Matty Healy: Pop Culture in the 21st Century | Doomscroll

ELI5/TLDR

Matty Healy, the lead singer of The 1975, sits with cultural theorist Joshua Citarella for two and a half hours on what’s wrong with art in 2024. The thesis: pop culture has stopped producing new things and started endlessly remixing old ones, because the economics of being a young artist have collapsed. Aesthetic stagnation is downstream of political-economic stagnation. Healy’s response is to make pop music that smuggles in academic ideas — and to mistrust both the platforms and the people who say everyone’s an activist now.

The Full Story

The frame: Mark Fisher, the slow cancellation of the future

The whole conversation runs on Mark Fisher’s vocabulary — capitalist realism, hauntology, the slow cancellation of the future, the depressive flattening of culture. Citarella, who used to teach this stuff, lays it out cleanly. Through the 1980s neoliberalism arrived (Reagan, Thatcher, the Volcker shock), the wage floor dropped, the cost of living climbed, and the share of decommodified time available for young people to do weird unprofitable creative things shrank to almost nothing. Aesthetic risk-taking collapsed because the financial conditions for it disappeared. The 21st century, Fisher says, is just the 20th century on higher-resolution screens.

“If I said 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. Whereas if I said what’s the sound of 2009, it’s a lot fuzzier.”

The mechanism is simple: when capital becomes more risk-averse — declining rates of profit, accumulating data, a need to bet on safe bets — culture takes the shape of whatever sells. In film you get infinite Marvel reboots and a 75-year-old De Niro digitally de-aged in The Irishman because that was cheaper than casting and developing a new young actor. In painting you get the 30x40 canvas that fits over a couch. In music you get Adele and Amy Winehouse doing competent versions of the 1960s, and beyond them an endless stream of references to references.

Healy adds a second mechanism that’s specifically musical: the disappearance of new physical instruments. The 60s had distorted electric guitar; the 70s had the synthesizer; the 80s had the Fairlight; the 90s had the DAW (the digital audio workstation, where music became software). Since the mid-90s, nothing physically new. Everything happens inside a screen. The avant-garde, in his definition, requires both a culturally progressive impulse and a willingness to use a new tool — and the tools have stopped arriving.

Selling out, getting the bag

There’s a generational pivot Healy returns to several times. In the 1990s the worst thing an artist could do was sell out — sign the Nike check, take the corporate sponsorship. By the 2010s the same act had been rebranded as “getting the bag.” This wasn’t a moral collapse so much as a structural one. Once the social-democratic scaffolding around art (subsidies, cheap rent, public theaters, art schools that funded weird experiments) had been eroded, the only economically viable art was art that paid immediately. The most creative young graphic designer ends up making flat design for an internet startup, because that’s where the money is.

His own father, a welder turned stand-up comedian turned actor in the Geordie series Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, got a government grant in the 1970s, bought an ambulance, and toured plays into working-men’s clubs in the north of England. That kind of upward mobility-through-art, Healy says, was a feature of the postwar settlement. It is not available to anyone from a similar background today.

The Museum-of-Ice-Cream-ification of art

Citarella’s contribution to the vocabulary: art institutions have become advertisements for themselves. The Museum of Ice Cream, the immersive Van Gogh experience — these aren’t designed to deliver an aesthetic encounter; they’re designed to produce content for visitors’ Instagram stories, which then advertise the institution. The visitor is the unpaid promotional labor. Marvel did the same thing to fandom: being a fan stopped being a private relationship with a poster on a bedroom wall and became a public performance, a pose held while pointing at the poster for the camera.

The deeper claim is that the 21st-century super-rich have, uniquely among ruling classes in the history of capitalism, declined to fund culture. The Carnegies and the Fricks pillaged society and gave back libraries, museums, opera houses. The Silicon Valley billionaires built platforms and called them gifts. Citarella’s position — and Healy concurs — is that the platforms are not a substitute for institutions. They’re a competing structure that is actively eroding the public sphere. The generation raised on “rebel against the institutions” is fighting a battle that ended twenty years ago. The task now is building new institutions, not abandoning the idea.

“We have some shitty elites. They just built us social media platforms and they didn’t give any libraries or museums or anything else.”

Context collapse and the theatrical performance

Healy’s last live show began with him eating raw meat shirtless on stage, doing push-ups, and crawling into a wall of TVs playing footage from the conservative manosphere. It was performance art about the crisis of young men and the language the left lacks for them. It also went viral on TikTok in fragments, which produced what their friend Brad Troemel calls literalism — the assumption that the moral content of an artwork is the moral content of the artist. Art used to be a door you opened to see what was on the other side; now it’s a mirror you check to confirm your existing values.

The clip-stripping made the piece nearly impossible to read. A rock show is the one form of performance the audience is invited to film, and so a scripted theatrical work was being live-edited by millions of strangers in real time. Healy revised the show daily based on what was being said online, which made the whole thing meta in a way he hadn’t planned. He uses Danah Boyd’s term “context collapse” and gestures at Poe’s Law: anything ironic, given a large enough audience, will be read literally by someone.

He’s reached an interesting concession on this. The instinct of a thirty-something artist is to say “context, my track record speaks for itself, this is art.” But he now thinks about the 24-year-old BFA student whose career might be damaged by association if his post is misread. So he’s pulled back. Not because the critics were right, but because the cost of being misunderstood is borne by people downstream.

Sincerity, irony, the David Foster Wallace concession

Healy has been on a long arc from irony to sincerity, which he traces partly to growing up English (where embarrassment is the default register) and partly to coming of age inside the British indie scene of the 2000s — the Arctic Monkeys imitators, the I’m-not-even-trying pose. He quotes David Foster Wallace: to be truly human is to be a bit goo-prone, a bit naive, open to earnest things that could be dismissed as soy.

“If you dethrone sincerity with irony, you eventually get an equal tyrant.”

His point isn’t that irony is bad. It’s that irony as a defense mechanism — a permanent way of being — produces the same kind of foreclosure as the sincerity it was reacting against. Irony now functions for him as a precision tool, used sparingly to highlight specific things. Sincerity is the default, partly because it’s not incentivized and is therefore unusual.

This connects to his diagnosis of online behavior. The reason measured opinions get punished on social media isn’t just that they don’t go viral — studies suggest they don’t even feel good to the poster. The dopamine reward is calibrated for spice. So if you say “I find Jordan Peterson useful in small doses on certain topics,” you alienate both camps and get nothing back. The platform incentivizes choosing a side and performing for it. Anyone who can’t take a measured position seriously online is, in his view, missing where measured thinking actually happens — which has migrated downward, into the dark forest of patreons, substacks, and Discord servers.

The clearnet, the dark forest, the dark web

Citarella’s three-layer model of the internet is worth holding onto. The clearnet is open social media — Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, anything ad-driven and free. Underneath sits a “dark forest” of paywalled or invite-only spaces — Patreons, paid Substacks, group chats, Discord — where actual conversation now happens because there’s no extraction incentive. Below that is the dark web proper. The interesting cultural production has moved into the middle layer. The clearnet is increasingly a venue for performance and outrage farming.

Activism, attention, the new left

There’s a long detour through the political history of the American left — old left (Eugene Debs, the Wobblies, coal miner uprisings, organized labor as the historical subject), new left (Students for a Democratic Society, identity politics, the activist as historical subject). Citarella’s view: replacing the worker with the student was a category error, because labor is the actual lever of power and the student/activist approach can’t scale to material problems like climate change. Recycling won’t do it. Personal lifestyle changes won’t do it. You need institutions and organized leverage.

Healy’s contribution is the attention-economy reading of all this. Activism is now a low-cost identity claim — actress, mother, coffee lover, activist — slotted next to other consumer preferences. What looks like political conviction is often, on inspection, a chase for the larger pool of attention available on a particular side. He uses Winston from Mumford and Sons as the example: a banjo player tweets about a book, gets canceled, becomes a martyr for the right, and the gravitational pull is less ideology than the simple fact that being a martyr generates more attention than being a banjo player. Healy doesn’t doubt anyone’s sincerity, but he thinks the attention economy distorts the path of conviction in ways the people involved can’t see.

Performing the frontman

A recurring thread: Healy treats himself, on stage and online, as material. Most musicians use social media as “this is who I am.” He uses it as “this is what I do” — closer to a video artist working with persona. Which is why the responses look excessive to him. People react personally to what he treats as work. The David Foster Wallace bit, the surveillance theme, the simulated masturbation in the live show, the four-part video series A Theatrical Performance of an Intimate Moment — these are persona experiments, not confessions.

The surveillance theme has a literal source. His mother (the actress Denise Welch) was hacked by the News of the World during the British tabloid hacking scandal. Healy himself was hacked from age 18 to 24 — every phone conversation listened to, including during his brother’s serious illness, his parents’ divorce, and his early heroin use. He compares it to coming home to find someone has been in your house. So the question of who controls the narrative — who gets to script your life — is not just theoretical. Making constructed art about it is one way to take the words back.

“When people do that with your thoughts and your conversations — people don’t realize how much that…”

The next album

He’s not interested in publicly addressing his own tabloid moments — the casual romantic liaisons, the various controversies — because by the time a record comes out the topic is two years old and uninteresting. The new album is about the intersection of red-pilled and “online schizo” subcultures: apocalyptic and millenarian beliefs, prophets and gurus, sacred texts, numerology, moral absolutism — phenomena that show up symmetrically on both ideological extremes online. The corrective, he keeps saying, is “normal life maxing.” Make the meal, take the walk, have the conversation. Don’t get red-pilled. Don’t get black-pilled.

The aesthetic strategy on the record is, characteristically, pop-shaped. Songs about love, sex, death, communication. The framework is theoretical; the surface is melodic and accessible. He’s not making an academic paper. He’s trying to make work people actually want to listen to that happens to be carrying ideas underneath.

Key Takeaways

Aesthetic stagnation is downstream of political-economic stagnation. No new physical instruments since the DAW; no decommodified time for young artists; capital is risk-averse, so culture is risk-averse.
The platforms are not a substitute for institutions. Silicon Valley is the first ruling class in modern capitalism that didn’t fund culture. The generational reflex of “rebel against the institutions” is twenty years out of date.
Context collapse is structural. A clip stripped from a live show and circulated on TikTok cannot retain its frame. Anyone making art at scale either accepts this or stops.
Irony as a default produces the same foreclosure as the sincerity it was reacting against. DFW was right.
Measured opinion is punished on the clearnet — both by the algorithm and, apparently, by the dopamine system. Real conversation has migrated to paywalled and invite-only spaces.
The attention economy distorts conviction. Cancellation often becomes a path to a larger audience on the other side, and the person involved cannot tell the difference between principle and gravitation.
“Normal life maxing” is Healy’s prescription against both red-pilling and black-pilling. The walk, the meal, the conversation.

Claude’s Take

Two and a half hours. Of that, maybe ninety minutes is worth the time, and most of it lives in the first hour. Citarella is a clear thinker with the academic vocabulary already loaded; Healy is a perceptive observer whose register is performative even when he’s being serious. The combination produces moments of real density (the Fisher exposition, the museum-of-ice-cream-ification riff, the noblesse-oblige argument about the Silicon Valley elite) interleaved with stretches where Healy is mostly free-associating and Citarella is mostly nodding.

The most useful thing here isn’t any single argument but the connection between them. Aesthetic stagnation, the platform economy, context collapse, irony fatigue, the disappearance of subcultures, the activist-as-identity-claim — these usually get talked about separately. Pinning them all to the same underlying story (the slow cancellation of the future, the erosion of decommodified time, the failure of new institutions to replace old ones) is genuinely useful. Fisher’s been dead since 2017 and his vocabulary is still doing most of the heavy lifting in this conversation, which says something about both how good he was and how little anyone has built on him since.

Where it loosens: the second half drifts. The riff on Healy’s mother’s tabloid hacking and his own surveillance is striking but doesn’t quite land where he wants it to. The bit about the Mumford and Sons banjo player is sharp but goes on too long. The closing material on the new album is mostly the polite shape of an interview wrapping up. Healy theatricalizes — as the brief noted — and you can feel him doing it in real time, performing the pose of “the thoughtful pop frontman who reads Mark Fisher” even when he’s making a real point.

A 7. The ideas are serious, the synthesis is useful, the execution is uneven. Worth watching at 1.5x with a willingness to skim the last forty minutes.