Matty Healy, lead singer of the English band The 1975, ate raw meat while shirtless on stage at a Nov. 7 show.
The bit of the show, part of their “At Their Very Best” tour, wasn’t just for click-bait and shock factor — it was a critique of toxic masculinity in the internet age.
The tour comes after the band’s fifth studio album, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language,” released in mid-October.
Many viewers were confused and even disgusted by Healy’s bizarre choice to eat (at least what looked like) raw meat onstage. Which…is a normal response.
But there was more behind this seemingly gross choice. The raw meat, in my view, represented hyper-masculinity. The rest of the visual aspects of the show, combined with the band’s internet-age lyrics, represent mass media.
Different news outlets reported on the performance and the visual aspects of the stage.
According to Variety, “the 1975 transformed the Garden’s stage into an enormous deconstructed house, fully furnished with couches, lamps, bookcases and vintage televisions — lots of them.”
BrooklynVegan said the stage gave the arena a “cozy, intimate feeling” and that it felt like a “‘70s sitcom, with band members moving from room to room and Matty flopping in chairs and on the sofa.”
One of the television sets on the stage had broadcast shots of Ben Shapiro, Mark Zuckerberg, Kamala Harris, Logan Paul and Vladimir Putin, according to Variety.
“Healy began chewing on a raw meat shank and doing push-ups until, finally, he climbed into the TV and disappeared,” Variety reported.
Performance art mixes visual art with a dramatic performance. Doing something insanely barbaric and then crawling back into a box of mass media (like a television screen with highly-publicized political figures), is like being sucked into one’s phone to distract from impulsive movements.
This isn’t the first controversial, themed performance from The 1975.
The Human Life Protection Act was signed in May 2019 by Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey. The writers of the bill compared women having abortions to major genocides like the Gulag government control, forced labor camps, the number of Jews that died in the Holocaust and the Rwanda genocide.
“There are people — men — in the American government actually comparing the harrowing, difficult life choices of female American citizens to the Holocaust,” Healy said.
“People will call you a monster, but I will tell you, you are fundamentally uneducated,” he said.
“Those people should apologize to the Jews of America, they should apologize to the people of Rwanda,” Healy said. “I don’t believe it’s about the preservation of life. I believe it’s about the controlling of women.”
“You are not men of God; you are simply misogynistic wankers,” he said.
Later that year, The 1975 performed in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
According The Guardian, “The singer of the band the 1975 defied Dubai’s anti-LGBT laws during a concert on Wednesday by venturing into the crowd and kissing a male fan on the lips.”
The 1975 have always been pro-LGBTQ+ rights, and performing in a country where homosexuality is illegal didn’t stop them from sticking to their values.
No matter the controversial performance, bands and singers who take time to speak to marginalized groups and talk about political issues are doing the right thing. Even if eating raw meat is a little off-field, The 1975 consistently tackles controversial issues in an attention-grabbing way.
Kathryn Craddock is a 22-year-old mass communication senior from Patterson.
