An Old Friend

Several months ago my Russian language partner sent me a photo of her dog dozing in his bed after he shredded it. “Bad boy,” she said. I seized the rare opportunity to make a joke in Russian so that I could not only test my language partner’s sense of humor but also see if I could in fact be funny in a foreign language that still unfortunately feels quite foreign to me. I wrote back to her: “мой мозг, когда я говорю по-русски (my brain when I speak Russian).” To my delight she found the joke so funny that she recalled it during our next phone call.

That I relish moments like these more than almost anything else captures who I am right now. I know I am not alone in feeling that the world is a very interesting place right now – and not in a good way. I could sit down and ramble about all the things that bother me, but that feels burnt out.

All I want to do after a long day of work is sink into my Russian language learning books and become funny in a foreign language. I long for the weekend conversations with my German language partners that feel endless. I crave that sense of satisfaction when I express myself in a foreign tongue better than I thought I could, perhaps even better than I could in English.

It is a retreat from the reality of the outside world but not from outside worlds entirely: being funny in a foreign language enables me to live in an outside world of my own creation.

I have outgrown a lot of bands. In high school, I insisted to my mom that it “wasn’t a phase” as I clutched a pair of custom Converse sneakers decorated with Bastille lyrics and a silhouette of Dan Smith. Little did I know was that I would stop listening to Bastille only a couple years later. My college self shrugged that off as immaturity: surely I, someone who finally escaped her hometown and stepped into the world, had such refined taste and awareness that I could not make that “mistake” again. Because under no circumstances would a band be worth a listen if I were not committed for life, right? And there was no way that my twenty-something self would change.

I thought that as I accumulated a few Twenty One Pilots tattoos and even traveled to the other side of the country to see them. While I do savor those memories, I distanced myself from the group’s music and fanbase so much that I have hung up my Regional at Best era beanie for good.

Surely there are other bands I have grown out of. Bastille and Twenty One Pilots are prime examples. It is normal to become detached though: one day you wake up and realize that you no longer identify with something. People change – both the fans and the artists.

There is only one band to which I have clung ever since I was hooked on the more “indie” (I cringe as I write that) side of music: The 1975. At this point there is no proper word to describe the band itself either, as its sound as evolved and continues to range from indie rock/pop to shoegaze, R&B, garage, soul, and whatever other genres with which they decide to tinker. I think this is part of their appeal to me especially; I consider myself such a multidimensional person, even more so now that I by day perform some biological assay on a tissue that many people have not heard of but by night drown myself in Dostoevsky, Russian grammar, and Die Anstalt among various other things so far removed from science.

I cannot say that The 1975 were a prime candidate for “growing up with me” from the beginning. After all, I was certainly not smoking weed or engaged in any sort of romantic relationship depicted in the band’s angsty debut album. I still remember listening to Chocolate for the first time, watching the music video and scrolling through comments that said “like this if Harry Styles brought you here.” There was something about the album – not only its lyrics but also its sound – that screamed teenage angst but in a way that does not deter me from returning to it frequently to this day.

I was hooked. I needed to see them live. I still regret not seeing them at the first possible opportunity at Royal Oak Music Theatre in 2014. Instead I stayed home to cram for my AP Chemistry exam. Big mistake. However, I redeemed myself later that year when I not only saw them play The Fillmore – a small venue relative to what the band plays now – later that year but also spammed a local radio station on Twitter, winning the chance to meet Matty and Adam and to see them play an acoustic set on a chilly November afternoon. I remember accidentally stepping on Matty’s foot and giving them a letter whose contents would probably make me roll my eyes now.

After hopping back in line for the show later that night, I already had a sense that maybe I would not be a fan of The 1975 “for life.” Nestled in the passenger seat of a limousine, Matty whizzed past the overwhelming line of mostly teenage girls and flung his cigarette out the window. I cringed as girls around my age squealed with delight and flocked to the newfound memento. Was this fanbase really for me?

Still, I was mesmerized by their show, even if I, a naive seventeen-year-old, could not understand the appeal of a Matty Healy smoking and drinking during their set.

Sooner or later I was attaching specific and major experiences in my life to this band’s music. The 1975 were no longer just a band whose tracks I blared in my Volkswagen Beetle as I drove to the local mall or park to escape my parents at home. I vividly remember how the band’s first single following their first album soundtracked my college application season in late 2014. Medicine overcame the sound of a downpour outside the window from my family’s “library” room, where I, hunched over our computer, finally finished my early application to what was my first choice university and is now my alma mater.

I am not at all unique in these sense. Most people who adore a band begin to associate it with specific bright and dark times in their lives. They can recall exactly where they were and what they were feeling when a new album leaks, much like I can when I reflect upon my first listen to the band’s sophomore album. I jumped at the opportunity to listen to I Like it When You Sleep early. I remember feeling like I was walking through a snow globe while the album’s instrumental tracks accompanied my stroll across campus en route to my weekly chemistry lab. It all felt meant to be – how the snow fell almost cinematically in slow motion and how luscious the album’s title track sounded even in the worst quality earbuds.

I have seen The 1975 many times over the years. I have slept in a tent perched on the cold Uptown streets of Chicago as well as the United Center grounds in the worst conditions for nights just to earn a spot at the barricade. I cursed myself when I froze in my rental car for hours after the show because I accidentally left its battery running for the whole weekend and had to wait for roadside assistance. But it was worth it.

Over time it became clear that their music was always more than what it seemed on the surface: teenage angst packaged by a singer whose vocals were hardly comprehensible. For starters, Matty Healy, regardless of the controversy he often garners and his occasional pretentiousness, invites you to ponder not only current events but also the human condition itself. His vulnerability, a trait I highly value among artists, is second to none. It goes without saying that to not only open up about his crippling addiction to heroin but also include his streams of consciousness in his music. The 1975 is Matty Healy: no one asks why The 1975 are still around because they are just like individual artists like Taylor Swift who will always be relevant. Yet at the same time The 1975 is not just Matty Healy.

What makes them so captivating to me and presumably to so many others is that they are a band “of the times” but in a personal way. Today it is easy to write about politics. It is easy to write about mental afflictions. It is easy to produce a synth-pop banger. But to do all those things among others all at once? Not so much.

I remember feeling personally attacked when “A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships” was released. It was around this time that I began to question the Internet and what it had become. It was around this time that I for the first time felt genuinely scared to live in the United States. It was around this time that I began to think about what I would do next in my life but felt crippled by my inadequacy in college and in my relationships, particularly with my parents who seemed more different from me than ever before. This album spoke to my core with songs like “I Like America and America Likes Me,” “How to Draw/Petrichor,” and “I Always Wanna Die (Sometimes)” not only lyrically but also musically. I did, in fact, always want to die a little bit, especially during one particularly rainy evening walk when I had to come to terms with potentially not being admitted to any graduate program and, more tragically, feeling the most lost when I knew that I would have to move away from the one place that finally felt like home to me.

The icing on the cake is how the songs feel like they could soundtrack your life in both a local and global sense. While it is always comforting to listen to sad music when you are indeed sad, it is an entirely other experience when an album not only captures your mood but also sneaks up on you and says: “This is what will happen to you, and this is exactly how it is going to feel.” I would argue that The 1975 achieves the latter more than the former.

I continue to stand by this a couple albums later as I await my first listen to Being Funny in a Foreign Language. I was struck when I first found out what the album title was because it seemed so much less reactionary than something like A Brief Inquiry Into Online relationships; its track titles followed suit. The 1975 worried about it all: digitalization, the apocalypse, and climate change, just to scratch the surface. The new album title is so irrefutably me.

I too have worried enough over the past couple of years. It was only recently that I discovered that I do not have the energy to worry anymore. I cannot worry about Russia’s war in Ukraine, climate change, a global pandemic, or attacks on women’s rights and digital privacy to the extent that I have only years or even months ago. It continues to feel every day like the world falls apart even more than I imagined it could. But all I can do now is delight in being funny in a foreign language because that is ultimately who I am – not just now but for the rest of my life. Like many as well as Matty himself, I am focusing on where I am emotionally and physically rather than on “the plethora of computers and the Internet.” I care about art – music and books especially – and that is timeless. And that’s exactly what BFIAFL is about.

That is why listening to the album’s first single “Part of the Band” on release day was like sitting down at a café with an old friend who knows you all too well. It still is.