Matty Healy has discussed how today’s music industry has created a bigger need for commercialisation in order for music-making to be viable.
The 1975 frontman appeared as a guest on the latest episode of Joshua Citarella’s Doom Scroll podcast, in which both he and Citarella discussed how the music before the ’90s was defined by various new technologies of the time. He also recalled how now, the reality of “physical technologies disappearing” has led to a lack of change within music since then.
“If you took a piece of music from the ‘90s – if you took a piece of Aphex Twin back 30 years, they would go, ‘This isn’t even music. I am so stunned by how unrelatable this is.’ If you took a piece of music now, even from the far leftfield, and you took it back 30 years – which is the ‘90s– and you played it to them, they’d be struck by how understandable, how relatable and how not different it is,” the ‘Sex’ singer explained, citing writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher.
Healy went on to theorise that the reasons for the creative standstill when making music can be attributed to “neoliberalism” and “horizonless progression” with regard to commercialisation.
While discussing his opinion, the ‘Part Of A Band’ singer explained that they “started to erode art funding, any space where a squat or a rave or anything truly culturally generative could happen,” adding that it has “partly to do with economics, but it’s also to do with physical technologies disappearing.”
“Very simply, the ‘60s: Jimi Hendrix and the overtly distorted guitar. The ‘70s: Brian Eno and the synthesiser. The ‘80s: the Fairchild, with Peter Gabriel and Throbbing Gristle. And then the ‘90s: Aphex Twin and the DAW, and basically Logic and Pro Tools,” he added.
He continued: “In music, since the mid ‘90s, since a DAW – a platform where you can create music on your computer – there have been no new physical technologies. Everything is software and everything is codified. Everything happens on a screen.”
Elsewhere in the chat, Healy goes on to say that there has been a revolution in the music world recently, but “only in the space of distribution” rather than in the space of creation. “In the ’60s and ’70s, young artists were really interested in changing the world. Now, you’re not really encourage to do that,” he said.
Previously speaking to NME as part of The Big Read cover in 2022, Healy opened up about his feelings on ‘cancel culture’, and his reasons for quitting Twitter after a controversial post back in 2020.
“I was like, ‘You know what? If I’m gonna write about the culture war then I’m not going to be in it anymore. I’m certainly not going to become a pawn in it’ – that’s what I was starting to become: very much this beacon of the left, which was pissing me off. Not as much as the right, because there are Nazis in the right, but the left was starting to wind me up,” he explained.
In other news, Healy recently appeared on Charli XCX‘s latest remix album ‘Brat And It’s Completely Different But Also Still Brat’.