“Music for a Sushi Restaurant” by Harry Styles (updated repost, warning: frank discussion of specific sexual acts), Sunday, February 4, 2024

Harry Styles' third record Harry's House grabs listeners with a funky '70s-Jazz-influenced track, "Music for a Sushi Restaurant." The avant-garde production, scatting, horns, and minimal (though somewhat complexly layered in meaning) lyrics are simultaneously the most and least pop way to start a record. Harry's House is a record that jumps all over the place stylistically track to track, yet "Music for a Sushi Restaurant" is a bombastic-themed track--horns, '70s-inspired tracks--to an otherwise laidback singer. But the imagery of a girl so hot you could fry an egg on her? What a bizarre way to open an album, and possibly a little unappetizing.

MUSIC FOR A SUSHI RESTAURANT, MUSIC FOR WHATEVER YOU WANT. Musicologist

Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding talked about the horn themes on Harry's House on their podcast Switched on Pop. The duo made the connection between Styles' recent inclusion of horns on the record with Styles' Peter Gabriel influence, particularly on his massive 1986 hit "Sledgehammer." During an interview with Howard Stern, Styles said that the overall mix of the song made it one of his favorites of all time. Styles then performed a cover of "Sledgehammer" on Howard Stern's show. What Sloan and Harding noticed, though, was how Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" was really about horns blaring when to heighten the melody. Then then proceeded to give a musical history of the zeitgeist of horns in '80s music, starting with Lionel Richie's 1983 mega-hit, "All Night Long." The difference between these two songs, though, is that whereas "Sledgehammer" has punctuated horns throughout the chorus, "All Night Long" is a slow build-up of momentum, each chorus building from a synth pad to synth horns to real horns and finally going all out on the final chorus of the original 6-minute non-single version of the song. Styles recorded some of his records at Peter Gabriel's studio and seemed to take a cue from "Sledgehammer" by going all in on the horns on the album's opener.

IF THE STARS WERE EDIBLE AND OUR HEARTS WERE NEVER FULL, COULD WE LIVE WITH JUST A TASTE? Harry Styles has a bit of an oral fixation, at least in his writing. Later on the record in "Daylight" Styles says, "You'd be the spoon / Dip you honey so I could be sticking to you." On "Keep Driving," the second verse describes a breakfast. Sometimes, food and sex are interconnected, but not in a George Costanza way. Recall the oral pleasures Styles sang about on his last record, Fine Line, in "Watermelon Sugar." "Music for a Sushi Restaurant" takes a more savory approach, but the idea of having "just a little taste" seems a little more actual than metaphorical in a Harry Styles context. In the introduction to Violet Blue's The Ultimate Guide to Fellatio, Mary Roach descriptively describes the unique flavors she experienced eating in a Chinese restaurant in Tokyo and she related the uniqueness to performing oral sex. In the first chapter of the book, Violet Blue reminds readers that "it's an undeniable fact that my mouth is a sex organ." The author goes on to explain that she, like many others, gets sexual pleasure merely from giving oral sex and that exploring why the act itself gives the giver pleasure is both healthy to understand and healthy to explore. And if we think about how sushi and fish are often euphemisms for female genitalia, the song makes a bit of sense.