![]() ![]() When the 1975 won the British equivalent of a Grammy, Healy, in an acceptance speech, read a snippet of an essay by the writer Laura Snapes about misogyny in music. The band’s last album, “Notes on a Conditional Form,” from 2020, opens with a monologue about the climate crisis delivered by Greta Thunberg. He sometimes ceded his spotlight to the voices of women. Though he has always run his mouth, he long seemed dedicated to saying the right thing, eventually, and getting praised for it. Healy is something of a test case for the digital panopticon and its reaction cycles. The future holds little imagined promise, and, to cope, teens are indulging in reactionary conservatism or the oppression Olympics, the world and their identities distorted by social media. Now, as Healy sees things, the average seventeen-year-old is worried about melting ice caps, or the failures of capitalism, or how easy it is to say the wrong thing. ![]() He sang the song’s refrain: “I’m sorry if you’re living and you’re seventeen.” When Healy and his three bandmates were that age-they have been a band, and best friends, for twenty years-they were mostly concerned with shows, records, parties, and girls, and they believed earnestly in the power of art to free themselves and change the world. Then he lit a cigarette and began to play the jittery riff that opens the band’s latest album, “Being Funny in a Foreign Language.” “You’re making an aesthetic out of not doing well / And mining all the bits of you you think you can sell,” he sang, taking long pulls from a bottle of red wine as the audience roared. His band, the 1975, stood in position among wood-panelled walls and framed family photos, and Healy-skinny, in a close-cut suit and a tie, black curls slicked back behind his ears-rose and dramatically blinked at the lights, took a swig from a flask, and sat down at a piano. Audience engagement is table stakes for K-pop success, and in 2020-after their EP Heng:garæ sold a million copies its first week-the incendiary single “Left & Right” yet again drew fans into SEVENTEEN’s process with a global TikTok dance challenge.In January, the thirty-four-year-old British rock star Matty Healy woke up on a couch in his house, except it was not his house, it was a stage set at the O2 Arena, in London, and twenty thousand people were there with him, screaming. After topping South Korean charts with their first three albums, SEVENTEEN documented their 2019 Ode to You tour with Hit the Road, a YouTube documentary series that once again invited fans to their virtual backstage. The promotional event set the stage for their first EP, 17 Carat, which provided the SEVENTEEN fan community, Carats, with its name outlasted every K-pop entry to date on American charts and offered up an irresistible centerpiece, “Adore U.” The band easily fill their epic three-hour concerts with super-tight choreography, constantly unfolding stories about their members and material for every taste: Piano ballads ("Say Yes"), electro hip-hop ("Fronting"), and hard-hitting Auto-Tuned dance pop ("Hit) are all on tap. After Pledis officially took the group under its wing, the 2015 reality-TV series Seventeen Project: Big Debut Plan concluded with an hour-long live showcase on a major broadcast channel. In 2013, while being groomed by management firm Pledis Entertainment, SEVENTEEN first appeared in an online show that depicted the group’s 13 members-often divided into hip-hop, vocal, and performance subunits-rehearsing and performing largely self-written and -choreographed material. ![]() SEVENTEEN cultivated their steady rise to the top of South Korea's charts by providing fans with behind-the-scenes access to the supersized boy band's artistic process. ![]()
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