Matty Healy Pop Culture In The 21st Century

TITLE: Matty Healy: Pop Culture in the 21st Century | Doomscroll CHANNEL: Joshua Citarella DATE: 2024-10-22 ---TRANSCRIPT--- your favorite album will probably be an album that you hate the first time you hear it that’s the definition of the Avant guard right there’s some kind of like culturally Progressive Force but then there’s also a like willingness to experiment with a new tool new piece of technology so media consumption has been individualized subculture has been individualized and and commodified the cautionary tale of my last record which was essentially like don’t get red pilled and black pilled try normal life maxing welcome to Doom scroll I’m your host Joshua citarella my guest is Maddie Healey a musician an artist and the frontman of the 1975 my work has always kind of served as like a cautionary tale for emerging Technologies how we’re communicating all within the context of what traditional pop music will talk about you know like love relationships and stuff like that I’m sure we’ll talk about my last show which was kind of a cautionary tale about the situation we have with young men who are dealing with articulating a a kind of a modern form of masculinity and how maybe the left which I’m historically a part of doesn’t quite have the equipment to bring in these or capitalize on this this this group of floundering young men because you know we don’t have the language for it we don’t have the language and also we don’t have the archetypes we didn’t have uh tools like professional managerial class I mean we had them we had them from 1971 they existed but uh they weren’t in popular use they weren’t colloquial terms that people could like Ah that’s like PMC we’re in a different Society now where it’s all about self-actualization it’s all about becoming the most best authentic version of yourself right without any institutions to kind of guide you of how to do that it’s difficult right so a lot of young men will find a Jordan Peterson video not to talk uh [ __ ] on any particular academic I’m I’m not a very partisan person but you will get people who will be like basically understand that idea of being like Oh you’re a man who wants to be a man right here is literally 12 rules of how do you know what I mean so it’s um so only 12 only sounds actually quite so my last show was in part kind of a traditional Rock Show and in part a uh a performance art piece that kind of operated a bit like a play in its First Act yeah and a traditional Rock show in its second act and the First Act came from the covid years and me becoming single over that time and basically starting to consume from what started out as a kind of interesting a perspective of being interested in these subcultures of internet and I started being fed all of this algorithmic kind of extrem they got you tar they got me targeted so luckily there’s people like us that can kind of see that as an objective phenomena and not be too influenced by it but I became aware of how influential it was and um I basically was trying to navigate of how not to get caught up in that world so the one thing I would add to this because we tend to use these words like extreme and Fringe and so on but we’re in a unique a unique period of society and history where we actually have quantitative metrics about how many people watch this stuff and the question I keep asking guests who come onto this podcast is uh how do we describe something that is fringe subcultural or outside the mainstream if it is quantitatively larger than the mainstream is there some something that we need to redefine here like if everybody is watching this like maybe that just is actually the new extreme uh the new mainstream and it is not extreme it is not Fringe this is the problem that we get into that we’ll get into in a little bit yeah you’re you’re you’re totally right that anything that becomes listen consumer capitalism understands Trends better than anybody as soon as something is alternative it becomes immediately corrupted by the mainstream now you see that in music a lot now in its most I think um extreme way you have these um I want to single anybody out but I’m sure you could imagine who is there’s this group of um Tick Tock punks essentially that Tik Tok punks well kind of there’s this basically there’s this new um scene of very overtly alternative artists in the way that we would describe somebody who’s gone to Hot Topic you know what I mean and we’re in this weird place where for their young a audience they are presenting these ideas as kind of and these Aesthetics chains skirts doing that being being alternative in the way we were 50 years ago 40 years ago and um they are basically presenting authenticity as just another commodity in an aesthetic so so the fact that they are [ __ ] the man but all signed to like Island records and they’re also referencing um Sid Vicious in the same sentence that they reference Good Charlotte and AAL LaVine now our generation knows that that version of punk was bunch of white dudes in suits going oh people like Silver Chair and Nana we need a pop version and that’s where you got like your kind of early 2000s alternative music which were all the biggest artists in the world you know what I mean and would you would you say that part of the rise of this new kind of reactionary online culture has to do with that commodification of the like Counter Culture the idea of punk that you and I both grew up with and if that is now mainstream and sold to you through like Hot Topic and everything else then uh yeah it’s kind of not surprising that like the inverse of that then feels like a little bit more dangerous it’s weird for me because as I’ve gotten older I think I’ve been able to articulate these ideas a lot better but I’ve um been feeling them for a long time so for example when I started the the band became known in this very very interesting transition or kind of passing of the Baton from traditional linear media institutions to social media which was so you basically used to have the enemy that would choose a band put them on the front cover give you one song and say this is your new favorite band I’ll just kind of I’ll Define for the audience the um the performance piece that was a really a center piece P of your last live show involved uh beginning with a plate of what appeared to be a healthy Hefty portion of raw meat which you proceeded to consume in front of the audience you then do a bit of a workout routine you’re uh doing some shirtless push-ups in the beginning behind you is uh what appears to be I mean I would not be surprised to see this performance in an art gallery or a museum this was just a piece of performance art in the middle of a rock show there’s a wall of TVs behind you they’re playing what appears to be protest footage uh different news Clips I recognize a few faces from kind of the conservative alternative media sphere and towards the end of this you literally Crawl Through the television screen and go down the rabbit hole so to speak so I thought it was a beautiful piece of performance art I thought it was very empathetic I thought it was an interesting way to explore the phenomena of masculinity that I know both you and I are very interested in especially in the last few years like we’re both kind of artsy creative types we were not like Macho jocks in high school yeah we were beaten up for being gay yes exactly and I wasn’t even gay in high school this is the whole thing and I had I had long hair and that was enough exactly exactly and now it’s like these things have all been like thoroughly redefined and it’s a kind of interesting media experiment but then also kind of like interesting social experience just to see how the definition of masculinity has shifted within that period and so you were exploring this through ART it naturally went uh absurdly viral on Tik Tok and a number of other places uh and the reaction the public reaction to that has been kind of an interesting um realtime test of you know all of these different media theories uh at once it made me aware of this new culture that um TR that Brad Brad TRL for people watching which is which is a our good friend who wrote part of the show with me um the phenomena that that he coined as literalism yes so this idea of I consume the art and the moral values within the art adhere to mine and the person who’s making the art therefore aligns with me morally and socially right now art used to be less of a um less of a mirror and more of a door that we opened you know and if you look at like the ’90s with your kind of the culture of Gen X they were very interested in opening as many doors as possible to see what their limits were and then going yeah I’m good with that but not that that shouldn’t happen right so so what what I thought was interesting is that for me it was obvious what I was doing from an artistic perspective but to some to a lot of people even people with context it was quite confusing and I think that the reason it was confusing nowadays is because let’s call it a meme culture so the primary discourse in like youth culture now is is kind of through memes so it’s sharing these images or these ideas that are immediately very understandable and relatable yes so if you consume something now within that environment be it in a in a clear net environment um Tik Tok or something like Clearnet is uh for the audience big open social media platforms that are free to that are driven by advertising so Instagram Facebook Twitter anything you don’t have to pay to post there’s no pay wall and Etc so clear net everyone can see it yeah and we’ll get into that later that underneath that you have this kind of dark forest with a merging kind of platforms and then the one that we all know underneath that is the is the dark web a topology of Internet culture so so we’ll get into this but clear net right now are just like big open social media and the responses are uh driven a lot by attention by attention and by incentive as well so you have lots phenomenas that we know about in regards to I wasn’t playing any uh good or bad character I was trying to be as objective in my performance about listen this is not where you want to end up do you know what I mean so I would be doing these things that were I think when you look at them on on the screen quite provocative but of part of the show felt a little bit more surreal and kind of acceptable because you were in an environment where you were there to watch art you weren’t like in your kitchen yes yes and I think that when you’re exposed to things that require context or are supposed to elicit a real conversation um in an environment that isn’t really about that you get all of these emerging phenomenas happening would you say that part of the conversation that ensued online was um perhaps a fulfillment of the piece to to provoke these conversations we had it also got into a problem that that basically there would be all of this conversation around what I was doing why I was doing it and what it meant so we everyone knows that that’s kind of the point of performance art to generate a conversation which becomes part of the art itself so I’ve I learn very much in the early days of social media you can kind of control a now narrative right you can control the conversation that you want to be had around you fairly well the weird thing about that show is that every other performance like that a performance in a gallery a theater performance a movie a stand-up comedy thing you can’t film it you’re not allowed to film it a rock show you invited to film it so I had this scripted thing that on day two went live to the whole world so I had to kind of keep rewriting it so then I was reacting to what was being said so it was becoming this quite like meta kind of thing and um this is something that you can relate to so me and you used to with our social media and stuff and and I think me from a brief inquiry onwards we would draw from the most extreme parts of the internet yes and we would post about them because we found that culture interesting and we Shadow band over and over Shadow all all these kind of things now what we were doing was presenting this new phenomena of behavior and asking people to engage with us in a conversation of what it was about whether we make art about it and stuff like that and because I was doing that whenever people would miss the point I think that I got into the habit of being like well my track record speaks for itself or this is art or context blah blah blah blah blah but what I realized that I was actually getting myself into and I’ve heard you Ed this this sentence before is a kind of a series of moments of context collapse where people became genuinely unaware of what I was UN lampooning what I was unironically platforming what I was supporting and what I wasn’t so I’ve stopped doing that as much anymore I think that you know there’s a certain uh section of my fans that are very like me that are very interested in this thing that like the kind of [ __ ] posty thing because like me and you they like taking silly things seriously which is I think that we we we take that idea very very seriously but for a lot of people you know what I realized is that I don’t want to I don’t want one of my posts or something that I say or do to alienate some young person who takes their affiliation with right a community say it’s like even being into the 1975 like seriously I think that I’ve grown to have a bit more responsibility with the way that I talk about these kind of things this is precisely the question is what um what are the threshold are the parameters of responsibility with a large audience right and I’m I’m personally conflicted about this maybe something we can explore uh a little bit more deeply but um for uh uh just to give the citations here so context collapse is a term that was coined by Dana Boyd who was the founder of data and society which is a a think tank that specializes in social media it is also sometimes um analize to pose law which was uh a rule that emerged on forchan but basically anything that is said in Gest or in irony on the internet given to a scale of like millions and millions of people someone in there is going to take it 100% seriously and so this um this is kind of the media theory behind why we need to have certain uh levels of individual responsibility in what we post yes now the the flip side of that um my concern is that when we enforce those things to heavily um and we’re saying that people are not able to deal or interpret or should not be exposed to complicated art we’re saying that most people are too stupid to get involved with art right and that’s actually a profoundly anti-democratic thing that they’re too dumb to make up their own minds if you extrapolate that out a bit further it’s like well they can’t have aesthetic preferences they can’t choose what art and culture they like to participate in should they be able to vote you know there’s like really weird Downstream implications when you start to say that most people are too stupid to make up their own minds so I you know I’m willing to concede that there are certain parameters I I behave a lot more better on social media now before I would share all sorts of like extreme material I mean I literally wrote a book about it I’m willing to have the long-term conversation I find what is um maybe similar to your experience what really um restricts the kind of like outrageous posting that I would do before is that now I’m part of an organization I’m part of a community right and so I think about how my personal post is going to affect the career of like a 24-year-old BFA student who they put their work on to do not research and this is like you know the the thing that get they get up in the morning to do they really care about that art and it’s like I would hate for my [ __ ] post to be misin reted and then negatively affect this kid who’s just like aspiring to get his foot in the door for some creative career that’s really that’s really have same thing like um I ran into a series of issues with basically you know I am an artist first and I also run well creatively run my record label so I’m I’m not a boss but I’m a figurehead for a lot of other artists now what conflicts me is I don’t want my right to express myself exactly how I want to negatively impact on those people that I’m genuinely trying to empower you know what I mean and it’s difficult being like uh different artists and being disperate and all trying to kind of operate under the same I don’t want to call it like a moral framework but a um a you know a I I don’t know how he would desr it a kind of a way of Behaving that adheres to a 20-year-old girl or a 3 5ye old man that’s been doing something so um one of the challenges for me is um doing something like a show at the Garden right that people leave saying wow that was a really really interesting music show and you did you did this piece of performance art at the Garden during show yeah we did it at some of the biggest kind of venues in the world the energy in those rooms was was electric because I think people we we’ll get into the cancellation of the future but I think that when people go to environments and they experience something that is even in a new in in a in a small Way new it’s it’s it’s it’s very exciting and I think that I just wanted to um do something that felt a bit more reflective of what media is like now do you know what I mean and how the how it makes you feel it’s difficult to kind of explain explain the show but one of the things that I had to become aware of is that we’re like quite a big band right and there’s what I’m interested in one of the things that I think that is important for me is to take more academic ideas from my peers or my friends like you or trell or whoever it was and kind of present them in an in an understandable and kind of appropriate way within pop music so you know the reason that I didn’t do we didn’t want to do a a show at a at a gallery or something like that is not just because of our resentment for institutions now in art galleries but also is because I wanted to do it in an environment that had a large audience and kind of was as much as I could make high art with with a broad appeal you know because it’s actually ironic that as long as there’s there’s groups of people like me thinking the same way you’ve kind of got more chance now of going to a rock show and experiencing a real piece of art than you do go to a museum yes yeah I mean the the great irony and this is similar to what you mentioned before of uh as fiser describes the slow cancellation of the future so for for my fans your fans will know all about that just explain that because this is a theory that me and you Riff on all the time yeah yeah hauntology slow cancellation of the Future these are ideas that are coming from uh a pop culture theorist let’s say pop culture political theorist named Mark Fischer whose famous book capitalist realism written in the uh The Fallout from 2008 kind of explores this um problem of the 21st century of not having a political alternative socialism Was Defeated its capitalism from here on and forever what Fischer is writing about is the developmental Arc of neoliberalism when we talk about lost Futures there’s a Perpetual Nostalgia for the80s now what happened in the 1980s it was Reagan in my country and Thatcher where you grew up and uh the vulker shock with profound interest rates and uh Shoring up of the money supply and the Advent of neoliberalism in which everybody got a lot more poor and started to work harder for less and so the uh kind of utopian imaginaries the optimistic visions of the future that had emerged in the’ 60s 7s leading up until that point began to recede from popular culture if you look at the kind of imaginaries of like you know I think of uh the origin series of Star Trek which I grew up watching like they had communism in the future they had post scarcity it’s like yeah it was like Utopia no one people just pursue their own intellectual interest no one wants for anything um they have replicators that just like 3D print their food all of the sudden and the future imaginaries of the 21st century are things that are like totally dystopian they’re all falling apart it’s all like you know the The Future Has extreme wealth disparity and people are living in poverty and uh we’re uploading our brains to the internet and the then the robots are going to kill us uh that’s the future imaginary that we have now this slow cancellation of the future uh something that you and I talk about a lot corresponds to in aesthetic stagnation on top of the political and economic stagnation in that the amount of creative risk that people could take in previous generations was proportionately more and that was mostly because the wage floor was high the cost of living was low and so the total amount of decommodified time like you could spend 25 30% of your time just making punk music or doing your weird art practice and you never have to worry if you like sell that album or you sell that painting and you can just kind of experiment and like you know experience the joy of creating stuff aesthetic pleasure and so on and as Society has become more and more privatized over the course of neoliberalism the total amount of free time that people have to pursue creative practices is uh basically that has disappeared from contemporary life yeah and what it’s created is this hyper commodified uh sphere of art where the only art that is worth making or is or is possible to make is is art that is successful financially or does numbers has to be immediately successful has to be immediately successful so yeah listen you’re so articulate and and what you just said had all of the information but some people might be might have to watch that about three or four times what you’re kind of saying is that like in like the ’90s you could have a job in the service industry and you could work as a musician at night do you know what I mean the economy allowed you to do two things so you could make experimental music that went out to a certain group of people and you could work in a coffee shop and you could afford rent exactly the economy allowed for you to do that Phoebe buffet was the the ultimate uh pop culture example of that kind of uh economic uh result of of a type of artist when like you said once neoliberalism kind of started to totally Decay any socially Democratic aspects of society and your art funding went away and stuff like that young people were forced to well there was actually this really interesting thing that happened that when we were growing up in the ’90s the one thing you didn’t do was sell out so if you so if you were making just enough money to live off your art don’t sign the check for Nike because you’re kind of getting into bed with consumer capitalism the hour at the time community of artists is fighting against once it was so obvious that consumer capitalism and the the the marching horizonless uh kind of a motion of neoliberalism had won young people had to change this idea from selling out to getting the bag yes so now so now you you get the bag yeah yeah that was the millennial experience of like I’m bootstrapping entrepreneur this is it right so I think that like um I think that what happened was that young people became encouraged to make art for money right and the the art that young people can make for money is homogeneous art for big companies yeah so for example the most creative young graphic designer now is probably just making some flat design for a an internet startup do you know what I mean because that’s the only thing that they can afford to do you have that issue and then from a kind of class issue which isn’t so much of a thing that I see spoken about in America because you have such a huge middle class it’s very different but I was brought up in an incredibly class orientated environment my dad was a I come from a kind of second generation upper middle class and my dad was am was a welder who became an a stand-up comedian and then he became an actor in this TV show called Avid Z pet and it was a show about thatchers uh the era of kind of the the loss of subsidization of industry in the north of England and all of these workingclass Blue Collar men and communities of men having to go to Germany to work to make money right and this show it was a comedy and my dad kind of became like a political cultural figurehead so I grew up in all of this kind of anti- Thatcher very much aware of how social Mobility worked and the social mobility in my family was acquired through ART now the issue that we have now with neoliberalism is neoliberalism has decayed this is a Fisher thing but has decayed any socially Democratic aspect of society that previously allowed the working class to be a dominant part of the culture natur production of our society so basically poor people used to be able to do that so my dad was a welder right and he won day down tools and wanted to be a stand-up comedian and from the government just by asking them got enough money to buy an ambulance and him and his friend decided to do the first ever they were they were touring comedians in comedy clubs where toothless Hench men would be like I’ll give you 20 P make 20 P to make me laugh You’ be like [ __ ] H and they they were like [ __ ] it let’s go and do a play in these environments they would put a small set in an ambulance and they would drive to the Dunston Working Man Social Club incredible and they would do a play to these confused people but what that turned into was a company that still exists on the key side in Newcastle called the live theater company and it’s still is a environment that invites young people to come in and EXP experiment with theater nowc those kind of things just aren’t funded now so we have these these physical monuments that I actually kind of go to see what’s the word when you religiously go and see pilgrimage I almost go pilgrimages to these m is to see not only what my dad created but what the the kind of economy and the social fabric that I was brought up in and that I was kind of promised created that’s the Lost future right there future right and so what I have been really interested in over the past couple of years is uh we lost fiser tragically in 2017 in the only way I think he could have gone I would have been really interested to see what he thought about my band because I couldn’t articulate these ghosts in our society that we can all feel but we don’t really know how to put our finger on what he was basically saying for a lot of people who don’t know his work is that the 21st century is defined by its inability to articulate itself aesthetically and politically Fisher puts it the 21st century is just the 20th century on higher resolution screens and um indeed it is and and and the only before the comments fill up with um with people talking about the the the the elements of maybe slight shortsightedness in those writings because I think the emergence of real subcultures that didn’t last for very long like witch house and the influence of I think the most influential band over the past 20 years is 36 mafia hands down there is no band or there is no group or people who made music whose pop music references more it’s the tempo of trap music it’s the they started doing this rapping became like that that’s all three things it’s all pop it’s all trap so black music started to articulate the 21st century a bit when we got to around about 2011 and onwards and that’s kind of when I came out again just to to explain this Theory to to my fans who maybe not quite understand it is that we’ve gotten to a place now where we can’t quite imagine some thing truly revolutionary and new and spending the time and acquire building the audience for that new revolutionary thing is too expensive it’s exactly my favorite example of this is um and it’s a fantastic film the Irishman where uh when the film was sold it has you know Stars Robert dairo and he ages I don’t know like what like 40 years in the course of the narrative uh it was easier to sell the film and to later invent the technology to deage him rather than to invest in another young actor who could play the younger version of him and I think uh this is very pronounced in film the kind of classic the easy example of it is just this infinite reboots of films that have already been made and that’s not like necessarily oh well um we were overdue for another one of these like we uh we do these every 10 years it’s because from a financial Viewpoint it’s a really risky investment to put money into any sort of new IP so people accumulate this massive amount of data they become very risk averse in a uh in an environment that is not yielding a ton of profits and they’re like I’m going to invest in the safest thing possible and that means I’m going to do 500,000 Marvel movie reboots and that’s the only culture we’re going to get and we’re going to get more Star Wars and we’re going to get it every year on Christmas or whatever but we’re never going to invest in something that is aesthetically new you see this across film you see it across music you see it across art in the art World in particular which is my background you see everything has now taken the shape of a 30x40 painting that fits over the couch because that’s the only thing that can sell and being risk averse in a condition of declining rates of profit is just a very rational thing but this underlying political economic situation is shaping our Aesthetics and our culture and so when you see this played out in different fields it feels very uh kind of safe and boring and it doesn’t have this like radically new aesthetic experience that we had in decades previous before you start this this is what I want you to talk to you about and I’ve written this down I want to talk to you about the Museum of ice cream ification but this is our thing right and this is only stuff this is only stuff that I write down when we’re on the phone that I want to go into more with you but what I wanted to ask you was about this concept the the Museum of ice cream ification of art institutions how they have become at adult daycare centers and the loss of gatekeeping in art institutions being a bad thing in general how alternative institutions need need to be subsidized to recreate a culture is defined by creation rather than consumption and um Ai and Clearnet platforms being anti- creation and proc consumption so explain to to my audience the Museum of ice cream ification of art institutions well okay so um if you’re a young creative you have probably grown up with this idea that um what we need to do as like progressives very broadly speaking is we have to overthrow the corrupt institutions right that like that’s the man that’s what you should fighting against and whatever uh and I would say that there’s actually there’s a conflict right now amongst the ruling class about how they prefer to organized Society some people like to be patrons uh but others do not and so in the period that both you and I grew up one of the things that was offered to Young creatives was a platform in which anyone can post there’s no editors there’s no curators there’s no Gatekeepers you can bypass any opinion and just post what you want to the platforms those people this is very curious and pronounced in the art World they never donated to museums unlike the the carnegies unlike the Fricks unlike all of the robber barons of the 20th century that you know pillaged Society but then gave back in the form of these extraordinary libraries and museums and public institutions like the Opera for example the new 21st century Silicon Valley robber barons have not chosen to give back to culture and that’s actually very unique thing in the development of capitalism because usually when people take a lot off of the table they give something back in some way I think that’s an ideological decision because what they would say is that we actually built all the Platforms in which you can upload all of your thoughts to YouTube you can post them to Twitter or whatever and so now everybody is an artist and we gave you the means to do that to publish and so on so and everybody’s an activist and well that is that is naturally naturally one of the the results so um I like to take this kind of contrarian position in that um what we are seeing is actually an erosion of the public of the public sphere and of public Goods through this competing structure of the platform and so I think actually the generation the logic that we were raised with to rebel against the institutions is kind of pretty outmoded by like 20 years right these are relatively new phenomena like the mass adoption curve of Facebook is like 2012 so I I mean the way in which the academy catches up to these things um we’re we’re still a few decades away like we’re still learning this kind of Fuko Boomer like rebel against the weak they’ve they were defeated and I’m a of not using the platforms as our desired Alternatives I think we need to build new institutions exactly I’m not saying the existing ones are savable I think the the task of our generation of people like you and me is to build new institutions new trustworthy institutions because the platforms are turning everything into the [ __ ] Museum of ice cream where everything is content for ad views and so on if you look up the new van go experience the new van go experience which is an Institutional art is an Art institution uh saying come and see our art show they are not actually expecting people to come and revel in the aesthetic Delights of projectors what they want you to do is come and create content that becomes advertisement for the institution itself same with the Museum of ice cream they are no longer art institutions they are essentially adverts for the concept of an Art institution or The Art institution itself which is why you’ll go to a gallery and you’ll walk in and you’ll go the uh cuse times Rick and Morty experience and you’ll have some art speak but what it’s actually I can actually see that what it’s actually for is for like Brad post next week and it’s a real thing two weeks later this is the whole thing one of the things let’s start with that idea of the idea of the ice gamification of art institutions now it’s not just art institutions but it’s it’s big media corporations so take whatever example of a huge uh artist or or a concept like Marvel the the most endur again tremell will talk about this the most enduring product that has been created by those companies is the consumer identity of what Marvel or artists have realized over the P 15 years with social media and people’s kind of projection of who they are and uh is that being a fan of something is now a form of political identity so when I grew up if you when I when I grew up if you were a super fan of something if you went over to someone’s house and they were a super fan of something think before you went in their bedroom they would go listen I’m not [ __ ] weird just just don’t judge me are you thinking of like a specific person right now there a couple of people like Oasis and youd walk in and their room was a shrine this and the relationship was I don’t know how the camera can pick me up but say there’s a poster on your wall your relationship was looking at this poster your relationship with fandom now is is going like this to the poster like showing other people and you become ESS a of the promotional labor force of the company itself I mean this this is practically speaking it’s called user generated content built into uh advertising campaign how many people you can get to spread the post and share it and engagement so I don’t like doing that I think it’s very very contrived so I try and stay away from that in the kind of in The 1975 sphere and um so so that’s one of the interesting one of the interesting things and about that kind of our institutional problem art and Aesthetics is how we compute and understand time H and when that dissolves right the depressive flattening of culture yes is what Fisher talks about and again for my fans let me just give like a really obvious example if if I said to anybody the 60s or the 70s or the ’ 80s the first thing that you would think of is the cultural producers of those times 50s rock and roll 60s hippies 70s disco and punk 80s Rave and a new Rave into Rave and stuff like that they were so overtly articulate in in in their time and who they were and even if you look at compilations of the ’90s of films where people go it’s the ’90s yeah we knew kind of where we were if you say what was the sound of 1974 what was the sound of 1984 you can normally figure that out you can almost track that to the month yeah whereas if I said what’s the sound of 2009 lot fuzzier it’s a lot fuzzier right and it’s and Fisher says that it’s one of the issues is that when we got to the 2000s culture stopped feeding us this idea that a future was ever GNA come so again to stick with the 90s you had movies like Fight Club and the Matrix which were I don’t think I’ve coined this term maybe I’ve heard it but were cubicle movies where the protagonist was trapped in an office cubicle and it was Modern Life is boring and every movie was about the future crashing into Earth right Independence Day what it was all about future coming and we were promised Futures that involved a lot more physical Technologies as well so what happened with music is it got to the 2000s and the biggest artists from that time were Amy win housee and Adele and they were doing versions of the 60s yes so what Fisher said was like look if you took a piece of music from the ’90s if you took a piece of Apex Twin back 30 years oh my God imagine it would reimagine their they would go this isn’t even music right right I am so stunned by how unrelatable this is yeah if you took a piece of music now even from the far-left field and you took it back to somebody 30 years which is the ’90s and you played at them they’d be struck by how understandable and how relatable and how not different it is now we touched upon one of the reasons for that being that when neoliberalism and its horizonless kind of progression started to erode any art funding started to erode any space where a squat or a rave or anything truly culturally generative could happen it flattened what art is like that is um partially an issue to do with economics but it’s also to do with physical Technologies disappearing very simply the’ 60s Jimmy hendris and the overtly distorted guitar okay the 70s briano and the synthesizer the 8S uh kind of the fair child you know with Peter Gabriel and throbbing gristle and then the ’90s Apex Twin and the DAW and basically logic and Protools right now in music since the mid90s since a Daw which is a a platform where you can create music on your computer there has been no new physical Technologies it’s all software everything is software and everything is codified and everything happens in a screen now if you look at the story of like when throbbing gristle moved to psychic TV and and sleazy went off to do coil when he started coil he was a young person and he was part of a culture where young people were literally thinking because they could economically and stuff like that I don’t know if I want to start a band because I don’t know how it could be new there’s nothing physically new that can make what I do new so I might not do it and Peter Gabriel before kind of I think it might have been before so or maybe a bit earlier was kind of thinking the same thing then the fair child existed and it opened up all of this new stuff so one of the issues that we have now that is I think that that’s the definition of the Avant guard right there’s some kind of like culturally Progressive Force but then there’s also a like willingness to experiment with a new tool new piece of technology yes that’s right a new piece of technology that is that is inherently going to alienate people already into something that’s previously successful and the Paradigm under which I grew up and I think you as well is like that was kind of the point point of art was like explore these New Horizons like I said when you we don’t only live in a 20th century culture on 21st century screens we also still really really understand ideas that were so prevalent in the 20th century like your favorite album will probably be an album that you hate the first time you hear it right now getting a young artist who signed to a major label to make a record like that this this this long-term invest it’s just it’s not AIT feas way of doing anymore so I think that one of the problems that we have with stagnation is that the revolution of music has only happened in the space of distribution it hasn’t happened in the space recently of creation yeah yeah but I think that me you Brad whoever it may be there’s these groups of people who are aware of how cringe it is but also aware that like in the 60s and the 70s young artists were really interested in kind of changing the world yes and changing the way that things me and now you’re not really encouraged to do that it’s kind of a bit it’s a bit a yeah you’re getting too big for your your bootstraps and I think that one of the things that I think that me and you and other people are taking on now as a challenge and we’re just starting to have conversations about alternative institions and stuff like that and I want to talk to you about this charity initiative that that I’m recently involved in that is hopefully going to try and challenge the idea of the lack of art funding where I came from stopping young people being able to music and art but um we are very we are quite good at the diagnostic but nobody’s that good at the prescriptive right so we can diagnose all of these issues how we actually create a new alternative is very very difficult because you start to think right well okay then new music isn’t that new so how do I make it new so people start experimenting in these kind of futuristic ways whereas if I said to you what does futuristic music sound like we all still think it sounds like craft work it’s already a genre it’s already so futuristic music is actually a 20th century genre in the way that punk or or reggae is do you know I mean so it’s kind of like music that we think robots would listen to a little bit and I think that whereas I suppose what Fisher is saying is where are the artists who come out that sound like they’ve never heard music before right right I don’t really know what my new record is going to be like but the thing that I’ve been experimenting with is because the only revolution in music recently has been within the distribution has been the emergence of new distribution platforms trying to use those platforms as instruments itself huh so yeah yeah practically you’re kind of looking at gin and cutup technique which has essentially been what everyone’s been doing as a form of collage but but for me sampling I’m obsessed with from a kind of Fisher kind of idea you know if if you want to read ghosts of my life is a beautiful piece a moment where he talks about crackle well I’ve never even thought about the thought of crackle in modern music but not only is it telling you that this music isn’t of now it’s also reminding you of of the Technologies in which we used to consume it um this idea of we’re totally lost in this kind of Timeless malaise a nowhere time as he calls it in the way that a nowhere place would be an airport or an industrial estate years have started to feel like airports are industrial Estates I can’t remember the aesthetic difference between 2019 and now has stopped time stopped or the future has stopped you know what I mean the future isn’t coming the future isn’t coming any anymore and um so so with them sampling before the internet the only things you could sample were things that were on records so music or spoken word now we have everything on the internet Tik toks personal whatever it may be trying to use that as much as an instrument it can be uh it can be difficult to try and aesthetically theorize something right uh as you’re trying to like all right well how do I come up with something radically new it’s like well you wouldn’t you wouldn’t know you have to like just kind of do it and and figure it out in real time um but I I feel like yeah one of the things that is uh unique to our experience of this moment that did not exist years ago is the way that people post it is social media right that’s where a lot of like young creative experimental energy has gone um and uh I I did this experiment where I tried to become a meme in the last few years uh and I thought that that actually like using influence as a medium was an interesting 21st century experiment and there’s a few artists of my like broadly speaking the post internet generation that have experimented or done projects in this field but you know similar to how like VHS and experimental video work was like that was new and weird in like the 80s exactly uh like I think this is actually a good medium to be experimenting this is for me when I look at um the work that we take that we talk about is taking silly things seriously the reason that like video like VHS art was not considered a serious Pur if you were making video now it’s in museum weird yes and and this is and this is the thing so everything yeah it it’s it’s not perceived as legitimate it’s perceived as kind of kitch yes and this is the thing with with memes which is where me and you talk a lot about taking silly things seriously the reason that we take meme culture the reason that we take it very very seriously is is because behind this new model of communication and discourse predominantly going on amongst you you people is a real set of social circumstances and economic circumstances and environments that they’re that they’re kind of reacting to and talking about and I think that in the way that I’ve always been a massive champion of of Comedy not just comedians but the idea of using humor to delineate important ideas because the idea of Comedy is to take the the biggest ideas possible and convey them in the fewest words possible it’s the same with music and lyrics and it’s the same with memes like sometimes a joke when somebody sometimes they in comedy somebody will say something to an audience and the audience will go o yeah yeah they never go ooh yeah yeah you get the same thing with M truth is the laugh yeah and then after that is the acknowledgement of whether I should be allowed that’s the super ego coming back yeah can slip under your so what humor does is it’s the sharpest knife in the drawer like a meme a perfect like for example we were talking about this the concept of a late stage social media right we’re in it we’re deep in it now we’re deep in it now and we could talk academically about all of those points and you could do a video TRL could do a video we I could do an album on it but the best example of late stage social media was that tweet I sent you the other day I just which one was that I just had a dream that I had to download the cilantro app to use my bunch of cilantro yes yeah yeah and I we’re not too far away we’re not too far away from that yeah yeah when you’re in the studio you have a rule that uh now well as you as you told me um you have rule to not bring up anything on Spotify to not bring up references of like oh this is a pre-existing track from another artist like let’s take inspiration from this you’re trying to innovate something new and not get like stuck in repeating old genres of the past that’s true so that that was something that’s that I’ve become really really strict with that um my good good friend and longtime collaborator even though a lot of the stuff that we’ve made has never seen the light of day BJ Burton we we were making a record for a while before I went off and made it with Jack and George made it because um we were really really interested in this idea of of newness and I actually got into this full circle place on a brief inquiry where we’d made such a what I felt was 21st century record in with notes on a conditional form which yes constantly referenced music from the past but in a way that I felt was inherently 21st century do you know I mean like I said I’ve always said I’m from the generation that creates in the way that we consume and I think that doing that the the kind of the the Breakaway from genre was quite a new hopefully fishery thing for us to kind of kind of do but you mean like a generationally like the kind of genres that we grew up in is like you think of yourself as like a punk or a metal head or something like that and I think that basically yeah you you would historically make music in a genre and in 2009 when all the in the record labels the institutions were coming to see us they were confused cuz I would play them chalk they’ play four songs that sounded totally different and they’d be like but I don’t get it and I’d be like but my generation will they they’ll just inherently understand oh you were right about that I was right about that which is why I ended up owning my own label and all of their labels died but the Gen Z kids I interview and talk to none of them identify with like oh I’m this specific genre they just consume from from everything we’ll get into why that is in a minute but but for me on the last record I was like okay I’ve just made a experimental modern record right what is actually fresh now because we talk about witch house we talk about that emerging subculture and I remember hearing artists like Tri XXX trip Tri X Y YX X or whatever it is and you would hear this music that was created by a 15-year-old on a laptop and that had never happened before so when you heard this you’d be like exting you like what is this right now when you hear something someone’s made on the laptop it’s like watching Transformers 2 it’s like doesn’t mean anything I know that it’s impressive but it doesn’t mean anything so I got to a point being like right well we’re past the bedroom what’s interesting I was like what can we do that other people can’t right now and I was like we’ve been in a band for 20 years maybe just like being a band it’s actually quite revolutionary because there’s no bands so leaning into the traditional Aesthetics of what a band is maybe we should do that so I did that for a record and that required I suppose not necessarily referencing but understanding the history that we were drawing from and not from a woke perspective also but because we’re such a Rhythm based band I’m always referencing a black music more than I’m referencing white music and it’s an important to knowledge that you know so it’s always been important for me to kind of like pay homage to the people that but basically on the last record I was like I’m going to make something quite rootsy and traditional because rootsy and traditional is actually quite subversive now after we made that record the idea of stopping ever referencing anything came in so we try not to um we try not to listen to other music or pull or pull from other things that exist what about um just the existence of bands in 2024 is kind of like an anomalous thing everyone you mentioned before like 15-year-olds making music on their laptop like everyone or not everyone but most people I know who are in music are in kind of like it’s either one person or maybe it’s a Duo but very rarely do people have like full bands definitely not one that have been together for multiple decades where they have instruments and they have like whole performances it’s a we live in a very kind of atomized uh musical landscape right now I would say we live in a very atomized landscape like you know I think the death of the living room is just as relevant to the death of the band you know the living room music nowhere to rehearse well not so much that but the way that the um the the the fire the fire was replaced by the TV the radio and then the TV right so the TV used to be in the living room where we would all live together and we would come together and we would watch one screen and we would talk about what was happening on the screen we then got our own screens and what was happening on the screen we no longer said to the person next to us we tweeted to a thousand people right right so instead of having mom dad and the teenager and the the 8-year-old all watching the TV at night and fighting over what they want to watch and the remote stuff and the teenager who always changes the channels um now you just have everyone on their own screen so so media consumption has been individualized subculture has been individualized and and commodified so when I was growing up if you wanted to be a goth or a punk you had to find out where they hung out you had to physically go there you had to build up the confidence to talk to them you had to immerse yourself in a world of cultural and aesthetic references that you didn’t know that you either had to pretend to know and then to a library and all of these people’s references you knew were authentic because because social media didn’t exist you know that they had read this book or been to this show or seen this movie they hadn’t just revised a Wikipedia article on it you know what I mean so you would immerse yourself there was a a barrier there was like a hurdle uh a small barrier to entry you to do certain stuff to join the subculture this is the thing and yeah and a process of qualification and with that process of qualification you acquired a kind of social identity you immersed yourself in a community and you felt you realized that if you bind together with a group we do this a little quite a lot now but in real life you know your IRL friends versus your online friends if you bind together in real life you can create something bigger than yourself as an individual that’s where the 1975 came from we should bind together and just make this aesthetic world for ourselves do you know what I mean which meant that when that happened and we went out on tour we were together we were a unit we had a community any oppressive um mellian forces from the media or whatever had to come up against like the four of us who were willing to like physically fight people do you know what I mean but when social media came along the idea of being a a band isn’t incentivized the IDE of being an individual is incentivized a lot of a band you’ll see each member will have their own social media right so whether they talk about it or not they are in competition with each other as individual exactly exactly so that’s not healthy for the great a good right you shouldn’t kind of have that in a band Dynamic now I think that the idea of of doing that it also gives yourself kind of of like a bit more confidence because there’s there’s four of you do you know what I mean and and I think that so so people don’t adhere to subcultures anymore and also people don’t dress like groups of people anymore I was in New York yesterday and I bumped into Albert Hammond from The Strokes who’s a friend of mine now fcking if I’d have said that 15 years ago I was sha my hands I mean the last band White Band to change how everyone dressed they changed how an entire generation dressed no bands have done that since right and I think that what people do now is they dress like or they adhere to individuals right a particular Kardashian or whatever it is do you know I mean the idea of grouping I don’t know what a scene of kids look like which is why I think like days or Vogue are constantly trying to make everything scrambling micro trend bus core or long hair core or whatever the [ __ ] like if you went to like the lunch table the proverbial lunch table like how would you identify you as a different school like what your crew is it’s like you look at their t-shirts and their pants or something like that that’s much more difficult now like groups of friends don’t look like each other or dress like each other the best articulation of that concept of how fast a generation’s values has changed because if you look at like the the the generational values of young or the cultural customs of young people from the 70s to the ’ 80s to the 9s there’s there’s a bit of a change but 21 Jump Street does it so well because 21 Jump Street is about two guys who in I think it’s like 2009 were were at high school and five years later they come back to high school and Channing Tatum is concerned about what way one and he’s met with loads of climate activists who are all Queer yeah and he just [ __ ] hits one of them because when I was at school if you were gay you got hit and the whole school’s like bro what the [ __ ] are you doing I got checked into lockers for being too gay this is and that that’s what it was like when weol and that immediately changed you know I mean it’s because like so so I don’t really know what a scene or a subculture kind of looks like now well this is not not to get like too meta on it but um the generally like speaking The Disappearance of a mainstream and a counterculture I would say as a direct result of what you described before of like there was this one screen that the whole family was around or like the whole group of friends or whatever and they had each their own kind of individual preferences but they were constrained by there only being one screen and so someone who might have preferred to watch the Sci-Fi channel versus someone who preferred to watch Animal Planet they had to like negotiate over who got what time and they their their options were constrained by having this one TV and now when everyone has their own their own individual screen is not really clear what the mainstream preference is and what the countercultural preference is they’re all just individualized and so the uh the counterculture and the mainstream have all kind of like disappeared into just advertising revenue for platforms period and it’s not really clear like what kind of oppositional cultural forces or like how you delineate belonging to a subculture and not belonging to a subculture because everything is basically just a product of your consumption habits like you’re clicking into this or clicking into that you’re not showing up anywhere you’re not like dressing in a certain way or like doing activities with certain people I think that’s why me and you you I keep saying me and you as if we’re going out but I think that one of the reasons that we use the word cleet to describe that space is because the mainstream doesn’t make sense when you’ve got you know what is it what was that AC the the intellectual dark you know that group of intellectuals um that that when you’ve got them or the daily wire or Steven Crow or or you know the Contra point or any side of it when you’ve got these people amassing more views than CNN and thingy bob combined you know I mean what is the actual what is the actual mainstream now this idea of kind of what is alternative has plagued me since the beginning and it’s one of the things that I’ve had to really stick to my guns with because I think that culture has caught up to the 1975 a lot more than we have kind of adhered to culture because we were hated when we first came out and we were hated in particularly by the enemy and the fly now I personally hated them back for personal reasons but part of me now would love an institution that is run by a series of people that yes maybe self-serious and cringe in regards to how cool they think but have at least gone through a process of qualification and are there because of their taste that are feeding me in Fe that are giving me pieces of art that they think are interesting as opposed to being fed pieces of art that are doing well right and I think that your work is anomalous in this field because the overwhelming incentives the power law distribution of the content that thrives in a a platform method of distribution whether that’s Instagram or streaming music or whatever it happens to be when there’s not an editor or a gatekeeper or a curator in place most of that content most of that material is just dopaminergic slop it’s just bad work and there’s no space for art I can’t think of another mainstream artist that would dare to put a [ __ ] piece of performance art in the middle of their Rock show that that just simply doesn’t exist and so this disappearance of the possibility or space for art in society if we seed everything to the platforms algorithmic filtration recommendation of everything we’re going to have a society without art we’re going to have a society with just content and it’s going to be vertical videos slop feeding culture into the meat grinder and just spitting out Tik Tock reals on the other also and if we allow that to happen to more entertainment cuz you can let’s let’s put art as in the in the realm of art is great when you eaten and you’re not right having an argument with a loved one no that’s true you’re not interested in art if you’re hungry or if you’re having serious issues so that’s call Art entertainment yes if we allow the decimation of art or if we allow art to become completely for you pag ified the same thing will happen to all human experience which is one of the dangerous things about the phone what what Silicon Valley understands about the phone is that a lot of people will say this thing which is true I know about my phone use and how it’s dangerous but I need my phone I need my phone for work yeah yeah I need my phone in case someone contacts me that’s true the problem that we have is that the way the apps are laid out and prioritized is flat so you will get a notification about somebody that you’ve never met in your life liking a photo that you made three weeks ago with the same tenacity right or priority as a text message from your mom right so we just bounce between genuinely authentic Human Experience talking to people to just going on Reddit for 10 minutes and then flitting back between it and I think that the flattening out of all experience and the incentivization of short-term pleasure over long-term satisfaction is a problem you know like long-term satisfaction was what I was trying to go to with the show you know it’s a bit like you can’t make a Tik Tok at the beginning of this show and understand it without watching the whole show like the first chapter of a book doesn’t have any context or make sense until you’ve read the whole book do you know what I mean but that’s not the way we operate anymore I don’t have time to read a whole book do you know what I mean so that’s what my show was trying to do in a world of shortterm pleasure incentives the dopamine the the like the chocolate bar the wank versus the the walk the making the meal the meaningful conversation as you would call something part of normal life maxing you know what I mean which is really important to practice um but just to go back to the point that we that we were talking about before about how Al alternative culture has been a confusing idea for a long time that I was talking about how I was hated the reason I was hated back in the day is because we came out as a band and every band that got signed over us was a band that was essentially doing an impression of the Arctic Monkeys so what they were saying is a band has to be kind of from an economically deprived place in order to have authenticity it needs to be kind of gritty needs to reference H the kind of at the time the kind of the Aesthetics of Post Punk so like you know all of your Joy Division industrialization thatcherism e kind of brutalism all those kind of things and we just didn’t adhere to any of that and because I was saying we create in the way that we consume so we were like hated for essentially being a band that was the opposite of heavy and I was like well after the shape of punk of come to sh the shape of Punk to come came out incredible album the last Punk album it and it knew that anybody who wants you have to get into refuse you have to find the documentary it’s it’s it’s only in on YouTube in Swedish about when their last show got shut down and they split up they split up because they were politically so different wow can you imagine that now they they just couldn’t politically align so they split up and in their last show the cops came it makes me want to cry I get I get chill thinking about it the cops came in and all of their fans turned around and shouted the line from rather be dead I’d rather be alive and they’re just shouting I’d Rather Be Alive I’d Rather Be Alive as refused physically disbanded on like incredible right for me when I saw that I thought I can’t do something heavy that that touches on that CU for me heavy was like unless you’re like glass dra converge refused or further than that Heavy’s [ __ ] lame do you know what I mean like since haal heavy so so the reason we’re not heavy and we can do heavy all day long but we’re not because it wasn’t new we wanted to be something quite new now the only time the only thing I could think of at the time of being new was being representative of this new form of cultural consumption which is everything everywhere all at once to um to give a little bit of the historical frame um when we talk about the left in the context of the US there’s the old left which is like Eugene Debs this is like 1910s 1920s uh the international workers of the world the iww the wobbly and these were like the struggles that basically like shaped American life within that per period the uh uh rebellions of the West Virginia coal mines like rednecks like literally with the red scarf where they’re like shooting at the people who own the coal mines and trying to take back their Town um really like kind of radical struggles that were very much based in like the workplace and the degradation of Life under capitalism when we talk about the new left we’re talking about a particular slice of students particularly the SDS the students for Democratic Society so it’s almost hard to draw continuity between these things that like one was just a you know an enormous kind of workers movement and the other was kind of like a nich intellectual movement in like you know Elite universities or whatever the situationists and people are well that was after but there there’s this kind of like um there’s there’s a lineage here of um basically really broadly summarizing replacing the historical subject or the Revolutionary subject not being the worker but being the student or being the activist and so for me from my perspective this is a uh fundamental category error because being a student and having ideas is not the source of value in society like value comes from labor that’s what produces society’s wealth it is the only political lever that actually matters and so if you don’t have a strategy or political theory that addresses the actual lever of power in society you’re not going to get anything done what was also um very popular among the new left broadly speaking was a kind of embrace of individualism rather than the class identity so there was a real focus on um identity politics of the era that has a certain continuity to now especially as it enters Elite acmy and universities and then there was also just kind of like a personal libertine ethics and um a kind of like you know finding yourself through consumer preferences that is totally copasetic with navigating the platforms and consumer identities and so on so um a lot of the kind of unlearning that we’re having to do in this period of American life especially on the political left is just kind of like parting with the bad ideas that were taught to us in certain universities that were inherited from the boomer generation that were totally ineffectual that in many cases salary like that well I think some of them got just a little bit kind of too comfortable in many cases like there’s a great book we’ve talked about this before from Fred Turner from um coun culture to cyber culture and this is going to sound totally wild for people who have not encountered this before but literally the people who moved out onto the land particularly in California in the 1960s and70s started all of these kind of Lefty communes they then moved back into the Bay Area literally found Silicon Valley and then become the people who inaugurate embra the internet yeah theyand and all of these new kind of exactly yeah these like kooky [ __ ] you know Libertarians of of the ’90s and so that Drift from within you know 20 to 30 years of being from on the radical left to being on the radical neoliberal right there’s actually a continuity of idea within that that they because they because they prized individualism over their solidarity and class identity it was very easy to make that transition over the course of a few decades so having good principles when you start out having good political Theory um all of those things I think are super important we’re also both fans of the um extraordinary documentary series Adam Curtis all watched over by Machines of love all of Curtis’s stuff you know from H hyper normalization whether it can’t get you out of my head but all watched over by Machines of loveing Grace I think is our is our personal favorite personal fa I used to show it in class it’s just like it’s really I would I would also for fans of mine watching if they can try and um get hold of Josh’s uh syllabus if if you’re interested in the kind of content that we share or or or that that kind of seems to inform a lot of a a lot of our work um so hippie ism is a reaction of going okay well if we can’t transform Society if we all transform ourselves as individuals by proxy we will transform society and then the 70s still trying to articulate this kind of new form of individualism you have woo woo 70s New Age kind of stuff and then when you get to the 80s you get consumer capitalism essentially going oh you guys want to be individuals I can help you with that here’s a [ __ ] Coke and a car and stuff like that that’s how I’ve always recognized that kind of movement of consumer capitalized consumer capitalism’s understanding of the emergence of the individuals you know what I mean because you don’t have a lot of framework to operate as yeah indiv uals in places you know in like you know in Al places but again this is this is a this is a question that that I’m asking you well I I would say that the the emergence of the um a theory where the individual is a unit that changes Society is uh that comes from liberal political Theory right there’s not a kind of class analysis in that and I think the problem that the new Left faced which is um you know In fairness a very difficult problem is that in the period of the 1960s like liberal democracy was working quite well you know like my my mom’s a boomer she’s of that generation she had the best slice of the American economy was raised in a workingclass family with a single mother and now she has a master’s degree and owns a home and like things generally like that kind of upward Mobility is actually quite rare in uh you know capital L liberal think capitalist Society yeah and so what the the new left the kind of student radicals fac at the time was like broadly speaking the working class was not receptive to their message because things were going well you know like what’s the alternative you want you want to go to the Soviet Union like things are working better in the liberal democ scare was kind of propped up by that kind of idea right that the fear of Communism was a kind of a fear of status quo change and and the status quo being incredibly comfortable right yeah yeah whereas now we have a young desperate break well cuz now I mean liberal democracy is clearly not working for most people right there’s just kind of endless quantitative data about this that yeah I mean look at look at our cities all they do the same Studio where they do soft white underbelly which I think is a good example of how where we are right now is kind of surrounded by so many kind of people who have been failed by this and this was not the case of uh in American life you know a few decades before but in this you know uh economic climate climate of neoliberalism like it things are just so incredibly expensive that most people are not given like the dignity and U you know necessary materials to have like a dignified life so um part of that I would say is the um the retreat from the class analysis that was necessary to have an organized labor movement to like demand the political changes that we saw which allowed for that kind of prosperity in the era of the postwar boom so um that’s a big part of my project my kind of thorny contrar iism against the kind of new left ideas is that one they didn’t work uh and two we just have to do a bit of relearning for the things that actually did work you know we need material leverage and the individual approach the activist or the student activist approach is just not sufficient to scale to any of these real material problems like the individual approach for climate change is never going to work you can’t recycle enough in the world as much as we need like institutions to come back to kind of gatekeep certain uh to to Gat keep the kind of Integrity of certain whether it be art forms or kind of positions I think we really need the same for like activism again because what social media has done has made everybody an activist but what that’s done is completely degraded the work of real activists there that there’s that like there’s that uh nor McDonald’s joke which I’m which I’ll murder but he goes um when he’s talking about you know people get described as a modern day philosopher and I think that’s quite offensive to modernday philosophers and there’s a kind of there’s this thing where you know whether it be an actress or a model they’ll be like actress mother coffee lover activist oh yeah everyone they won’t be like actress coffee Le neurosurgeons you know because they know that they’re not a neurosurgeon so activism is something that now is the most important job in the world yes but everyone is it right right so so I think that even the concept of being active now we are bored of remember like the sjw thing of like 2016 and then you got the whole this back forward of everybody on the the left being indoctrinated by the right because it was a way of owning the left you know I mean all that kind of thing like I had a very very it’s really interesting how I think what we what we’ve come to understand is that what people need more than anything is some form of attention and some form of now this is a very trite observation but at at at the core of it where are a lot of these behaviors coming from do you know I mean I think we wrap them up in politics in intellectual thought but the truth is a lot of it is just about getting attention I don’t want to I I’ve had I’ve had dinner with this guy before sweet nice guy Winston from um Mumford and Sons not talking [ __ ] about him don’t want to talk [ __ ] about anybody but just to use him as an example he was the banjo player from Mumford and Sons okay and one day he tweet he was actually in a month of tweeting about what he was reading he’ tweeted previously that he was um reading Mal to to know reaction and one day he tweeted that he resonated slightly with a book by that guy is it Nick angio or somebody like this is it angio some right leaning okay okay pseudo academic and he got canceled on Twitter massively cancelled or in his version massively canceled and what happened to him is that he decided that this was going to be the hill that he was going to die on happens to a lot of people happens to a lot of people and what happened was he got he became adopted by the right um essentially in order to own the left which is what happens with left now the thing is what I think that people now I genuinely believe that he I don’t doubt his sincerity in this journey but I think that what a lot of these people aren’t quite aware of what’s happening is that you know it’s it’s really because we’re in an attention economy about attention if you’re the banjo player in Munford and Suns for 10 years there is x amount of attention you’re going to get in real life or on online right so you get used to that amount of attention then one day you do something that gets you more attention than you’ve ever got and you’re 10 years into a career of a band that’s kind of on the down and you’re presented with an option do I want loads of attention or do I want the same amount of attention I’ve always got I want the more attention so what he so the mental gynastics that goes on is goes oh I’m actually a mar for the right yeah as opposed to this thing that I literally just read and had no familiarity with before I’m now a martyr for this cause so that’s one of the things that this is the thing with me in my show as well and you know when I talk it’s easy for me you know I I laugh with you and my friends I read the stuff going on when the stuff’s going on about my show but for me because I am essentially a kind of musician and a writer but kind of like a a writer on these phenomena I always see internet phenomena objectively and it’s really interesting because we were talking about it before sometimes the subject of the phenomena is me and I think that people can’t un because people are the protagonist in that online story MH the difference between me is that me social media social media for me is this is what I do social media for most people is this is who I am so if social media is this is who I am you can’t imagine using social media or experimenting with that in a way that doesn’t literally reflect who you are right right so people essentially there’s not a space for art there’s not a space for art so people would whether it’s criticize or analyze by behavior and they would be like yeah well well mat will be think and it’s it’s like it’s interesting because people will think that you take it very very personally there’s an incredible uh rigidity in how people interpret things that are said online and behind that is seemingly an amount of political certainty that’s unquestionable right there’s two things going on there so you’ve got like you’ve got the fact that um being measured doesn’t work anymore there’s a really really interesting study recently about being measured so for example if you are measured on social media you don’t get a reaction very much so here’s a good example who’s who who’s a good who’s a good like I’ve already meant okay Jordan Peterson fine no no because I’ve heard Rory Souther use this example I’ll use the same example as Rory um if I tweeted I kind of enjoy listening to Peterson H in small amounts on certain topics right that’s a totally fair thing to say right sure sure the reason that you’ve learned not to say that is because with that you’re going to annoy both sides you’re going to get negativity from the Jordan Peterson side and you’re going to get negativity from the anti Jordan Peterson side you need to choose a side to perform to right so not only being measure measured doesn’t get you the the desired outcome they’ve actually done studies in this that it doesn’t actually feel good huh when on behalf of the poster on behalf of the poster when people tweet something really measured they don’t get the same feeling just a reasonable opinion reasonable opinion buz doesn’t give you a dopamine buzz it has to be something that’s a little bit electric and a little bit spicy so if you if you apply that you know then we’re not we’re not really taking any ideas seriously so any hypoc you know if I’m criticized online don’t do it online do you know I mean it doesn’t I I can’t take opinions that seriously that operate in a a Twitter or an Instagram kind of space because you’re not rewarded for being measured the incentives are just yeah yeah everything has to be the most extreme the most sensationalist the most outrageous version which is which is why I think that my show worked at pushing those buttons because it elicited an immediate reaction that that that kind of stayed the same in your clear net spaces and then at the deeper of it Reddit being right at the below of the cleet underneath that’s when the conversations about actually what was happening was going on you know what I mean yeah I remember before verified accounts we were very active in early social media with the 1975 because we I had this obsession with where are we 2012 2013 I was like we have access to all information right every single band is on sounds old is on MySpace is on pure volume is on YouTube if you can’t find something on Google immediately and understand it it’s inherently quite sexy that was that how I felt at the time so when the 1975 came out our early EPS especially our first song face down in the Blogger sphere it came out at the same time as like peso ASAP Rocky the early weekend EPS but yeah we were very interested in playing with the internet as a form so basically saying it’s this huge information pool and there’s too much of it and you can find our access so why don’t we make people unsure as to whether we are a brand or as to whether we are a solo artist or a mus let’s just open it up do you know what I mean and we had a lot of fun so what I was saying that is when in before verified accounts became a thing the way that social media platforms would verify you would follow you back so we were the first band or art page to be followed by Instagram so when Instagram had followed 20 people The 1975 was one of them it was a big deal when it first happened what we would do is we for a start went on an American tour which 10 years ago couldn’t have happened because people wouldn’t have heard our music if it wasn’t for the internet right we went and we played these shows in America what we would do every day in the tumbler Instagram era was take a tumbler instagramy photo of the environment that we were in not of the band not of anything else just something abstract and we would post it and theore was massive people would just love because it it felt like in the way that when you used to have a band and a vinyl the only thing you had was the artwork and your imagination you know you need to Art needs to Art can’t be too didactic and because you can’t have questions answered for you you need to bring your imagination your personal experience to it I would say that uh your work in particular your performance during the last live show uh I also think of the video for love it if we made it that these are two pieces and there are many others but those two are I think most prominent in my mind um that these are probably the rare encounters that a mass pop audience has with high art that if I walked into a gallery Museum and I saw this performance I wouldn’t be surprised it’s oh this is the kind of work that belongs here and similarly if I saw that video being played in a Exhibition at a a museum Gallery what have you I’d be like ah this is a piece of video art that that makes sense it’s uh it’s put together there’s intention behind it and those things are actually like very very rare in society that experimental space is extremely I can’t think of another person who’s doing that well thank you and I wish there was maybe there is on a smaller scale I there needs to a smaller scale there needs to be more because the thing is it’s so exciting when it happens even if you’re somebody that really really understands all this Theory so for example when we did the Hollywood Bowl show that me and Brad wrote and because the staging was different we had to riff and write loads of bits followers of TRL or yours will know his famous Casper mattress joke which is one of my favorite online jokes anyway and and what what we did that night was uh we wrote this piece that’s still out there somewhere called the sponsored apology and it was about the idea that um you know the idea of sponsorship and authenticity these cross-sections kind of h o over overlap so what I did was I was in you know I was get getting can whatever you want to call it getting canceled or there was a required apology from me and what we did was we took five minutes in the show and we wrote this fake but sounding the real apology that started out with me saying you know I don’t want to I don’t want everything I do to be perceived literally but also I don’t want people to mistake my intentions with my desire to kind of create like artistic environments and then at the end of the apology I said you know but everybody wants to better themselves you know what I mean and there’s no better way of doing you know and I said I turned to the camera and I said and for1 17.99 a month better help and then an advert for better help came up right and we did that and it got this huge laugh people were so confused and then we went into it’s not living if it’s not with you one of our biggest hits I love that now Brad knew what we were going to do and afterwards Brad was like it’s amazing that that we’re doing this we’re doing that type of art yeah that that critiques the things that we really want to critique at the Hollywood Bowl going into a song that has however many hundreds of millions of streams across the thing it so as much as I can be like yeah it is good that I’m doing that I’m more like how are more people not doing that as much as I in the same way that I understand like to become a billionaire you don’t really care that much about culture but I don’t know how there isn’t one billionaire that’s really into music that goes walks past cbgbs sees that it’s now a John vatos shop and goes I’m just going to buy that and turn it back into CBGB you know I mean like I don’t know what no I couldn’t I couldn’t agree more there’s uh so uh we talked to Amber Frost right she uh she wrote this incredible article uh a few years back I used to teach you my syllabus it’s called the declining tastes of the global super rich and I absolutely agree that there we have a crisis among Elites there used to be this idea of nobl oblig that if you were unfathomably wealth wealthy yeah it’s in the notes it’s exactly this is a responsibility if you take so much from society and you have all this wealth [ __ ] give something we have some shitty Elites they just built us social Med platforms and they didn’t give any libraries or museums or anything else give me a [ __ ] break this is the problem so let’s talk about Noz obl in the context of you know the elites not doing what is required so the idea was back in the day that you used to have we used to have the the we used to have the aristocracy right so you were born into these these upper classes you were born into the aristocracy right but with that back in the day when that was the ruling class you know it was there was this sense of no a responsibility responsib so a lot of these people would go into Civil Service civil engineering whatever it may be there was this inherent feeling of I need to give back now once the aristocracy as the ruling class in the 70s got replaced by the exam passing basically the academics and int uals who had passed exams became the kind of new almost like ruling class that sense of noble as o bleach started to disappear because there was this an idea of you look at Silicon Valley or you’re kind of iron R the new new money does not give to culture exactly so so there so so with that is that now there isn’t this inherent kind of social pressure to to give back you know what I mean and I think and yeah I mean I think I think we should be um publicly shaming these people for it not that that’s not that that’s enough pressure but just to kind of like to lay out what the the conflict the crisis is here is that the alternative to the institutional model which necessarily requires patrons there’s got to be some rich person who who foots the bill for the Opera for example right like Opera is Opera is never going to operate as for-profit everything that exists on the platforms operates for profit and the underlying Assumption of this is that all culture needs to be supported by consumers and that nothing should be decommodified or not not operate under the profit motive and so the institutional model from with that from within that framework seems vastly preferable to me that there should be basically some rich person who foots the bill and then there’s a giant aircond conditioned beautiful Opera for people to attend and uh yeah if you don’t have that eventually you get people with pitchforks and we know where they’ll be coming for yeah exactly I mean Opera is a good example as well because things are starting to become op everything’s starting to become Opera in the way that Opera is a refined a refined uh I don’t what you want to call it performance or or something crystallized it’s a crystallized activity little time capsule is that we go to to expect no change do you know what I mean and I think that like you know like music and art is becoming like Opera that like you go to experience the like a a kind of predetermined idea of what experiencing musical art is yeah the 20th century 20th century Bohemian lar yeah exact that’s very powerful it is and it’s still uh it’s still pervasive in a lot of creative Industries you know that’s unfortunately that’s not the world we exist in anymore but like the the idea of like having that kind of romantic life of like coming to New York in the 1970s and like working parttime and buming around and making some weird art or music or whatever like that there’s not now you know I mean who’s like writing [ __ ] the system or something like that that becomes a massive and also one of the things the problem is is that like all of this trickle down stuff like when I spoke about like throbbing gristle or like Peter Gabriel at the same time looking at the fair child and thinking what to do with it like throbbing gristle or like art school kids with no money that were making this noise that people with money yeah yeah took inspiration from and turned into a mainstream kind of Sonic change in music and stuff like that if that’s not happening you’re not going to get inspiration from anywhere do you know what I mean so um yeah a lot of artists now like the small crew of us whether it be Me djon Bon IA McGee whoever it is are all constantly talking about like what does it sound like to to make music now do you know I mean and we’re all trying to kind of push ourselves forwards well I mean I think we we share this uh uh this interest that a lot of the most kind of interesting weird experimental avanguard culture has moved online in the last few years and uh if I’m pulling inspiration to make new material like that’s where I look that’s where I look for the new exciting that’s where I look for the exciting new thing yeah your forthcoming album title M uh pulls a quote from a very interesting online subculture do you want to tell us a bit about the rabbit holes you’ve been exploring I’ll say one thing first I think that we spoke about Marvel before and we spoke about other you know let’s say like huge music artists that operate more as like a corporation they’ve they’ve really cottoned on to this postmodern meta thing that happens in art now so a Marvel movie will be 60% in jokes and call backs to other Marvel movies yeah yeah and in the franchise exactly and these artists now will put out a record where half the record is self referential jokes to the law that exists outside of the record and what they end up start doing is kind of forgetting that that’s all cool detail if you’ve made something objectively good right so if this objectively good album or movie has a subtext that’s interesting that has all of these theories that’s great so so I say that because what I want to do is make a great album I I I’m not you you know I’m not going tomorrow to teach it the school of design and Aesthetics and do some kind of academic treaty I’m making a Lally doing that tomorrow L do that tomorrow and I am going to make that people like and and it’s not that I’ve never made music for an audience or made music that that I expect people want to listen to but you know I I just naturally make melodically quite relatable music so my next record will be hopefully an enjoyable 1975 record objectively and it will be about all of the theory what my records are always about love sex death communication good things to make art about you know the the the all the big things but the the framework in which I talk about that from a brief inquiry onwards has kind of been the same how are we and why are we communicating in the ways that we do and what are its impacts so the last Rec the new record is um is I suppose born from me nearly going insane and that being a kind of an Internet induced Insanity combined with the cautionary tale of my last record which was essentially like don’t get red pilled and blackpilled try normal life maxing it’s good advice it’s kind of about the intersection of those Concepts so how religious fanaticism plays a significant role in the evolution of kind of Internet Insanity online skitso stuff my my Instagram feed now is just mentally unwell people expressing themselves in different ways not from a a voyerism place I’m just really really interested in this new environment that people have and there’s a um there’s a big intersection between the themes and behaviors observed both in the red pilled community and the kind of let’s call it the online skitso community yes and I think those are the the intersection between apocalyptic and kind of millenarian beliefs yes the the dichotomy between good and evil the concept of prophets and gurus um the rejection of mainstream Authority the kind of um symbolism and numerology that these communities get obsessed with and um the moral absolutism of both sides and the kind of sacred texts and doctr that they hold dear I I’m seeing a big cross-section there and I think that because a lot of my records and my ideas are delineated through even imagery you know like a like my my campaigns that surround the album are just as important as the album itself um those are the theories that I’m kind of that are that are the framework for for what we’re kind of working on it makes a lot of sense as someone who pulls inspiration from social media that uh I would say that our current design of the platforms are kind of like designed to be schizophrenia inducing right where if you feel a little bit paranoid or delusional that there’s a whole bunch of people who are following you tracking your every move like finding hidden messages and then they’re going to maybe advertise to you I’m not sure that’s just literally true on social media like it is a schizophrenia inducing machine and so people who are a little bit mentally ill then become very mentally ill once given social media and that’s happening to smaller degrees to all of us because these tools are so powerful they’re so overwhelming and it has devastating social effects it really does yeah and the way that yeah it it so so what what I’m trying to kind of get to is you know is Broad examples songs that kind of speak of it without being songs that try and be academic papers you know the one thing I would add is that um sometimes people feel um uh they feel a little embarrassed or like self-indulgent if they’re making work about like romance and heartbreak and sex and Leisure and just kind of like the everyday experiences of Life uh because they feel like they’re supposed to make art about like big political topics right and I would say that this is um we’ve been having a very political conversation contextualizing all of this I think that is uh a necessary part of the discursive component of art is to understand the underlying political economic mechanisms that produce culture right all these things are Downstream of our economy but I think those are actually great things to make art about I think some of the best art is actually just about heartbreak and it’s something that you can actually pursue through ART whereas you you try to pursue activism and politics and so on art is not very well equipped to do that so understanding the appropriate context for these things I think is actually an important distinction there’s very you have to be a very particular person to read a whether it’s even a piece of Pop philosophy or an or an academic kind of thesis and be transformed immediately as a person whereas you don’t you can be kind of anybody but a Philistine to hear a record and be completely changed as a person do you know what I mean like music has this really transformative power that that that words and like I always say you know words visuals literature they’re kind of suggestive of how you feel but music even ambient music commands you how it feel I’ve heard you talk about sincerity before I think that irony and irony poisoning especially for the uh the demographic the subculture of young men that you’ve been interested in pulling from uh for the last record a lot of them um were so boiled in that irony that they didn’t really know what they actually thought about the world in many cases and I wonder if you would share maybe your experience of moving through irony to sincerity and uh understanding yourself in the world understanding what you really think about a topic um I think that being English you’re kind of taught that um embarrassment and a kind of a really scrutinized version of of self-awareness is Paramount do you know what I mean so we’re always is kind of ironic in the face of authenticity or irony do you know what I mean so basically what I learned and I and I’ve said this before is kind of summarized in in that David Foster Wallace quote where he says um to be truly human is to be a bit goo prone a bit soy a bit naive and open to Earnest s uh you know sometimes what could be described as soy things and I think that it’s so much easier to fight or combat those things with irony or just taking the piss but if you Dethrone sincerity with irony you eventually get an equal tyrant you know that’s kind of the kind of the way that I feel about it that it gets to a point where it it’s not a repacement it’s just another way of doing it and it’s not really a means to an end like irony is for me now a tool to highlight very very specific things that need to be highlighted whereas it used to be a defense mechanism yes I think my turn towards sincerity from my third album onwards was was was also a reaction to being part of the the Indie music scene of the 2000s in the UK so the Indie music scene was defined by being a slacker so you when you on stage you had to essentially be like I am going to pretend that I don’t care so I can’t be judged for not being very good right that was kind of the concept I’m going to replace all ambition I wasn’t even trying I’m not even [ __ ] trying also I don’t really care like for example like there’s this idea of yeah I’m going to pretend to not care so I don’t get judged about not being very good and everybody was a bit [ __ ] on their instrument and I used to feel like well if if you don’t care why the [ __ ] should I care right right like I I care about stuff that I wouldn’t read something that I didn’t feel somebody like cared about do you know what I mean so I think that one of those things as well it was this s sardonic ironic I don’t care attitude that defined being successful in in rock music sure sure and I just found like I was like yeah cool but that’s just that how long is that going to last do you know I mean like it’s not it doesn’t really mean anything and um which is why I was always more into One Last Wish or fugazi than I was into like Minor Threat you know I mean the hardcore stuff was cool but the reflective emotional stuff that wasn’t that immediately co-opted by just like skin heads and people who wanted to have a fight I mean I was always more attracted to that stuff so yeah so I think that sincerity like I said is is really important because it’s not in vised you don’t get a lot of credit for it yeah you know and also it kind of comes along with sincerity for me has really encouraged me to focus on in the in the in the frame of what we’re talking about and being online is um being cons always being concerned with doing the right thing as opposed to being seen to do the right thing so doing the right thing often requires quite a lot of sacrifice and very little reward being seen doing the right thing requires very little sacrifice and often Gars a lot of reward so when I’m think about am I doing the right thing I often think am I going to be rewarded for this if I am I’ll try and limit the ways in which I could be rewarded for it for the thing being of service for other people especially when you’re like a frontman in a band they’re very important to kind of stay grounded but um so so yeah that’s why I think that it’s been very very important to kind of not adhere to the cynicism that is kind of out there on either sides do you know what I mean like uh the the yeah that is now existing on the kind of extremes I just think that like sincerity long-term satisfaction being measured empathy listening they’re just they’re just not incentivized they’re just not really part of what we’re doing and I think that like we need a being a normal person maxing we need being a normal person maxing and I think that one of the Privileges that I have is that I have the ability to make long form pieces I told you this story right I was talking to a kid who was like the son of a music executive I’ve said this online before and I said what kind of music do you like and he said I don’t really know I was like what kind of um what artists do you listen to and he was like I was like well what what songs do you like and he said he said what full songs oh my god oh boy so the Des he doing them on Tik Tok or something the decimal point of where we thought the smallest denomination you have the song the album The the catalog it’s moved it’s moved the Tik Tok the Tik Tok you know so you have people now making records with two minute songs and stuff like that and and the thing is with that is such a symptom of the incentivization of short-term pleasure that I’m quite happy to make long Rec essentially long form statements that require concentration you know what I mean and um a lot of people are not in the economic position to do that right you know but a lot of people are and they choose not to and they choose not to for really neglectful reasons and really like kind of I think like disrespectful reasons to the form do you know what I mean like um there’s too much content in general but you could argue that we are now in the Golden Age of TV MH now I think that started happening because that’s happened because you kind of have these almost like Gutenberg moments right so so I think that when there’s this Douglas Copeland will talk about this idea that um when a dominant media platform is superseded by a new one it opens the previous one up to become more Artful so for example sure so just to people the TV used to you you could only have a half hour show on TV because the TV was the only thing we had so you couldn’t take up two and a half hours cuz everyone else start to do their thing yeah yeah when the internet came on and people started watching content in other places and the TV became not so constricted by actual time you got The Sopranos you got the wire you got 6 feet under you got all of these shows that had like dovi level narratives that went on for years do you know what I mean you can even you can even say the emergence of Photography that it unburdened painting with the task of having to represent the world and so you got radio all of these kind of things that will that is happening with the internet a little bit now as we start to talk about the delineation between the cleet space and the the dark for Dark Forest kind of environment that is happening there is a more creative subversive yes form of art happening on your patreons substacks and Below which used to be people writing for magazines and people being involved with institutions and I think that even though there’s a lot of content out there You could argue that we’re in the Golden Age of TV right now and you could argue that we’re not in the Golden Age of film but I don’t think that we are that outside of your big mainstream movies I don’t think we’re that starved for good film making that is kind of pushing things forward even on a mainstream level if you look like the safties or if you look at like you know um music though is not in that place and one of why is there music in that place I think it’s because I’m not going to summarize that I’ll just give you an example you’re a cute young girl or boy on the internet and you establish a fan base as a young model from the ages of 17 to 21 and you get millions of followers sure as a person you get to an age where you want to start authenticating this or or giving this a reason kind of like you know you want it to have a reason as opposed to my tits or my haircut or how good I am at whatever what a lot of them will do is pick up a ukulele or an acoustic guitar right and within a month you will have a bedroom EP from this artist yeah yep and they’ll be and so you’ll immediately get a link to their SoundCloud so they’ll go from being an influencer now to a musician there’s a shortcut through using social media to get a job or a position or be regarded as a musician you can’t do that with being a screenwriter you can’t do that with being a director you can do it in your bedroom yeah you can do it you can make it on your laptop you can make it on your laptop it can be uh it can be given to a wide audience you know it’s not like and also it’s not seen as what like if you are this this social influencer and you go one day here’s my SoundCloud link people go oh if you go hey guys here’s a link to my rpt or he not not a lot of clicks for that your what you’re a what why are you that I don’t care about that do you know what I mean whereas so I don’t know there’s partially I I feel that that’s happening in music a little bit my sense of this stuff is that um we growing up in the society that that we did um you’re uh accustomed to having like a level of trust in institutions that um when I grab the box of cereal off of the Shelf is not going to have metal shavings and wood chips in it like there are bare minimum standards that someone has looked at this it meets safety protocols and on a plane yeah yeah and this I mean this is why when a medication is uh you know revealed to have negative side effects then there’s the penalties Financial penalties to to uh the the pharmaceutical company and whatever but in the last few decades especially I mean think of the opioid crisis think of all of like the negative health effects and all the endocrine disrupting chemicals and just the [ __ ] that’s in all of our foods like that [ __ ] is I mean it’s just the [ __ ] Wild West like we are in a blasted libertarian hellscape and there is no institution that is checking any of this for safety protocols everything’s definitely not social media and so the negative externalities of the terrible design of all of these platforms is making people literally [ __ ] insane and schizophrenic and also just producing really really unhealthy social patterns and because I think we grew up in a period where our parents had you know the relatively like stable period of life in the advanced world we just had this kind of benign naive faith that these institutions would take care of us but they are not at all we’re just living in the of all these things it’s all at the expense of neoliberalism’s intent on oh the market will regulate it that’s what they’ll say oh people will just divest they’ll like spend their dollars elsewhere if they don’t like all about choice at the detriment of what those choices May entail you have to be able to self-determine you have to be able to self-actualize that’s the you have to be able to do that that’s what we’re going to provide the individual and it’s like yeah but we’re eventually just going to burn out and we’re eventually just going to right there’s a limit to like consumer responsibility it’s like am I supposed to individually conduct all the scientific tests to see if there’s like plastic in food you know you’re going to have to look at like every Individual Car to comp them social media you have to trust someone at some point yeah exactly and because social media has just been inherently put into this um part of our life which is about self-expression and self-determination that we are terrified of regulating it for being perceived as I all like I mean other countries have figured this out you know I I I hate to make the comparison but like you log onto Tik Tok or Doan as it’s called in China like you’re limited to an hour a day right and the content is also curated it’s like educational it’s wholesome or whatever and then in the United States we have all these libertarian ethics where it’s like well if people don’t like it they’ll look away it’s like no you just gave a slot machine to every child in the United States 250 million monthly active users and they’re all just [ __ ] swiping slot machines like Boomers in a casino give me a [ __ ] break like no you need someone to regulate this [ __ ] it is unhealthy and it has bad effects yeah there’s loads exactly because it teaches also like an environment I would suggest people to go and watch your work that you did on um Josh did this kind of analys this kind of I suppose this Rabbit Hole piece where you went into this part of the internet that was filled of kind of like young people that were operating as like a video game server in the way that they were communicating and all of these political ideologies kind of being jettisoned into this environment and consequently what resulted of that is you can see in in Josh’s working just but um it is very difficult to kind of think of how to regulate these things because you know you can look at an empathy issue if the you know when you’re a young person you’re trying stuff out Louis CK said this before he’s like if you the first time you’re just trying stuff out when your kids you try out being mean you’re in the playground and you say to a kid you’re fat and that kid goes oh and then you go oh that didn’t make me feel good I’m not going to do that whereas if the first time you say your fat is on in a comment thread and you get no emotional reaction you get a thousand likes yeah yeah your your view this feels pretty good actually exactly so I think that the idea of kind of like of how but again this is the problem it’s the same thing with like guns like or prohibition if you give if you provide Society with something oh you you make it desirable when you’re not if you like give Society alcohol and then you go nah that was a bad idea you get what happened during prohibition do you know what I mean you get or if you give Society guns and you get to like now and you try and regulate it you get in the issue that youve got you can’t really take something back from a society that you’ve kind of allowed to become fabric of because let’s say an amnesty of social media only addresses the people that want an amnesty within social media same with guns same these kind of things you know I mean so I don’t actually know how you start now regulating things without it being something that seems totalitarian have you have you considered though so um I and I’ll say I’m not totally sure my uh my feelings on this or or whether this uh this Bears out in like 5 to 10 years for example but I have noticed a trend I always give this example of uh there were a Duo of artists at the school ofth Art Institute of Chicago and at the time that we all got on social media they happen to have more followers than Pace Gallery which is like this you know hundred million like very lucrative Blue Chip Gallery if you’ve made it up there like your career is set you’re at the top of the market top of the museums um and the early adopter benefit for Millennials on social media was enormous because we were actually just we had a quantitatively larger reach than some of the major brands cuz they were slow to get on there but uh what we’ve learned now one generation removed is that the Gen Z kids if they try to get on social media they’ve got like a 100 followers of their friends but Pace gallery has like a 100 million or maybe it’s 100,000 or somewhere like that but uh there’s not the early adopter benefit and so sometimes it’s difficult to not over index the millennial experience that is just our experience of social media and there maybe the possibility I’ve heard the most um crude cynical way I’ve heard this phrased is that um Millennials were the only generation uh selfish enough to like get on social media narcissistic enough to get on social media and maybe actually for kids younger than us they might just opt out of the whole experience that’s the most optimistic version I think that just because of the way that being a teenager has always ex being a teenager is not being a grown-up so whatever grown-ups are doing cuz we’re all adults and so what a teenager is is looking at grown-ups and going that’s gay sorry you don’t say ISM on social media I don’t want to do any that’s [ __ ] lame I’m not doing that [ __ ] so if everybody who’s older than you is just going Cala is brat or whatever the [ __ ] they’re doing teenagers who are normally at the this is the thing young Fishers problem was that the 20th century being defined by lots of ideas was also defined by this idea that young people are always at the Forefront of cultural change right right and that was for loads of reasons because of naturally what they’re like and also because of the way that the 20th century kind of economically was set up so you saw the birth of the teenager in the 50s and the with the Beats really then the articulation of that idea with the hippies into the into the punks and I think that like being a young person has always been inherently countercultural or aign with a culture so you were either like in Vietnam or like completely an so it used to be a very very kind of thing youth was leading the culture for all of those decades up until I mean when is it like 2008 where that cuts off or like CU it doesn’t feel that way now no it doesn’t feel when when the no it it doesn’t it doesn’t feel like that that now that that it feels like young people are subjected to listen you just said to me said to me there’s not anybody doing what you’re doing in this in this particular space it’s like I know and there really should be and it’s not just because like I’m ambitious there should be young people being funded to have those kind of lofty aspirations like that’s the issue that we’ve got like the the most talented young person who’s really creative you know like I said will be doing the flat design for some internet company last year you made an exceptional video series a piece called a theatrical performance of an intimate moment three-part four-part series it was it was we did four of them at that time yeah episode two I was very much touched by thank you the fourth episode as I call it I really I really love that uh it got me my childhood experience very much what did you want to explore with that series why did you choose to make an art piece like this you’re you’re busy enough aren’t you you’re touring you’re making the next album why was this important for you to make it was a reaction to um our social media which is essentially a Content platform being used primarily to just advertise the show so it would just be a series of kind of images of the show and after a while you know I’ve I always love we grew up in emo so any kind of BTS walk tour I used to love like tour documentary stuff and I’ve always kept cameras even though we filmed everything I’ve never put any footage out of our studio sessions so there’s not that much BTS stuff just because I’ve been making this film for 10 years that I’ll probably never even make but I’ve filmed everything but um it the for a theatrical performance of an intimate moment came from the fact that that’s what the live show and and my entire life had start to feel like do you know what I mean this the intimate moment being me essentially um simulating masturbation in my house on a stage do you know I mean it was a theatrical performance of that the the the me literally literally it was it was literally that and I think that I wanted to extend that concept out until what was happening around the show so instead of instead of just doing a straight up tour documentary I wanted to do something that was a little bit conceptual that still kind of explored some of the ideas that were in that were in the show the first one was a kind of uh almost like a jokingly on the- noose uh parody of like Woody Allen you know I mean because we were in New York and we were just me and Jordan just we were just doing it on the Fly and we would just write these little skits and then we’d go out and we’d shoot them it’s actually it be it is essentially um the kind of precursor internet web series version of a proper thing that I’m I don’t know when I’ll do it but that I’ve been working on on trying to do the thing with um theatrical performance is that all of these um ideas of my art or my expression being permeated with this feeling of survey and I would say um eeriness to quote Fisher again in a specific way if if you if you look up you know his difference between weird and the Eerie yeah I had a very eerie upbringing as much as I had an amazing upbringing wonderful relationship with my my my family and you know that kind of millennial brilliant childhood that a lot of us had um but I was quite a thoughtful um introspective kid and for example my so my mom was two examples that I remember massively that have informed all of my work was my parents doing two different shows my mom once was in a Katherine cookson TV show which was a a a writer who would write about you know dramas period dramas so I remember being 5 years old I mom left for work and I was going to go and see her at 400 p.m. at work and when I arrived at work it was the 1800s and my mom was an old woman well and I was five and she was still my mom and she came over to me and everything was but I was presented with this concept of subjective reality sure of being like okay this isn’t real this is all an artifice but I can get lost in this at any moment Dred fully dressed yeah and it felt kind of eerie because it felt real and unreal at the same time and I think that that feeling was driven home when I went to see my dad in a play called Art and my dad played out of three men the the the the least strong least masculine least assertive of this friendship group right and in the play the two characters who are bigger than my dad get into an allocation my dad get gets in the way and ends up getting punched in the face and it’s this big emotional point in the play where everybody goes oh because you really don’t want that character to get hit yeah now I was watching that in a theater and I saw my dad get punched in the face and I wanted to react to it but my reaction would have been socially inappropriate I mean as a child people would fight like my dad the biggest nightmare of being a small child as a boy is watching your dad lose a fight yeah wor watching it and then not being able to react to it because it would be rude or it would stop people’s enjoyment of watching it I remember thinking okay there is a very very flimsy line between reality and not do you know what I mean which is when I got really interested in post Modern Art and people like Andy calman and all of these kind of people that would play with these environments one of the reasons that I’m not really interested in doing press with any traditional media even if we do desire the return of Institutions is because um the my mom was brutally hacked and surveilled by um right by like a assumed to be known news organization same news organization that ended up getting the news of the world canceled and um so when I was younger I learned of all these stories that I’d slept in hotel rooms that had been bugged and people that I had met with my mom had actually been essentially kind of like media spies who had taken me off to try and really befriend me and then get information from my mom and only over the past couple of years I learned that I was actually hacked for five years wow so every phone conversation that I had from the age of 18 to 24 was listened to and this is an era when my brother was very ill my parents were going through a divorce Jesus I was kind of dealing with a I think I probably just roundabout starting to deal with my heroin habit and everybody knows the feeling of um not well a lot of people will know the feeling of how it feels after somebody has been into your house and stolen something yeah you feel so in personally invaded you you feel dirty and you feel uncomfortable and you feel unsafe and that’s because somebody has come in and taken or played or or man [ __ ] around with your things when people do that with your thoughts and your your conversations you know people don’t realize like how much that old way of treating people in the media for like Sienna Sienna Miller Sienna Miller didn’t talk to her mom for 4 years because a newspaper hacked her answering machine and released information that she had only ever spoken about with her mom wow in in public and for her there was no way that her mom didn’t do that and she didn’t speak to her for for four years yeah now how like degrading that can be to your personal relationships especially like your relationship with the media and stuff like that and um so was this was this video series a way of kind of like controlling your own life taking back your own character and identity I mean I don’t want to take it like that seriously but what what it was was me starting to experiment with you know kind of creating something that I felt was like authentic and also kind of scripted but not scripted in order to conceal information almost scripted to reveal more than what a normal prosaic conversation can you know what I mean people used to watch dramas and they would invest in the the narratives of the characters when reality TV happened we very quick quickly went oh this is great because the consequences are real that’s when that happened then with your big brothers that started to articulate that they went oh you like the consequences being real do you want to phone in and decide what actually happens yeah yeah then we get into this model which I think was the precursor for How We Now operate with famous people on social media do you know what I mean it’s almost like sure social media yeah yeah we kind of we like to be in control of The Narrative of this person you know what I mean especially if they give us loads so I think that whether it’s the last show or a theatrical performance of an intimate moment I’m always kind of interested in in playing with you know with th with those ideas it’s difficult to articulate actually scripting something I think of this as a way of taking back your own words of like owning the things that you say whereas if you’re surveilled the things that you say are taken from you and so reenacting these things is a way of uh yeah kind of like owning your own experience that uh it’s yours you choose to release it it’s voluntary rather than uh it’s something that happens to you inv voluntarily I think you’re very right I think that’s probably what it I think that’s a massive part of what it is yeah that that I at least I can construct The Narrative myself do you know what I mean even if it is constructed and needs to be constructed once you start start constructing a real life personality you want people to believe this is the real authentic version of me that’s something that you need to like keep up with and that’s difficult do you know what I mean because people are Dynamic and they change their mind and and I think that you know um yeah I think that being able to control some form of narrative in an environment where that’s just completely taken away from you do you know I mean is is is is important to me just as much with that with that stuff as it is with like the show yeah you become the director of your own life again if I have to you know like it it yeah is there anything you want to say about the new album themes you’re going to explore material that inspires you topics you want to address well like I’ve said to you I’m not really interested in doing press surrounding it mainly because outside of the the show and the album The the albums that I’ve made which are truly the only things that I’m interested in I think because I study and talk about culture like in my work I think people may be misinterpreted that I’m as personally invested as I am interested in the phenomenology of what’s happening so for example last year I became a a way more a way a way more well-known public figure for loads of different reasons yes and the only reason that I was interested in is kind of like what I was doing so I think that a lot of artists they become very interested in their law or they become interested in the things that have happened outside of their art that people know about and they want to address that and fair enough do you know I mean but maybe on my first record when it was very much like a series of journal entries with like little bits of heartbreak and all of these stories about Rel I used to write about relationships a lot more and stuff like that maybe I’d be inclined to kind of like reflect on my experience um a as as a as a person do you know what I mean more as an artist but honestly I would just um I would kind of just be lying you know like if I am made a record about I don’t know all the stuff that was said about me or my um casual romantic Liaisons or whatever it may be that I’ve kind of become known for just because I was famous I think that that that’s an obvious thing to draw from and I’m just not interested in it and I think that like the maintenance of the status quo is something that I always like fight against so the idea of making a record about something that personally happened to me that by the time I put it out is going to be like 2 years old do you know I mean I see people doing that as well and it’s just like it’s it’s it’s not like you know it’s not interesting so again my my my work is I hope you know interesting Art Pop that provokes that that maybe helps popularize academic subjects that that I’m really interested in and because I don’t have a blueprint of to make a record that people want to hear the only thing I’ve ever done is just be like make something you’re really interested in you know and that has and so that’s that’s just basically what I’m doing and you know we’re as interested in the culture War as we are interested in some kind of Niche archaic economic model that we’ve read about do you know I mean I’m just not interested in in that kind of stuff it doesn’t make interesting work and I think that if everyone’s else’s work is going to be about that I’d rather kind of stick to what I’m good at which is maybe being like a kind of outsider on the inside I’m not interested in being provocative or contrarian at all I find it kind of tired and um quite oldfashioned and also a kind of a type of behavior that I’ve already drawn inspiration from and shown examples of I am I just want to make work that ins that is in that is inspiring um not necessarily I don’t want to make work with an audience in mind I want to have my work exist outside of a lot of contemporary music that is very interested in shortterm gains whether that be getting attention whether that be getting credit um I’m really really suspicious of those ideas and I’m also yeah so so I think that I just want my work to be something that challenges people in the moment as opposed to delivers what they think they want so that’s what I want to do like I kind of just want to like quietly calmly and in long form way like have an effect on on the culture you know uh in a different way to the way that I did when we first came out you know because a lot of these this idea of the same artists being around 20 years later right A lot of them are dialing it in and it’s fine but I think that like you know if you’re going to still be there you’ve got you’ve got to keep making a reason why you’re there do you know what I mean um so that that’s what I’ll try and do so unfortunately no no heartbreak no like kind of well I’m sure there’ll be some like maybe like some kind of love songs on there but there’s not I think that yeah I’m not in the world of did you see what happened here’s my version of it kind of thing you know I think that that’s for for for other artists to do you know Maddie thank you for sitting with me here today I have to say I’m just such an immense fan of your work you’re an extraordinary musician you’re an incredible artist and I’m glad that we finally got to have this conversation on camera for once and talk about some of these ideas bring attention to the work and the ideas that we care about and it’s just been wonderful sitting with you honest it’s it’s such an honor being able to do this with you because that you know there’s a handful of people that I really I really look to or admire in the art world that’s how we kind of became parasocial and then IRL buddies um so yeah no I like I said this will be an interesting cross-section of my fans and your fans so hello to all of the the Josh stands um and thank you for having me as you will probably know you know Josh is brilliant and I would advise all of my fans to check out your work as well even if it’s just to give more context onto kind of what I do and what we’re this kind of group of artists are trying to achieve even though we’re so multidisiplinary our uh lack of faith in the existing institutions means that we need to work together to build the context through which to understand this work so I very much feel that peers ship with you I feel it with Brad I feel it with the new models podcast the shirt I feel like we do do not research again something I would tell people to check out because like you said these conversations they’re great for for the prescriptive element but I think that once we’ve had all of these we need to move into the diagn we’ got to move into the diagnostic we need to start looking at what these alternative institutions mean and one of the things that that requires is dropping any form of kind of like art school hipster cynicism for a sincerity that allows you to try and like change the world you can build something you don’t believe in exactly that’s so true so thank you for having me again it was like I said it was I I didn’t the me talking on camera was not on my what do they say bingo card for the next two years so it’s funny that you um that you called me up especially in between campaigns but I think that it’s been perfect because due to a lot of the the contact context collapse that went around the last show I think that it’s been important for me to check in with my fans because I think that that the there was this maybe concept that because what I was doing was spiky um I was maybe being a bit um thoughtless do you know what I mean or performative and people started to lose their grasp of who I was as an artist which was the point right um but uh it’s been really really n and sorry since then I’ve not spoken I’ve only performed so I’ve not been able to kind of you know to reassure people that I’m not a um a red pilled down the rabbit hole Edge Lord um I’m I’m merely somebody like like yourself who was who has been truly fascinated with the phen PHA of of how we’re communicating and um so thank you again and I um I’ll talk to you on the phone but I’ll I’ll see everybody else like when I do a show Maddie thank you so much thank you so much