Matty Healy: Love to Hate Him
by Kelsey Pecchia
“Who here has been to a ‘75 show before?” Healy, asks the crowd of thousands of people, stumbling around the stage as he raises his flask to the audience. They return his attempt at a “cheers” by erupting into a thunderous roar. “Good, I’m glad to hear it, this one isn’t going so well,” Healy barely mumbles out as he uses the piano on stage to stabilize his body. The crowd falls silent.
Frontman of The 1975, Matty Healy, truly leans into the whole “toxic rock star with too much money” stereotype, as the stage begins to illuminate as each band member enters and turns on a lamp to reveal the entire set is the inside of a house. Healy begins the opening song to their new album, Being Funny in a Foreign Language, one hand on the piano, a flask in the other, and a lit cigarette hanging out of his mouth. The stage is even further illuminated once the band is fully on stage, revealing that the prop design was heavily crafted to represent the band: ashtrays, an E.T. mug filled with whiskey, and upwards of five television sets.
Matty Healy has a famous online presence, one that borderlines pretentiousness, ignorance, and simply idiotic thoughts and behaviors. For a band who has developed quite the cult following through years of being the latest “Tumblr aesthetic”, the early versions of their band created a fanbase of people that for better or worse, would die for the unhealthy behaviors exhibited on stage by Healy. In their first few years on tour, Healy would almost always perform shirtless, finishing entire bottles of red wine on stage, kissing random people in the crowd, all while battling a growing drug problem. It’s no shock that in the online world, Healy has developed a reputation for the band that is not only cause for concern, but has consistently been perceived as insanely problematic. In The 1975: At Their Very Best, Healy completely leans into the image he created in his early 20s both onstage and online, giving the audience exactly what they want.
As the band performs the last song off of the new album and Healy introduces all of his band members, they each slowly exit the stage and turn off the lamps as they go. What seems like the end of the performance turns into a mental breakdown from Healy as he shushes the crowd: “Retrospectively, I think that [the last song] is more about… that song is more about my friends, because your friends leave… and then it’s just you.” Healy pauses to light a cigarette as violins play in the background. “And I don’t really know what to do. I just sit here and I watch shit… and I come here and I do this. And I don’t really know how to do anything else. I don’t really know how to be a liberal man. What is… what is a liberal man?” To the untrained eye, this appears as a psychotic break from Healy, something that could be a career ending moment of drunken existential thoughts, ones that he has never said publicly.
Healy then proceeds to kneel in front of the television sets on stage, remove his shirt, and begins to eat a raw steak. Slowly, the TVs in the background begin to play a montage of videos, everything from pop culture, to speeches from famous politicians, to war footage. Not only does this represent the horrible events taking place all over the world, but it brings to our attention how awful it is that we constantly consume so many different types of media within seconds of one another. Seeing something as violent as war footage, to immediately being fed a video of Mark Zuckerberg testifying in front of Congress, to the new number one music video, is mentally and emotionally taxing. We are not supposed to consume so many different types of media in one sitting with the same mindset, and this points out how deeply traumatizing it is that this has become our everyday.
While Healy begins doing push-ups in the same spot, the videos on screen begin to shift. Videos of controversial men in the media who represent toxic masculinity and the far right agenda, such as Jake Paul, Andrew Tate, and Ben Shapiro, appear on screen. Healy is in a trance while he continues these push-ups, showing us how hypnotizing these figures can be, especially to young boys in America. Healy is pointing to the fact that no matter how hard we’re trying in public politics, people like this will continue to have online platforms, continue to be extremely accessible, and in turn continue to have the most influence over young people. Overwhelmed with this realization, Healy crawls into one of the television sets, deciding that there is no way to escape his fate.
All of the lights shut off after Healy disappears, slowly beginning to flicker as the band reenters the stage, this time dressed in all black formal attire. As soon as Healy comes onstage, his presence is consumed by an entirely new demeanor. He winks into the cameras and cheers with the audience, communicating much more with them than he did in the first half of the show. Healy proclaims that “it’s now time to have some fun”, and the band follows his lead with a new setlist of all of their greatest hits. Healy is now consumed with joy, gratitude, and sweetness, all things he did not even seem capable of feeling in the first half of the show. This complete change from the persona of a toxic, threatening man to a sweet, genuine, and passionate musician highlights the contrast of the two so clearly. It is not until we are met with how men should act that it is so jarring to see how we tolerate this idea of toxic masculinity perpetuated into our society, politics, and the media we consume.
In just one show, Matty Healy was able to uniquely comment on how modernity has and continues to ruin society, creating a visual representation of the topics he discusses so frequently in his music. Though societally controversial artists have existed in similar circles, such as David Bowie or Prince, this performance does much more than encourage fans to be activists. Not only does Healy execute how it feels to be a young person in American society so accurately and heart-breakingly, but he simultaneously pays homage to his past self and other addicts, showcasing how terribly modern society thinks about and treats addicts. With this show, not only did Matty Healy change the future of live music, but he demanded more from his peers. Why continue to put on live performances if you’re not saying anything important with your art? Matty Healy brings this question to light through his off-putting expression of anger towards society while using his platform to tell the story of how modernity failed him. This showcases not only his insane creativity, but his ability to critique the society we have created that is actively hurting us, even if we do not realize it yet. Is Matty Healy really pretentious? Yes, but not without good reason.
Doechii is Taking the World by Storm, & I Have Fallen Over
by Kelsey Pecchia
While the powerful pop trio of 2024, Charli XCX, Sabrina Carpenter, and Chappell Roan, swept the stage at the 2025 Grammy Awards, reinvigorating pop music for a new generation of young people, it wasn’t the only category to see groundbreaking change from a new artist. Doechii, only the third woman in history to receive a Grammy for Best Rap Album, has not only redefined rap as a genre, but has solidified her place as an influential woman in the music industry.
In August of 2024, Doechii released her third mixtape as an artist, Alligator Bites Never Heal. The album is crafted beautifully. Showcasing Doechii’s intense honesty and vulnerability in her lyrics, to her unmatched flow and cadence throughout each song, she shows us a diverse range of style, emotion, and tone within one project that brings the pieces together like a puzzle. The different perspectives she offers, from her bright, unapologetic confidence on “Catfish”, to her uncertainty and fear of growing up on “Bloom”, preaches the very thing a lot of people are afraid to accept in today’s world: no one has it all figured out. As Doechii shows us, you can be a Grammy-award winning artist, a young artist at that, and still feel like you're falling behind, still feel like you’re not enough, and still feel like you could be doing more. These feelings of inadequacy are not always based in truth, and Doechii shows us that no matter how successful one may look, we are all susceptible to believing we are not good enough, or we’re not doing enough, or the one million other things we tell ourselves to convince us that we could be more than what we currently are. Doechii interweaves these feelings of inadequacy with feelings of extreme self-confidence, love, and at times, delusion. The mixtape brings together all of these vulnerabilities to show us what truly makes up a person, not just a successful one, but someone who wants to grow, learn, laugh, cry, and experience every tumultuous emotion that exists in life. For Doechii, this is what the experience of living is all about, and she is not shying away from it in her art.
While Doechii’s fame has risen substantially since a few of her songs on Alligator Bites Never Heal went viral on social media, it was her Grammy performance that finally caught people’s attention. Doechii is not only deeply creative when it comes to her music; she wants her performances to speak to an audience, to bring something to life, to make a statement, and that is something she has been doing in every single one of her performances, including the Grammys. From her first performance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Doechii stunned audiences with intricate choreography and insane stage presence. Choreographed completely herself, Doechii took inspiration from the history of hip hop, wanting to express the deep connection she felt to other black women in the genre, some who have paved the way for Doechii herself. She did this by creating a performance, not just a live performance of her song, but a true story in itself. She, and two other dancers made to look like clones of her, were all connected through their hair. The long braids that seemed to belong to Doechii continued to the two girls, representing how deeply intertwined they are, beyond their physical ties.
Doechii not only has a powerful eye when it comes to her music, but has shown that she is creatively innovative, never wanting to do the simplest thing. During her striking 2025 Grammy’s performance, Doechii made it so that you could not take your eyes off of her. Choreographed by Robbie Blue, Doechii came to him with ideas in mind. Initially, she wanted the entire stage to be moving, and introduced the performance as such to Blue. Something that would have been insanely difficult, they both dove into head first. After hearing the Grammy’s could not make this happen (safety hazard… boring), Doechii and Blue settled on a moving conveyor belt, making Doechii’s performance one that was fluid and captivating, keeping you wondering what she was going to do next. Again, choreographed with an ensemble of “clones”, Doechii played into the idea that the rap universe and black women alike have shaped who she is today. Receiving a standing ovation from some of the biggest legends (JayZ, Billie Eilish, SZA), Doechii not only captivated the world, she captivated those who thought they had already seen the best of the best. After hitting every mark, being held in a center split (for an impressively long amount of time), and walking up a staircase made of her dancers, Doechii showed the world the lengths she is willing to go to be the best of the best, creating the most powerfully moving and innovative art that she can.
After shedding a few tears, both during her acceptance speech and performance, I know I am not the only one who is now completely taken by Doechii. Only 26 years old, she is a bold, confident, unapologetic woman and performer who is determined to continue to share her insane talent, rhythm, and vision with the world. I see this performance and I see a woman I can look up to, a woman I’m inspired by, and a woman who reminds me that there is nothing more important than who I am and who I want to be. Isn’t that what art is all about?
