Style Guide: Harry’s album Kiss All the Time. Disco, sometimes. Grammatically correct? | Harry Styles

We don’t know much about Harry Styles’ first album in four years beyond its title – and it’s already causing some grammatical consternation.

The sequel to the 2022 Grammy Award-winning Harry’s House is more generically titled: Kiss All the Time. Disco, sometimes. In an age when fans clinically investigate every aspect of pop stars’ lives, it was perhaps inevitable that Styles’ choice of punctuation would draw scrutiny.

The main dilemma: Is the comma in the right place? “We’re going through a really experimental period with the use of the comma,” @poeticdweller wrote in a post One concern seems to be that the two sentences don’t follow the same rules: “The comma turns the second sentence of the parallel imperative sentence into a fragment that vaguely suggests there is disco sometimes,” another post noted, in sentiments echoed elsewhere.

All of this raises two questions: First, did Stiles get it wrong? Second, does it matter? (The third question is, of course: Who cares? But it’s nice to have a distraction from the daily horrors.)

As for the first question, it is true that the lines are not parallel. If Harry were talking about it, asking us to constantly kiss and also occasionally go to the disco – using the word ‘disco’ as a verb – it would be appropriate to leave out the comma. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Styles is doing anything wrong.

“It’s not a perfect construction by our grammatical standards and that’s interesting,” says Brett Edelen, also known as @poeticdweller, who wrote the viral post and is a doctoral candidate in English at Duke University. The result, whether intended or not, is that it “adds some movement to what would otherwise be boring” and “fits into a larger scheme of people trying to express things across divides that aren’t actually the way we use them.” He cites Virginia Woolf – known for her long, perfect sentences – as one example; More recently, Die My Love left a comma where we might expect a comma.

Also, disco is not usually a verb. “When I see ‘disco, comma,’ it gives me a little mental break,” says Ellen Goffin, author of several books on grammar and star of the comedy documentary “Rebel With a Clause,” in which she travels the country making connections through conversations about sentence structure and punctuation. Edelin agrees: The comma may have been added, he says, “to graphically display the time of speech, as in: disco.” [pause] sometimes”.

In the second sentence, Styles “changed the parts of speech. Now I’m working with the noun, and then it’s kind of fun,” he says. The comma leads to “a different circumstantial idea: not all the time, just sometimes.” And kiss all the time. Disco, sometimes. It’s surreal language at first – you’re unlikely to see this phrase appear in a research paper or an international treaty. “People are trying to impose some sort of standard punctuation on something that isn’t that at all,” says Goffin.

Moreover, context is important: this is the album title, not high school English. Even if that He was In English class, you might see this kind of thing in a novel—”commas” about which you’d say the same thing: “Wait, that’s not true. “This doesn’t belong here,” says Goffin. “This is just creativity, and I think it’s perfect.”

Images are important here too; Maybe Styles likes the way the comma looks, especially in a world where we’re seeing song and album titles more and more. Unlike physical media — or early MP3s, which gave users some control over metadata like song names — music streaming apps proudly display the title of each song on our phones with the artist’s preferred design and punctuation. Artists have played with this capacity in recent years: on Billie Eilish’s 2017 EP Don’t Smile at Me, for example, most of the song titles were in lowercase, while on 2024’s HIT ME HARD AND SOFT they were in uppercase. Dijon’s album Baby, from last year, includes tracks titled HIGHER! And (frightened). In the last week of 2018, according to a Quartz analysis, eight of the top 200 songs on Spotify were designed in either uppercase or lowercase; The following year, “more than 30 songs in a typical week” contained “non-standard capital letters.” (Quartz theorizes that this trend is related to the informality of texting.)

It is worth noting that grammar rules are flexible and change from stylebook to stylebook, which is why, for example, the titles of albums and films in this article are not italicized or enclosed in quotation marks (see “Titles”). Contrary to the perception we might develop in school, there is no official global union for correct English whose followers will break your knees over a comma. “I think Americans are overly committed to punctuation,” says Goffin. “They tend to care about rules and prohibitions too much.”

This doesn’t mean that rules never matter, of course. There are a lot of rules that pundits and experts agree on, and what matters is clarity. Take the example from the Guardian style guide on the importance of a well-placed comma: There’s a difference between dedicating a book “To my father, Martin Amis and J. K. Rowling” and “To my father, Martin Amis, and J. K. Rowling.”

On the other hand, when it comes to the album title, ambiguity may be exactly the point.

In a possible case of nominative determinism, Styles clearly demonstrated his penchant for grammar in a 2015 show, adding an apostrophe and an E to a Philadelphia fan’s sign so that it said “You’re so kind” instead of “You’re so kind” (he then wrote “Thank you – love, Harry” and returned it, in case there was any doubt about the sign’s message). If Stiles is obsessed with grammar, then perhaps the controversial comma is as well.