the 1975

there's lots of weird assumptions throughout the jukebox blurbs... the idea that healy "finds joy in crassly exploiting tragedy," idk just seems like people are bringing lots of baggage to bear here. also lots of weird projection that to me seems derived from the fact that a lot of writers nowadays have trouble seeing the world outside of the internet... i.e. multiple invocations of the phrase "hot takes," which to 98% of the people who will hear this song/band is completely meaningless and not a useful/informative concept at all. but this is why most criticism sucks nowadays. iain's blurb basically admits that he can't enjoy the song because he spends too much time online -- this is not the band's fault! (also btw something they write about frequently with both insight and wit). i would encourage ppl who find their enjoyment of art to be effected by how much time they spend on twitter to quit using it. it's not worth it.

but i can't say i'm completely athwart from katherine... the emotional crescendo of the song is kicked off by "i moved on her like a bitch" and it's not something i personally scream along to at the top of my lungs for obvious reasons. and of course the band exists to attract divisiveness, their every move is almost lab-created to bait a certain segment of the population into calling bullshit on them, so that a lot of people (at least on singles jukebox) are calling bullshit on this song of all songs is not very surprising.

but the idea that the song is ironic in any way is funny to me... i don't find it irony poisoned at all, in fact the opposite, and to me reading irony poisoning into it is evidence of one's own fatal dosage. healy has said as much about cynicism/sincerity when it comes to this album & of course no one is forced to believe him but i buy the performance of the song as earnest and pained, conveying suffocation and mania but also a sort of desperately resigned hope that well maybe we will just happen to make it through all this. it me baby.

and i guess as far as the more bait-y aspects of the song -- invoking lil peep, trump, kanye etc -- i find that stuff to be tempered by what i think is rather well rendered social commentary in the format of pop music, especially contemporarily. i'm interested in why katherine is stuck on the "suffocate the black men" line... the full lyric is "selling melanin and then suffocate the black men / start with misdemeanors and we'll make a business out of it"... personally i find it to be pretty efficient and effective songwriting about america's relationship to black people and culture. i'm ok with pop music addressing & indicting private prisons! the lyric "the war has been incited and guess what you're all invited / and you're famous, modernity has failed us" to me is another sober tempering of the more theatrical political provocations elsewhere in the song -- it's a completely accurate reading of modern society to me & a more literal but also still subtle enough (to me) invoking of a general sense of helplessness that, again imo, resonates generationally.

so anyway i think this is one of the only political resonant pieces of art in any medium in the last two years. that it's a mix of ridiculousness and seriousness is what makes this band churn, and thus what explains where the majority of this thread falls on it in comparison to interlopers. but i love it so.

well "poison me daddy" is def ironic but it's also funny

but you know as it pertains to "poison me daddy" the guy was actually a heroin addict & i choose to read the lyric as a sly little commentary on the prescription opiate industry. or maybe it's about feeling like you must be strapped into the news. idk. i like that lyric a lot.

as far as the "suffocate the black men" line, because that verse starts "we're fucking in a car... saying controversial things for the hell of it" and never switches tense off the "we." so the speaker ends up, essentially, role-playing the aforementioned private prison dude, in a context that sure seems celebratory, or ironically celebratory, and also just mentioned saying controversial things for the hell of it.

I don't think this is malicious, per se -- I think it's just lazy, possibly unedited songwriting. and the laziness would be bad enough on its own, but in this case it's a white dude play-acting someone bragging about suffocating black men. like, if you're going to take on this particular subject matter then you should probably use some amount of care and thought to make sure you're not inadvertently celebrating it.

one person's "play acting someone bragging about suffocating black men" is another person's acknowledgement of complicity

i can see how someone would find it jarring out of context or hearing people sing along with it, or dislike it for that reason, and that's a completely legitimate reaction; i just stumble at the point where someone would argue that's the effect of the song when understood in full, when the lyrics are laid out, when someone hears the effect of the whole song

i cant help but feel condescended to when im told im supposed to dislike this, like i cant make the cognitive leaps required without someone holding my hand to say (and it's bad that society is like this)

I'm not saying anyone is "supposed" to dislike it, but I am getting the opposite impression from this thread in general

xp -- the "crassly exploiting tragedy" line I took to be a reference to the line in "Give Yourself a Try" about a fan committing suicide

it def feels like an implicit judgement of anyone who might interpret it this way when you're arguing that a 'slogan is a slogan' & there could not possibly be any kind of mitigating context

i think to even find any inadvertent celebration in that line to be a very classic example of reading in *coughs up enormous fur ball* bad faith

to me the narrator's POV switches every bar -- first from that of a junkie (i think the "saying controversial things just for the hell of it" line heavily implies that healy, though a junkie, is not talking about himself but instead a specific sort of disaffected youth); then to both a more general and then specific rendering of white profiteers (i read "selling melanin" to not be literal in the sense of i.e. slavery but more of a commentary on how black culture is still mostly subservient to white capitalism, which leads into the more literal application of that theory as it pertains to private prisons); then to just like the every day citizen who is having their world both personally and generally being cleaved apart by social media; and then to someone in a specific current day political position who might say "truth is only hearsay". at no point personally do i ever read any celebration into any of these POVs, intentional or otherwise.

i do adore this band more than almost anything so maybe i'm willing to give healy a long leash, but that's how i break it down to an extent. i just think it's really really good political pop songwriting.

More like Maga Healy

for approximately the millionth time, what I meant when I said I agreed with that line is that no matter what one means when they quote “I moved on her like a bitch,” they are still quoting it. (I almost put in my blurb how this does the same thing as “Royals,” in that even though you’re singing a bunch of brand names to criticize them, you are still deploying them to create a catchy hook — I left it out because it seemed tacked on and also I can’t remember where/if I read it somewhere, but it’s having your cake and eating it.)

I think Katherine’s take is fair even if I have a different one.

I do think the opening line is not intended to be a frame for the rest of the song but Jordan’s excellent post above explains that better than I could I think.

As in, I understand considering this song to be trying to have its cake and eat it too.

can we go back to never mentioning me in this thread and my never having to think about this terrible band again

the only thing I have to say re: "poison me daddy" it that it makes me think of all the "ironic" (but not actually that ironic because the future is bleak and terrifying) "I want to die" / suicide memes. I find the irony level tough to gauge as a result.

that + milo

jordan makes a good point that the ambitiousness -- and temerity -- of the song certainly invite polarized responses, and someone feeling strongly enough about the song to give it a considered pan seems totally fair to me. ultimately I think such a critique needs to grapple with the many legitimate readings of the song to be successful, something I have not tbh seen put forth yet

an issue I have with the "a slogan is still a slogan" line of thought is that its logical extension would seem to render illegitimate on its face all sorts of other kinds of physical art that make use of instruments of, say, capitalism, as a means of a broader critique. irony can be a powerful tool (if used thoughtfully!) in just about any form of art

(btw as a side note clearly this song is ironic -- I think people itt have been using "ironic" to mean something closer to...carelessness or sarcasm?)

Nah I think it occasionally or judiciously deploys irony but the effect is more like a pastiche of samples utilized to create unstable meanings thru contrast, calling the whole thingironic though is way way off imo

I like many 1975 songs but the last song we reviewed just sounds like a sonic mess, regardless of the lyrics.

ok sure calling the entire song ironic is maybe needlessly imprecise, but certainly many parts of it, particularly the parts generating the most controversy, are ironic in the literal sense

the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect.

I don’t think that’s what they’re doing in any of those examples

huh

Peak emo problems https://t.co/DK7JwOfeOv

— matty (@Truman_Black) August 17, 2018

"the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or emphatic effect."

I guess by that definition it's ironic, but on another level it seems almost painfully sincere

I thought we all learned after Daft Punk's Discovery that the question "are they being ironic or not" is a bad question to ask, because everyone has different notions about what the object of ironic treatment is. A lot of art employs ironic (or at least "knowing") gestures so as to express something sincerely felt.

I think any approach to Matt's lyrics here is helpfully informed by awareness of his lyrical approach in general, which was always a pastiche of quotations albeit in less obvious form:

"Your obsession with rocks and brown and fucking the whole town's a reflection on your mental health"

"I used to think you were cool and I believed you had a wonderful vision / But I soon found out you're a terrible friend and your mother's on the television"

"And why stay if you hate it so much? You think you're well cool / You just write about sex and killing yourself and how you hardly ever went to school"

(see also a slightly different take on "Me" - all things "Matt" has said but all of them in quotation marks. In those circumstances the title itself becomes subtly ironic)

All of the above lyrics are things people are saying back to Matt about himself, and he passes them on to the listener without framing or judgment, which in turn implies that there is some truth value to them - or, more precisely, I consider them to be Matt saying that any third party view of him probably has as much truth value as anything he might say on the topic ("truth is only hearsay") (the debut album could have been called "Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I Am").

This is a thread that runs through pretty much all of the band's songs. In that light, I consider the pastiche of "Love It If We Made It" to be saying something quite different from "lol how could anyone think or say these things" - almost the opposite, in fact. The song is saying "these are things that people think and say and do and there is no answer to any of it." It's elegiac, and the only irony is in the delivery of that elegy in the sense of not explicitly spelling out what it's doing, in the same sense that Matt's earlier lyrics don't seek to draw attention to their own dialogic structures or the reasons for those structures.

(I added the comment about "Me" in parentheses at the end - obviously that song is not an example of what is described in the next paragraph, but is instead the opposite - Matt is relaying stuff he has said and is passing judgment on it)

^yes, great posts

i cant help but feel condescended to when im told im supposed to dislike this, like i cant make the cognitive leaps required without someone holding my hand to say (and it's bad that society is like this)

'actually it's about ethics in music journalism'

LMFAOOOOOOOK

I agree, the 1975 are basically rockstar letting kids murder prostitutes in grand theft auto

^^^a good example of irony btw

idk there is some bad faith arguing in this thread that isn’t coming from deej and is coming from a place of “disagreement expressed somewhat clunkily means you hate me” - and i’m saying that as a woman fwiw

also reminder that no one has to read any ilx thread ever

dag you ruined my four-consecutive-complaining-posts bingo

“Actually it’s about trying to own ppl online”

maura otm, heated differences of opinions about pop songs can feel like personal attacks, but that's not necessarily the place they are coming from.

the "personal attack" is in bringing something I wrote for a different website here -- by name, which means it is Googleable -- to call me a troll.

Fair. I think it's fine to discuss it, don't think we need to call each other trolls or insane because we disagree.

Insane Troll Posse

It probably would have been easier to ask the mods to googleproof your name than having a total meltdown across multiple threads

ffs lay off

given that I have never seen any evidence of moderators existing, let alone doing anything, in the several years I have posted here, that seems doubtful

Ban l0u1s jagg3r

see

this is what happens when u create a board full of ppl whose job it is is to have opinions.

everyone thinks their opinion is amazing
no-one listens to anyone
and no-one knows when to shut the fuck up

i could not give less of a fuck about any of this but the fact that someone would post under the same name on multiple websites that discuss the same topic and then act confused that those streams would cross is funny

yes, and believe me, I am thoroughly regretting that decision

you've never made any effort at all to be anonymous on ilx so like, i'm not sure what you were expecting?

I'm expecting that I can go about my day-to-day business without something I wrote on an entirely different site being dragged into a thread I have deliberately not been participating in, in order to pile onto it and call me a troll. this really doesn't seem like much to ask

idk, if i go somewhere else and post a bunch of bullshit as call all destroyer (idk if what you posted elsewhere is bullshit, i'm just saying) and ppl on ilx talk about it, don't i just have to roll with that?