Why Do Men, Specifically, Hate The 1975?

"It is sexist to hate the 1975" – Phoebe Bridgers, January 2020.

Firstly, I’d like to apologise to my paid subscribers for the time that has passed since the last newsletter. I’m on my fourth consecutive week of ‘having some kind of illness’ but I’m finally emerging from the bog, so regular service will resume from now on.

Secondly, I will disclaim in advance that pretty much every mention of “men” in the text below, unless specified otherwise, refers primarily to straight cis men. I don’t want to type that out over and over again because it’s a pain in the arse and annoying to read, so for the sake of brevity and good faith please assume I mean them lot. Ok? Ok. Here we go.

There is a popular contrarian “joke” that misogyny is when men hate women as much as women hate other women. The idea, often deployed by the hosts of Red Scare podcast and similar, is that women have a much greater capacity for cruelty than their liberal media image allows for. That female beauty standards are enforced more dogmatically by women than the men who covet them, that girl-on-girl bullying guns for your fucking soul over time rather than clipping you in the moment, and that the arbiters of womanhood – i.e. how a woman “should” look, feel, behave – are women themselves. Obviously this completely obfuscates the pervasive evils of domestic terrorism, domestic violence, femicide etc that take root in misogyny and are perpetrated overwhelmingly by men, but there is some truth to it. Turns out you can’t boil half the population down to a set of one dimensional characteristics – shocking! Anyway, my point is we talk about the hatred of women constantly regardless of where it’s coming from. The whole “gender wars” is about the bad things that are done to women and by whom, the ways in which feminism is perceived as “harmful” to men, and the transgender moral manic which, conveniently, focuses entirely on women. What rarely gets talked about is the fact that if “misogyny is when men hate women as much as women hate other women” holds some weight, then so does the reverse. And what interests me more than anything else is observing instances of male hatred towards other men.

My current favourite example is The 1975. Men hate The 1975. Specifically, they’re repelled by frontman Matty Healy, who has become a highly potent magnet for male-on-male ire. Men also love to be vocal about the fact that they hate The 1975. I won’t bother linking to examples because social media is awash with them, but based on what I’ve seen the most popular accusations are: they’re cliché, they’re cringe, it’s music for playing in shops, it’s music – actually I will give an example here because it’s so specifically presumptuous – “for white women who work in marketing”. Everywhere you turn: men who “can’t stand” The 1975 and yet are unable to specify why. For the pedants at the back: obviously not all men hate The 1975, and not all haters of The 1975 are men. Matty Healy is a polarising figure because he’s perceived as pretentious and narcissistic (more on that later), and continually the subject of debate over whether he’s “problematic” or “cancelled”. However, there is a phenomenon of men in particular suffering an extreme allergic reaction to The 1975, music and performance-wise. So I’m going to focus on that because it’s funny.

First off, it’s extremely easy to make fun of The 1975. Matty Healy is an exhausting paradox. A hardcore kid raised by Loose Woman Denise Welch and Lesley off of Benidorm. A former heroin addict who drinks more red wine on stage than Dylan Moran in the 90s and has a passion for karate. An intellectually curious man with a lot to say about art, technology, sex, politics and the culture wars who tweets like literally no one is watching, is physically unable to remove his foot from mouth, and uses an autotune mic to sing “dOnT tHroW mEnTHols oN tHiS StaGE” in place of his own lyrics. He’s a shitposter, basically. He’s also very good at what he does.

“A lot of the tropes you find in our music come from film,” Healy said in a recent in-depth interview on Sodajerker, talking about the influences of cinema, literature and postmodernism on The 1975. He likens his public persona to a character in a film who’s aware that he’s in a film. “I know that I’m in a song. I know that I’m Matty from The 1975 talking to somebody who knows who Matty from The 1975 is, so I can make a joke about [something from] two albums ago because you’ve been a part of it.”

This is particularly vexing for those who prefer their men-and-guitars music to come from the straight talking mouth of a “lad from your local” type. A mainstay of the British music industry, pervasive to its own detriment. Conversely, The 1975 is built on self-referential humour and terminally online language. Their music bores into modern phenomena like porn and incel culture and post-truth, but operates at a slight remove. They have a constant balance of sincerity and playfulness and a high concept approach to world building that, much like initial reactions to PC Music, can prevent listeners from meeting the music on its own terms. Picture Matty Healy “down your local” and he’s probably getting sparked.

People often demand that if an artist has something serious to say, then they have to present it in a serious way. (For all his other offences, Morrissey – famous for taking similarly grand, verbose panoramas of society with a focus on masculinity and shame – is rarely accused of being unserious.) The 1975 are in discord with that demand. In “Love it if We Made It” (literally an Adam Curtis documentary with a chorus), Healy boils cultural volatility down into a manifesto of shareable slogans and Donald Trump quotes. In the video for “The Birthday Party”, he nails wanted posters for a "goth gf" onto trees in a virtual universe and spends the rest of the video looking for her. In interviews, he will give deep, loquacious explanations for lyrics as simple as “Thank you Kanye, very cool!”

The resistance to that aspect of the band reminds me of the controversy around Sean Thor Conroe’s novel Fuccboi – a satire of heterosexual masculinity in the gig economy era, written in the voice of a twenty-something Soundcloud rap enthusiast with delusions of oppression. He fucks with this, doesn’t fuck with that. All his love interests are baes (“ex bae”, “editor bae”, “side bae”). The bibliography references Lil B, David Foster Wallace and Hitler. A lot of people found it funny; a breath of fresh air. A lot of male critics – mainly of Conroe’s generation, perhaps feeling as though they were meant to recognise at least a shadow of themselves – ha-ted it.

A few years ago The Tab published an opinion piece by a young lad calling The 1975 the lamest band in the world. The author slams the band as “performatively woke” and their music as “pure H&M changing rooms”, but I think the most revealing passage is as follows:

“The problem with the 1975 is they take themselves too seriously, mistakenly thinking they are making some divine contribution to art and culture when really they're making music for people who cry after having sex.”

This basically synthesises the male argument against The 1975. They care too much, they’re too brooding, too weak – qualities viewed as being traditionally feminine in nature, and which, when employed by other men, tend to rankle. I’ve written about this before in a piece on La Dispute’s Somewhere At the Bottom of the River, Between Vega and Altair, a fiercely loved but also widely mocked post-hardcore album that splits people down the middle for the much same reason. The argument is also responsible for the existence of the term “emo”, the historic disregard of boy bands, and the lack of value ascribed to digitally-native artists from Lil B to Lil Peep to Drain Gang. If you want to go back far enough you can also see it in early responses to Elvis and The Beatles. In all cases these are men who present us with non-traditional forms of male expression, whether it’s emotional, intellectual or sexual, and are celebrated for it. Some objections will come on a purely aesthetic basis – I hate Gorillaz, for instance, and couldn’t give you a good reason why – but there’s also a pattern of resistance to male melodrama that comes up again and again. As soon as ‘fandom’ kicks in, so does disdain.

In January 2020, Phoebe Bridgers tweeted: “It is sexist to hate the 1975”. Funny. But also… kind of true? As a stand-alone tweet it can be read as a half-joke. The same genre of ‘obviously overblown generalisation with a kernel of truth behind it’ observation that Healy himself tends to trade in. She probably could have left it there and the point would have stood, but there is more. “Teenage girls invented [The 1975] being famous,” Bridgers extrapolated in a June 2020 interview with The Forty Five. “Like, teenage girls invented The Beatles. Teenage girls invented music. You’re trying to say that something’s stupid just because teenage girls like it? It’s fucking insane.” 

That interview was given a month after the release of The 1975’s 2020 album Notes On A Conditional Form, which Bridgers appears on. It divided fans and critics into camps of “sprawling vanity project (genius)” and “sprawling vanity project (crap)”. In Healy’s words, it’s their “UK nighttime record; in cars smoking weed, Burial and McDonald’s and the M62 and Manchester – just England.” For my money it’s not their best, but still contains some of their sharpest songwriting. “If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)” gets as close as it’s possible to get to articulating the murky line between attraction and porn-sickness; the seediness we project onto intimacy over the internet compared to intimacy in person, regardless of the details. For its detractors, the album is self-indulgent and unserious – the latter criticism being the most damning, and the underlying aspect of Bridgers’ point that makes it ring true.

A lack of “seriousness” has a lot to do with why men in particular seem so rattled by The 1975. A band beloved by teenage girls, sure, but that's perhaps a consequence of their complaint rather than the origin of it. Teenage girls are more open to the balance of frivolity and earnestness that The 1975 deal in. They’re more open to fun as a valuable characteristic of good art rather than a mark against it, and they’re more open to expressing their love of something loudly and whole-heartedly. Screaming, crying, throwing up and things of that nature. Generally speaking men who hate The 1975 don’t seem to have an issue with the actual substance of their music, but with how it’s expressed.

@steps2adventure#duet with @Andres Reyna #the1975

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There’s a new TikTok trend that has girls stitching a clip of Matty performing live – singing Call me when you’re bored and you’re playing with yourself”, then running his fingers down his torso towards his crotch and rolling his eyes back, Ahegao-style – with videos of their boyfriends reacting to it. Usually the reaction is not good. Maybe they hate it because it turns their girlfriends on. Maybe they hate it because it turns them on. Maybe they just find it annoying. Much to think about, as Billy Ray Cyrus would say. But I think, very often, what Matty Healy presents is a sexual threat. He commands stadiums of screaming women by being lithe and affecting a “submissive and breedable” vibe – same as Elvis, same as Lil Peep, same as Paul McCartney sorry as I am to say that about an 80-year-old man with a knighthood, same as Harry Styles – that flies in the face of everything men are traditionally told they should be. When a man cringes at Matty Healy, he’s cringing at the thought of being seen doing what Matty Healy is doing.

A distinct undercurrent of repression runs through many criticisms of the way Matty Healy speaks and performs. A belief that he’s being too much, in the way that women are often seen as being too much. Fuck that though. Confront your inner cringe and free. Publicly brag about being hot. Wiggle your hips to “Gasolina”. Unbutton your shirt and do forward rolls on stage after saying “give it up for the world’s most based white boys”. Do pegging or something, I don’t know. Have a laugh. 

Or continue to hate The 1975 because you sincerely think their songs are bad. You’d be wrong, of course, but that’s your choice.