He's tuned into the vibe - he talks about listening to "dirtbag left" podcasts, wears the rumpled fashion, reads the right books. He's a dirtbag, baby, in a long line of antiheroes who interrogate the shapes of male privilege from the inside, even as they benefit from its persistence.įrom the first time Mick Jagger sang "The Last Time" to this year, when power players like Kendrick Lamar and Bad Bunny are both fighting and playing with masculine stances, Healy stands out as just one guy redefining the dirtbag role, and doing it with exceptional savvy. Critiquing masculinity while maintaining his position within the enduring hierarchies that put those bad boys on top, he's the one you love to roll your eyes at. There's a name for the kind of guy Healy tells us he is within these deceptively blithe ballads and dance floor burners it's one that's suited rock stars like him, with their disheveled charisma and well-annotated little black books, for years. But it also articulates an existential stance. This is an album about breakups, equal parts wistful and fatalistic that part of Healy's current art is apparently autobiographical, since he recently ended a two-years-plus long relationship with his fellow millennial pop protagonist, FKA twigs. In these songs, though, he mostly remains alone inside memories, fantasies, dreamed-up dialogues. Some of the jokes and a lot of the pain on the album can cross gender lines anyone with a broken heart might, as he poignantly puts it, take solace in conjuring the presence of an ex by "coming to her lookalikes." Elsewhere, though, Healy's definitely talking about masculine problems and missteps.Ĭlutching himself to himself, the Matty Healy of Being Funny aims to be earnest, to open up in a way that he insists only love can make him do. As one of pop's designated millennial spokespeople, he's happy to confront his own limitations and connect them to the era that made him - alongside familiar 1975 themes like The Problem of Being Extremely Online, this album addresses cancel culture, climate crisis and gun violence - but this time, he speaks from his body's center when he confronts these universals.
Masculinity can be comical, Healy loves to point out, even when it threatens relationships, inner peace, the world itself.ĭick jokes aren't universal, no matter how artfully Healy deploys them throughout Being Funny alongside allusions to his bisexual imagination and examples of women breaking his heart with a carelessness that equals his own. It all adds up to a disquisition on what it means to be a man - to be Healy, specifically, white and entitled, a media darling and cannily self-made bad boy - in 2022. Masturbation jokes abound on Being Funny in a Foreign Language, adding a certain saltiness to its passionately delivered romantic catchphrases, expressions of loneliness and self-doubt, protests against being misunderstood and pleas for forgiveness.
The potency and fragility of it also the pleasure. A little context: In that conversation, as throughout The 1975's new album, the singer was commenting on the curses and blessings of his gendered existence. When Matty Healy told an interviewer recently that he's obsessed with the duality of having a dick, was he joking? It's hard to tell. This piece contains language that some readers may find offensive. Matty Healy performs with The 1975 at the Leeds Festival in August 2022.
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