An Ode to Hoziers Tweets
By H. Lowe
Back in the (g)olden days of Twitter, before it was known as X and run by a megalomaniacal meme lord who is currently fighting with my home state of Delaware in court and online, Hozier had a fairly active Twitter account. For the uninitiated—or for anyone who doesn’t know me or hasn’t heard to me talk for more than ten minutes—Hozier is a 33-year-old Irish singer-songwriter who rocketed to fame in 2014 with his blues-inflected alternative rock track “Take Me to Church” and has enjoyed continued popularity in the decade since thanks to a dedicated audience of teens, girls, lesbians, the mentally ill, and the very sad, quoth Trixie Mattel.
He’s also on Twitter.
Despite his reputation for being some kind of forest cryptid who materializes once every five years to drop an album, Hozier was on Twitter a lot. His presence inspired novelty accounts dedicated to posting screenshots of Tweets he had liked. They’re a bit stalkerish, but the accounts were and are a funny insight into what Hozier is up to online. His likes are a mix of absurdist humor and progressive politics, both of which have served to endear fans to him even more. They’re an amusing contrast to the gravitas of his music, which is why people enjoy them enough to make accounts with the sole purpose of archiving them.
If you know anything about Hozier beyond “Take Me to Church,” it might be the image that his fans have cultivated for him over the years. It’s fairly common to hear fans refer to him as “forest king” (or the hornier variation, “forest daddy”). Fans joke that when he’s not making music or on tour, he recedes into the bogs of Ireland to hibernate for the next few years until he remerges with a new single, like a blues-singing cicada. A frequent comment on videos of Hozier nowadays is “God made men and then he made Hozier as an apology.” His lyrics, which deal with themes of romantic devotion beyond the grave and esoteric topics such as The Divine Comedy and Jonathan Swift, have led people to dub him a “man written by a woman.” He sings about bog bodies, astrophysics, the oppression of indigenous populations under colonial rule, and being really, really into his lovers. His iconic baritone-tenor cusp voice and tree-like stature—he’s six foot five—definitely help the image. Onstage, he dresses like a professor and accentuates his songs with a falsetto range so high many fans assumed at first that it was autotuned. He is, without a doubt, exceptionally talented.
He is also just a guy.
Deep in the pre-vaccine pandemic, Hozier ran occasional Instagram Lives where he would read poetry to his followers. It was a lovely virtual respite from a deeply troubled reality. His heartfelt recitations of poetry by Irish writers Seamus Heaney and Brendan Kennelly were punctuated by musings about whatever came to mind, which one time included the thought that he should buy a salad spinner because he’d tried to make a salad earlier in the day and his lettuce had turned out damp. More than once, Hozier has slipped up and accidentally posted to his main Instagram story instead of his “Close Friends” story. The first time was a video of him traipsing around in the woods and muttering under his breath about badgers, and the second, more infamous time was the “Handsome Squidward” incident, in which he was messing around with an Instagram face filter and filmed a video doing a fake bro-y voice to flirt with the camera. His apology for the latter was more genuine than most celebrities’ Notes app apologies for real transgressions, and he was just apologizing for being goofy on main.
Hozier is just a guy. He’s an Irish millennial who uses Internet slang like “nom nom” and listens to Flo Milli and, presumably, shitposts on his Close Friends story. That, to me, is what’s so extraordinary about him
In culture at large, we have a tendency to regard famous artists (of any discipline) as more than human: a divinely-ordained category of person who is more intelligent, more creative, more emotionally attuned, and more talented than the rest of us. We permit egregious misbehavior from artists ranging from Pablo Picasso to Woody Allen and Kanye West because we deem their art so meaningful that it makes predatory and offensive behavior tolerable. We put them on a pedestal. And, of course, once we’ve put them up high, they can always fall. When an artist we admire, love, “stan,” whatever, inevitably makes a mistake and we see them for what they are—a flawed human being—we feel betrayed. How could this person whose art spoke to our souls let us down in such a way? Aren’t artists supposed to be the best of us? What about their carefully-constructed, media-trained, likable public persona—was that a lie all along? (Deep down, we all know the answer to this.)
While I certainly don’t mean to put Hozier in the same category as Woody Allen and Kanye—god forbid—he has been elevated to the status of The Artist by many listeners, who agree that the only explanation for his vocal talents and Dylanesque songwriting is that he’s something more than human. He has to be a fae, people argue. No mortal can sing like that. He’s Orpheus reborn. Or maybe he’s Hades, composing love songs to Persephone.
But isn’t there something so wonderful about the idea that he isn’t? When people get too weird about Hozier—put a pin in my idea for a separate article about the weird fetishization/exoticization of Irish men going on right now—I think about an old post (which I now can’t find) joking about how non-Irish fans of Hozier think he’s a demigod but Irish people think of him as Andy from the pub. And he is that. “Hozier,” though it sounds very cool, is actually a laddish nickname from his school days, shortened from his full name Andrew Hozier-Byrne. When he meets people, he says, he always introduces himself as Andrew. He is both the brilliant songwriter who penned the lyrics “Honey, you’re familiar like my mirror years ago / Idealism sits in prison, chivalry fell on his sword / Innocence died screaming, honey, ask me, I should know / I slithered here from Eden just to sit outside your door” and “Heaven is not fit to house a love like you and I” and just Andrew from County Wicklow.
When we take artists off that pedestal and remind ourselves that they’re just people, we ready ourselves for the inevitable disappointment of our heroes proving themselves fallible. But more importantly, we also recognize that we all have the capacity to be artists. We can all make art. While not everyone will become Top 40 musicians or Hollywood A-listers, we are all capable of using our hands and voices and bodies to make good art. Making art—and making meaningful, profound, beautiful art—isn’t the province of a few. Human beings have been making art since we found shelter in caves in Sulawesi and Lascaux. Art isn’t a practice reserved for only those deemed worthy; it’s just what humans do.
When I worked as a writing tutor in college, I often encountered students who had been told at some point that they were bad writers, and they had internalized the ideas that 1) they were, indeed, “bad at writing,” and 2) writing was something that only a small percentage of the population could do well. It broke my heart a little every time. Writing, like singing, like dancing, like painting and all the other forms of art, is just one more way for humans to express our feelings and share them with other people. You don’t have to be “good” to have emotions, and you certainly don’t have to be good to find ways to share them. If you want to get “good” at a form of art, whatever that means, you can, by practicing and studying and having fun with it. As I have found in my yearslong struggle to write a semi-decent novel, writing isn’t a holy act: it’s just something that I do when I have the time between work and chores.
In the end, both things are true. Hozier is the brilliant songwriter who animated my teenage imagination and has directly or indirectly inspired most of the things that I’ve written since I first heard “Take Me to Church” on the radio when I was fourteen. He’s also a dude with Internet access who writes horny lyrics about oral sex and goofs around in interviews. He can be both of those things at once. He doesn’t have to choose between making art and being a person. That’s the beauty of it all and the lesson I take from his music. To be a great artist isn’t to live above mankind; it’s to live among it and to be a part of it, shitposts and all.
ncG1vNJzZmiolaeyr7rImqOmmZdjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89omKdln5mybsDOZp%2Bospmav7R507Ccnqyj