the 1975

I also have not listened to the podcast nor have the desire to, but my understanding was that matty laughed along rather than made the impressions himself

well yeah, completely different but I like them enough musically that if they were to one day tell Matty to eff off, I would still be curious enough to give the 1975 without Matty a try sorry sorry sorry

the crucial bit of that interview:

I asked him about the podcast. He’d been doing so much promo, he told me, that he wanted to do something that felt more like simply talking with his friends. But, of course, he had done this all in public, on mike. Had he baited his fans on purpose? “A little bit,” he said. “But it doesn’t actually matter."

Healey seem like such a clear example of somebody who fans are gonna defend because he's, you know, complicated, and Jia gives him plenty of room for that self-portrait.

But I mean, the various people of color I follow online have absolutely no patience for this shit, and why should they? He's a racist, Swift is showing us who she is, none of this is in the least complicated: I paraphrase the perspective from non-pop music fans.with no particular iinterest in celebrity gossip. The whole thing is just another episode of White Folks Not Owning Their Racism. Should I tell them "no, read Jia's piece, he's complicated?"

“the various people of color i follow online” sounds like a scrapped matty lyric so you two may have more in common than you think… (he is probably a better editor tho)

Well, Jordan, I could define them for you in whatever more detailed demographic terms you'd prefer--maybe a chart?

jord you gonna run the streaming numbers so we can get to the bottom of this?

uh, what seems to have people most upset is his story about masturbating to an apparently deeply gross porn site called ghetto gaggers which saw described as 'white men humiliating and sexually dominating Black women — physical violence coupled with jokes about poverty, welfare, slavery, putting nooses on women, etc.'

Yes. Gross isn’t the word for that website. Evil.

Again, it’s not just a “depiction” of this. It’s also not “kink.” There are real women who are victims of this website. Plenty of testimonials online from people who were victimized on the set of this company’s videos.

what seems to have people most upset is his story about masturbating to an apparently deeply gross porn site called ghetto gaggers

which in context was definitely not serious, one of the cum town guys started telling a story about matty including that detail, and he went along with it. not a funny bit at all but no one's takeaway should be 'matty is sincerely into racist abusive porn'

i think all this shit sucks, matty crossed some lines and rightfully seems to regret it, but the game of telephone with swifties has also been completely ridiculous

they announced another north american arena tour for the fall... i don't think matty is purely cynical enough to date the most famous pop star in the world just weeks before they have to sell hundreds of thousands of new tickets, some of them in large venues they just played months ago but........

if anything this tour does mile mark the new level of popularity that they've hit... playing arenas in places like charlotte, tampa, kansas city, salt lake city, sacramento etc... the biggest venues in these cities outside of stadiums. in some cities like boston, nashville, pittsburgh they're stepping up from 4-6k cap theaters or mini-arenas to the full on 20k cap basketball/hockey venues. all after, commercially speaking, their least successful album in a half-decade! the power of matty's own celebrity is very strong, almost feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way

maybe it means a new album too. they'll have been on the road for so long that i kinda doubt it but you never know w/ them. i'll be there of course but i'm not necessarily dying to see the very best show again...

yeah, they've never disappointed live but not sure I wanna go see them again this go-round if they're not gonna have a new album behind it

it’s been rumored for years they have a drive like i do album in the tank and i demand they release it

lmao blogto gonna blogto https://www.blogto.com/music/2023/06/band-fronted-taylor-swifts-controversial-ex-coming-toronto/

One of the local stations that never used to play the 1975 played "Part of the Band" a bunch before the album came out, and I still heard it occasionally a while after. But I haven't heard them play it for months, and I've never heard this station play anything else by the band. Maybe they were just dipping a toe in, and decided it ultimately wasn't for them?

last year matty talked about the drive like i do album - iirc he said he'd recorded a bunch of stuff but most of it wasn't quite finished and it was only an EP's worth because some of the songs originally written for it elsewhere - "wintering" was from it, and "pictures of us" from beabadoobee's album

they've been working on a new album while on tour again this year but i doubt it'll be out this year. maybe we get a new single if they're really excited by something idk. i think the new tour leg is just them touring obsessively like always & realising they can just play arenas everywhere now - i don't think they quite realised how big they were when booking the previous legs and played smaller venues than they could have

*some of the songs originally written for it ended up elsewhere

this tour will be my first time seeing them. super pumped

https://www.reuters.com/world/rock-band-1975s-set-stopped-malaysia-after-onstage-kiss-2023-07-22/

that is definitely sort of the dumbass stunt matty would do

lmao

best thing he’s done in months

no it really, really, really isn't. some context that couldn't fit into that straightforward news story upthread (that I wrote btw): 

- The current ostensibly center-left, multi-ethnic government in Malaysia is only in power after having to team up with the corrupt, racist, ethno-nationalist party that was previously in charge. Their opposition: a slightly less corrupt but even more racist, ethno-nationalist alliance powered by an Islamist party whose long-term goal is to establish an Islamic state. That party currently has the largest number of seats in parliament, and were ultimately the biggest winner of last year's election - they just didn't have enough for a majority. 
- Despite claiming to be anti-West, Malaysia's Muslim hardliners pick up all of their cues and talking points from the U.S. right-wing, and so, like in the U.S., queer identity and politics are currently a major part of our culture wars. The difference is, in Malaysia, both sides are trying to out-Islam the other in order to appeal to the majority of the voting public, who are Malay and Muslim. LGBT groups here have zero political power and the few activists we have do their work at great cost and great risk to their lives, and it's only gotten harder in recent years as the community faces greater scrutiny, legal barriers and penalties (e.g. several states in the past few years have introduced Islamic laws against cross-dressing, which is punishable by caning). The LGBT communities here have worked hard to carve out spaces for themselves including at music festivals like the one that was just cancelled, which was still allowed to invite queer artists (like NOT The fucking 1975) to perform. 
- This creeping Islamisation, a process that has been going on for nearly half a century, has had a massive impact on live music and public performances in general. Foreign artists coming to perform here have to comply with strict rules on everything from dress code to conduct, and most of it is ridiculous (Beyonce is permanently banned. Kpop boybands are not allowed to have meet and greets where they hug fans. Rock frontmen can't perform shirtless. Absolutely NO kissing, same-sex or otherwise. Etc.). This means that international artists tend to skip KL entirely when they go on their Asian tours. It's become a running joke that whenever we see tour line-ups, it's always: Singapore, Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila... but no KL. Again, event organisers try to do what they can to protect and grow the spaces they have, but it's not an easy or quick process. 
- We have regional elections coming up next month. Remember what I said about the current government? They're expected to lose badly, partly because of relentless attacks by the opposition that it hasn't done enough to protect Malaysian Muslims. And how has the government responded to these attacks? By doubling down on the LGBT community, tightening rules for foreign performers, and trying to burnish their own Islamic credentials. 

Now I don't expect Matty or the band to know most or even any of this - why should they anyway? But just a tiny bit of thoughtfulness, a little reading, maybe actually speaking to queer activists here would've gone a long way. At another time, their stupid little stunt, which nobody fucking asked for, might have made the news cycle for a day - there would have been some initial blowback, but the festival prob would've issued a boilerplate apology and gone on ahead without much other repercussions.

But because of everything else that has been happening, it's now going to become a major talking point for weeks to come for the hardliners, who see this as just another failure of the "liberal' government to protect the public from "Western ideas". And for the authorities, who will see this as just another excuse to clamp down on gay people and public performances. His reckless troll bullshit has real world consequences. 

What Matty did has done absolutely nothing good for queer communities OR music fans in Malaysia. All it did was set back YEARS of hard work, empowered the hardliners, and put queer people and artists here at greater risk while the band get to fuck off and enjoy their lives elsewhere. But yay, a white guy (who's given the Nazi salute and admitted to watching degrading, sexist, racist, porn) spoke up for gay people in a little authoritarian country! And called the government a slur! Good for them! 

And before anyone else chimes in with "well, maybe the problem is not the 1975, but your authoritarian government"?  Yeah, no shit Sherlock. That's our problem to deal with, not yours.

anyway, fuck Matty Healy and this band and their fucking shitty music. 

i completely agree about this incident but lol are we really doing this shit again ("who's given the Nazi salute and admitted to watching degrading, sexist, racist, porn")

i don't care if he wasn't sincere about that shit. he isn't sincere about fucking anything, including the gay people he claims to be speaking up for

Thank you, Roz

it's also been disheartening btw to see that even though I included the POV of a local queer activist in my story, some US outlets that picked it up or parts of it chose to cut out the quote entirely (ahem the NYT, most egregiously). Sorry if it's inconvenient to recognise that speaking up doesn't always have the impact intended, and can sometimes cause more harm than good.

i don't think this stunt was insincere, matty being well-meaning but a gigantic dumbass with no understanding of context or consequences is a running theme. he absolutely should have known better and it is particularly egregious given that he pulled a similar stunt a few years ago in dubai and then later publicly reflected that it was a bad idea, despite it not going as obviously badly as it did this time.

sorry to hear that the american press are being shitty in covering it too

xpost well that, plus the 1975 has played in Malaysia before at the exact same festival a few years ago - they and their management were perfectly aware of the performance rules here. So even though matty had been acting out in public recently, the organisers didn't think twice about inviting them again because it hadn't been a problem the first time. 

anyway, they've canceled their next two shows: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk-band-1975-cancels-indonesia-taiwan-shows-after-malaysia-lgbt-controversy-2023-07-23/

While being shitty often seems to be the NYTimes house policy, they did keep the paragraph about LGBT activists accusing Healey of “performative activism” and saying “his action was likely to expose the community to more stigma and discrimination”—so I think the point is still made.

Anyway, as Healey is British, I was curious how the BBC covered it. They quote a festival director talking about how the stunt hurts “the fans(…), the festival organisers and, you know, I think the industry as a whole”—but unfortunately do not touch on the larger point that Roz’s reporting conveys.

(Whoops—apologies to Healy for misspelling his name in my post, though he seems like a heel however you spell it.)

ok sorry

<3 roz

#Onethread?

https://www.stereogum.com/2231653/matty-healy-gets-stoned-with-caveh-zahedi-and-learns-who-the-mountain-goats-are/news/

this feels ominous

https://variety.com/2023/music/news/jack-antonoff-signs-management-jamie-oborne-dirty-hit-records-universal-publishing-1235701107/

Iirc Matty Healy no longer has a corporate role at Dirty Hit, right?

More ominous to me is the band's apparent desire to tour themselves into the ground. They played here and Milwaukee in December 2022, then just a few weeks ago at Lollapalooza, then coming back to Milwaukee and Chicago area in October. That's a lot behind one album.

they tour a ridiculous amount but if anything they've been relatively restrained this year with only ~110 shows (including the rest of this year's schedule) compared to the 204 shows they played in 2014 for example

that’s how you pay the bills these days idk

xxp I thought the same thing. Friend who missed the first show asked if I wanted to go to this one. It's at Allstate, which I'd guess is, what...twice as big as Aragon? I was surprised.

They sold out the United Center in 2018 or whenever, and that's bigger than Allstate.

I’ve been waiting for “Sad Mile,” from Mousetrap, to be discovered for a soundtrack or something…

Wrong thread sorry

xxp Ah, I had no idea. Interesting.

every the 1975 song pic.twitter.com/vgkVw6NbXB

— jillkrajewski.bsky.social (@JillKrajewski) September 17, 2023

No lies told

That is excellent

lmao

you don’t hear from me at all https://t.co/jKTwO0ehcX

— Lucy Dacus (@lucydacus) September 21, 2023

that isn't quite the epic clapback twitter is making it. It's just like an affirmation of Healy's punchline.