Love Songs of a Dirtbag
This piece contains language that some readers may find offensive.
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. 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. The potency and fragility of it; also the pleasure. 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. 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. Masculinity can be comical, Healy loves to point out, even when it threatens relationships, inner peace, the world itself.
Dick 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. 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. 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.
Across the course of the album's thornily seductive dance-pop bops, he expresses anxiety about being "cucked," offers a take on incel mass shooters which is somewhat muddled in its mix of outrage and empathy and invokes the word "ego" as a marker for male arrogance more than once. Tightening up the genre-swimming sprawl of previous 1975 albums, Being Funny is romantic music for cynical observers ready to give love a try, and Healy's honest move throughout is to acknowledge that even when he's at his most tender, his manhood gets in the way. "I would go blind just to see you," he moans in "Happiness," a song that bubbles up like Whitney Houston's "I Wanna Dance With Somebody" only to wind up not in a pink-lit nightclub but back with Healy, alone at home, wallowing in stimulating memories. "God help me, 'cos I'm never gonna love again," he exhales at the song's peak. It's a buoyant anticlimax, and it is pretty funny — a self-critical takedown of the urges that embarrass and drive him.
Clutching himself to himself, the Matty Healy of aims to be earnest, to open up in a way that he insists only love can make him do. In these
