twitter, adding to the overwhelming narrative surrounding the musician days before his first solo release: Harry Styles is as big as ever, and he still knows how to surprise us — even when doing so means knocking into fans with his boots during that impromptu leap off the stage.

While Mashable went the pick-up artist route:

Finally, we have the definitive answer to the age-old question, “Did it hurt when you fell from heaven?” Because despite what feels true in your heart, Harry Styles cannot fly.