who cares about matty healy anyway ew
who cares about matty healy anyway ew
matty healy is a brandy melville "stay weird" tank top but he thinks he's the white Azealia Banks
One of the first times I became aware of my narcissism of small differences was when I became an Arctic Monkeys fan in 2013 with the release of AM, the album that launched them into mainstream Bacardi ad commercial success. I was 15 and all about the music, man. I was a fan for the sake of the ART and the Tumblr typography, apparently not how I could aestheticize it into my soft grunge pale blog. I was condescending towards the starter packification of music groups, and I was only encouraged by the profusion of negativity that came with being a Taylor Swift fan, who were treated like interchangeable immature teeny boppers. I wasn’t a teeny bopper. I was taking 5 honors classes and had zero crushes that year! I wrote thoughtful, cogent editorials for my school newspaper, wore JCrew Outlet sweater sets to replicate Modcloth on a budget, and listened to Joni Mitchell, St. Vincent, and Mumford & Sons. Teeny bopper my ass! Teen girls COULD like multiple things! (This, of course, was part of the basis of Rookie Mag feminism, along with “emotional freebleeding,” being anti dress code, and pretending—at least for me—that you were really into riot grrrl and zines.) I wasn’t LIKE other girls; i actually LIKED other girls and the things girls liked and don’t act like I’m special, don’t you get it????
I resisted music marketed towards aesthetic sensibilities and poorly-defined subculture. No, I will NOT listen to One Direction just because I’m a teen girl. Taylor Swift already filled that youthful yearning void, and she played her own instruments and wrote her own music, unlike the FAKE boy and girl groups. The Arctic Monkeys was a REAL band. Alex Turner was endorsed by my favorite feminist poet Carol Ann Duffy. Who were these Neighbourhood and Bastille and The 1975 and how dare these landfill faux indie bands pretend they were on the same level by popping up alongside grainy black and white images of vinyl records and studded Litas on Tumblr? These were not serious artists. They were just jpegs in a starter pack. They were bands people only listened to because they thought it made them cool.
Goth, emo, Portland hipster were all archetypes that were well-defined not just with clothing, music, and purchasing habits, but also personality. I didn’t get what this “2014 Tumblr girl” was trying to be other than a window shopper whereas MY hobby was media consumption and thinkpieces. She didn’t have a descructive and all-consuming disease. She wasn’t being groomed by an internet pedophile. She quoted books she didn’t even read. This illegibility made me caused me to be needlessly derisive of this persona.
I didn’t like that this “2014 Tumblr Girl” and “Superwholock Tumblr Girl” were the only ones getting attention. Some of us were cultural omnivores, who appreciated the color grading of a Parks and Rec gifset as well as Vampire Weekend lyrics. To be honest, I wasn’t even that unique. I had all the tastes of a teen NPR listener who couldn’t actually be bothered to listen to NPR because “the media” aside from Jezebel dot com and The Atlantic longreads was pretty boring. If you met me, I was a perfect and mildly insufferable version of my Tumblr page—obsessed with pop culture, dressed in confectionery colors. What I perceived was that the “aesthetic bloggers” were not the same. Their blogs reflected aspirations, not mirrors. They may have reblogged photos of girls in grid print miniskirts, but they were too risk-averse in their style to wear anything to school besides jeans and leggings, or so I assumed. Of course I was no different in my admiration of voluminous Elie Saab runway dresses that I couldn’t afford on Rent the Runway now, but again—this is about the narcissism of small differences.
My music taste is still stuck in 2014. I haven’t evolved since then, only added Phoebe Bridgers, Carly Rae Jepsen, Mitski to my roster, which is just quiet Taylor Swift, 1989 Taylor Swift, and Fiona Appleish St. Vincent again. I’m not afraid of being a poptimist—I have about half a million people on r/Popheads who basically share the same Spotify Top 100 as me. And a lot of us listen to Mitski and don’t have baggage about being Asian-American, and a lot of us listen to Phoebe Bridgers and we’re managing our mental health to the best of our ability without making it our whole personality. So sure, at my big age I’m still somehow invested in distinguishing myself from my cohort, but only because I’m part of the healthy majority of music enjoyers.
Matthew Healy, like the soft grunge fandom he represented to me, is just another image-conscious person who talks a big game and underdelivers. Not much of what he says is important and it doesn’t mean much to like him. Somehow, as long as we don’t catch him soliciting nudes from 14 year old girls, he’s still more morally pure than 90% of C to B minus-list male musicians. He’s just a garden variety liberal who thinks he’s special because he uses the r-word sometimes. His performatively listening to Cmtown and Red Scare are no different from Harry Styles wearing an ill-fitting dress, and they most likely share the same politics and voting habits when it comes down to it. He will never be Azealia Banks. It’s fine to be the frontman of a pop rock band, but it’s absolutely insufferable that he acts like he’s so much smarter than the teen girls he makes music for and that he’s a “real” rockstar and he deserves to be pretentious just because he read Christopher Lasch. For Jia Tolentino, dubbed the millennial Joan Didion, and the New Yorker to see him as profile-worthy only validates his delusions and encourages the tepidly “subversive” behavior that only makes him look like a fool. It’s not that deep. He’s about as edgy as that brandy melville crop top that says “stay weird.” He is not a stargirl. He’s a somewhat smart, highly attention-seeking man who desperately wants to be seen as a slightly different type of smart man he’ll never have the chutzpah to embody.
