^{PHOTOS: Adriana Arguijo Gutierrez (2022), Jordan Curtis Hughes (2022),
& Anonymous (1952)}

“I'm sorry about my twenties, I was learnin’ the ropes / I had a tendency of thinking ‘bout it after I spoke / We're experiencin’ life through the postmodern lens / Oh, call it like it is / You’re making an aesthetic out of not doing well / And mining all the bits of you you think you can sell / Whilst the fans are on,” Matty Healy sings in the latest “The 1975.” // HEADER PHOTO: The 1975, Being Funny in a Foreign Language © Dirty Hit, 2022

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essay,  nov 23

About a year back, British art-pop stalwarts The 1975 released their sonically un-challenging and horridly-titled new album, Being Funny in a Foreign Language (2022). Where the band was once known for lyrical extra-ness (“It’s not about reciprocation, it’s just all about me / A sycophantic, prophetic, Socratic junkie wanna-be”) and penning post-guilty pleasure anthems, Being Funny strips it all back—down to the most natural essence of the band, of any band, really.

While it presents The 1975 at their least adventurous (thanks Jack Antonoff), the new record’s consciously nothing-grand-to-say approach to lyricism and overarching narrative has something both humdrum and utterly captivating to it.

The record, the band’s fifth, trades in the nihilism and conceptualism of their past—opting instead for a dive, headlong, into earnestness. “It’s not that deep,” says a track titled simply, “I’m in Love with You.” When before we’d get an intermingling of flippancy and on-the-fence sincerity, now the chorus starts: “Yeah, it’s simple and it goes like this / I’m in love with you / I’m in love with you / I’m in love with you / I’m in love with you…”

Speaking to Zane Lowe, Matty Healy, the band’s errant mouthpiece, opines: “I’ve been talking about ‘sincereity is scary’ for a long time, and it’s a lot easier to be ironic, but it’s not even ‘getting old,’ it’s just growing up a little bit. [...] Life will eventually give way for a less sexy set of circumstances. Family? Responsibility? Love? These are the big things, [and] I’ve always been scared of the big things, never wanted to take them on, and certain people don’t.”

“With this record, I [thought], “Yeah, I could say, I’ve got a disease and you took a picture of your salad and put it on the internet. I could do that. Or I could say: Just tell me you love me. That’s all I need to hear.”

So, what do you get when you strip yourself of all supererogation? When all the defense mechanisms are taken out, when Big Thoughts are rid of? What are you then? All signs point to: being an adult—a grown up. Someone compromising every single day. Not wanting to get out of bed in the morning, but knowing you’ll have to. “Growing old” is what The 1975 have done in their early-30s, becoming “washed”—a little defeated, a little deflated, but accepting of things more, the good and the bad, smiling a half-smile more, content.

“Every record I’ve made, I convinced myself that I had so much to prove,” said Healy. “But on this record, I said, ‘Instead of a magnum opus, what about more like a polaroid?’”

There’s a fine line between acceptance and giving up, a fine line between chasing dreams and not being delusional. As Zach Baron put it, in his “Praise of Being Washed:”

“If you’re anything like me, you spent the better part of your teens and 20s tirelessly working on being, basically, a more interesting version of yourself. […] You vowed to dress yourself to match the version of yourself you saw in that mirror […] You spent years building up something—taste, experience, judgment. You were trying to like what you saw in the mirror, as all ambitious people try to do. What I am saying is, perhaps you actually like that person now. Perhaps you could use the mirror less.”


Truly, “getting old,” as a concept, seems to settle-in around our late 20s, with the mark of 30, almost like midnight, announcing our arrival to the next stage of life. And artists, historically, have dealt with this (real or imagined) change through their work. There exists in this way a subcategory of its own, with completely varying—and entirely alike—results.

While Healy and co. handled the transition with calm, Robert Smith of The Cure famously suffered multiple nervous breakdowns soon upon turning 29. In 1988, Smith fixated over a notion that his best works would be behind him by the exact age of 30, just as he had seen happen to artists he admired from the past. Especially proving a sticking point was the standard set by The Beatles, who were barely 28 at the time of their breakup—a point by which they’d already carved out an unparallel discography in pop. “This is it. This is my last chance to create something really meaningful in my life,” the goth singer had said.

︎Robert Smith, 1987, in happier times // PHOTO: Viva Rock (Japan)/picturesofyou.us

Jay-Z, too, was no different. At 34, the Brooklyn rapper had released what was to be his “last album” (and a classic one at that) before embarking on his retirement. He was just tired, he said, and felt the need to leave the rap game before “he fell off.” He would come back, however, exactly 3 years later with the bang-average Kingdom Come.

In 2011, Danny Brown’s underground hit, “30” dealt with this particular anxiety: “And now a nigga 30, so I don’t think they heard me / That the last ten years, I been so fucking stressed / Tears in my eyes, let me get this off my chest / The thoughts of no success got a nigga chasing death / Doing all these drugs, hope an OD ain’t next.” Brown is 42 now, though, and has gone on to record several more tracks and albums—many better than “30.”

And back in 1964, New Left activist Jack Weinberg uttered the infamous hippie slogan, “Never trust anyone over 30.” This phrase would be reused several times throughout history, sometimes misattributed to other authors (some figured Lennon had said it.) Weinberg is currently 83, though, and has since retracted the statement.

It has to be noted, of course, that in Robert Smith’s chasing of—as he saw it—the last vestiges of glory, the direct result was The Cure’s most critically and commercially successful album: 1989’s Disintegration. The record was released just 11 days after Smith’s 30th birthday, and featured a great chunk of their greatest songs, including perhaps their most beautiful two, “Plainsong” and “Closedown.”

Disintegration, in a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, would come to be Smith’s last true masterwork. While later outings like Wish (1992) and Bloodflowers (2000) would be solid entries to their ouvre, the immediacy of the band’s 1980s output would not be matched. Either in a stroke of luck, or a stretch of forced labor, Smith concocted his magnum opus—which he feared he hadn’t made—within his 20s.

(For this writer’s money, The Cure’s masterpiece was already wrapped up by 1982’s impossibly haunting Pornography.)

Later, Smith would ease on the steadfast views of his 29-year-old self, admitting even: “[L]ooking back, I was a bit of a prickly character in some respects and maybe a bit difficult, more difficult than perhaps I should have been.” His favorite of his works is now Bloodflowers.


On a side note: Bob Dylan, ever the prodigy, grew out of this trauma by the age of 23. In 1964’s “My Back Pages,” Dylan sings, reflecting on his youthful protests and idealism: “Ah, but I was so much older then / I’m younger than that now.”

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The thesis of taking a breather every now and again isn’t without its share of ditractors, though.

The primary proponent against what Zach Baron lovingly characterized as “being washed” would be the Pygmalion Effect. This theory, otherwise known as the “Law of Attraction,” suggests that the greatest expectations beget the greatest results. We get, basically, what we send out into the world. We can’t be negative, we can’t be self-defeatist, we can’t stop and rest or question ourselves.

The original study for this concerned a classroom of young students and a teacher. The psychologists believed that, just like the Greek (mythical) sculptor, Pygmalion—who, so in love with his own statue, willed his creation to life—so too could a teacher, through lofty expectations and sheer positivity, be directly responsible for the intellectual advancement of their pupils.

Largely influencing the Pygmalion study, though, was an even older case: that of Clever Hans, the famous horse.

World-renowned in the 1900s, Clever Hans (der Kluge Hans, in the original German) possessed remarkable abilities, beyond that of a horse. Clever Hans was owned by Wilhelm von Osten, an arithmetic teacher and self-described mystic. Von Osten trained his horse very young, and by the age of 9, Hans was capable of his famously unique feats. Clever Hans, it was said, could solve arithmetic problems.

When von Osten would ask what, for instance, the sum of 3 + 2 was, the horse would stamp his hoof 5 times. The horse was similarly gifted in telling time, remembering the names of people, as well as solving more difficult math problems. The horse became a spectacle, traveling up and down Germany, amassing media attention and notoriety wherever they went.

︎Clever Hans performing in Berlin, 1904 // PHOTO: Granger Collection/Posterazzi

This phenomenon, too, didn’t occur in isolation. In the late 1950s, there lived an English-born chimpanzee named Congo, a reputed abstract expressionist painter. At the age of 2, Congo was handed a pencil and paper and the great ape took to drawing and, famously, painting. He would paint with large streaks of color, seemingly slapdashed, but with careful precision. When Congo felt he’d finished a painting, he would refuse to work on it any further, no matter the degree of persuasion.

So impressive was the chimp’s paintings that Pablo Picasso, a noted fan, hung a Congo canvas on his studio. Salvador Dalí, upon a viewing of Congo’s display at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, compared the work to Jackson Pollock, preferring the chimpanzee’s output to the American’s.

Within a decade of Congo came “Pierre Brassau,” the pseudonym for a 4-year-old chimp, Peter from Sweden. In 1964, a tabloid writer, Åke “Dacke” Axelsson, and artist Yngve Funkegård concocted an elaborate hoax. They convinced Peter’s keeper at the zoo to present the ape with a brush, some paint, and a canvas. Peter then produced several paintings, and the duo collected his 4 best efforts. Thereafter, they arranged an exhibition in Gothenburg, to “celebrate” the supposedly unknown French artist by the name of Pierre Brassau.

Art critic Rolf Anderberg, unaware, observed: “Brassau paints with powerful strokes but also with clean determination. His brush strokes twist with a furious fastidiousness on the canvas... Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer.” The chimp belonged to Borås Zoo, or as one might pronounce Bras-sau. When the hoax was finally made public, critic Anderberg only doubled down, insisting Pierre Brassau’s works were “still the best paintings in the exhibition.”

︎Hard at work // PHOTO: William Vanderson/Getty

There was also the case of Lady Wonder, the psychic mare, who not unlike Clever Hans, could correctly solve problems and quizzes. Between the 1920s and ‘50s, she just as easily predicted presidential elections, missing persons cases, and horse races. When the mare was asked herself how she did it, she spelled out simply “M-I-N-D.”

The horse’s psychic services were soon monetized; her owner and trainer Claudia E. Fonda charged $1 per client (roughly $18 today.) An estimation of 150,000 visitors were reported to have come. There was “no trickery involved,” maintained several psychologists (and parapsychologists) who flew out to Fonda’s farm in Richmond, Virginia, to verify. “There is left only the telepathic explanation.”

It was only a professor, John Scarne, who made the trip and noted, “Mrs. Fonda carried a small whip in her right hand, and she cued the horse by waving it. I detected Mrs. Fonda doing it every time the horse moved the lettered blocks with the nose. This method of doing the trick might have puzzled me if I hadn’t known that the placement of horses’ eyes on either side of the head gave them wide backward range of peripheral vision.”

Fonda also had a dog, Pudgy, who she trained at a young age to play the piano each and every time a new customer walked in through the doors.

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Lady Wonder’s predecessor, ultimately, was no different: Clever Hans was a highly intelligent and advanced animal, but he was not an arithmetician. Clever Hans could perceive the minutest change in muscle movements, the tensing of the questioner, of the audience, of the way they almost imperceivably leaned closer, cluing the horse into the right answer the closer he got to it. In Ray Hyman’s The Elusive Quarry (1989), the founder of skeptic inquiry asserts: “The horse was simply a channel through which the information the questioner unwittingly put into the situation was fed back to the questioner. The fallacy involved treating the horse as the source of the message rather than as a channel through which the questioner’s own message is reflected back.”

It was noted that when the horse couldn’t see the person who knew the answer, the horse didn’t respond correctly. That when the correct answer was not known to anyone present, Clever Hans did not know it either.

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The Pygmalion study, the law of attraction, and its many derivatives based much of their theorem on this, repurposing the above nonverbal phenomena to human-to-human interaction. What followed great expectations in the cases of horses and chimpanzees were exceptional performances. Animals, though, behave exceedingly different from humans. Our reactions to stimulus greatly vary, our learned behaviors, from any point in life, can be unlearned.

And it stands to reason, that if all we learned, up to our 20s, is learned behavior—expectations good and wrong taught to us from external forces—then unlearning, to whatever success and whatever outcome, would be the next logical step. We can be swayed unconsciously to the cracks of the whip, moving in line, and expecting our lives to fall in place as we were taught. We can keep racing those people the same age as us—historical figures and that one über-successful friend. Or we can unlearn. We can unlearn even by giving up, by “being washed,” by getting “old” when we still have youth.

I’m 28 now and I have academic degrees. I finished my masters with distinction, which is so boring to say. I grew up on punk rock, Wu-Tang Clan, cheap disgusting horror movies, and it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Academia is maybe the uncoolest thing in the world, yet here I am doing all the things expected of me. And I can’t tell you who made it this way, who set up these imagined signposts… when they started to exist. I only know that they do.

Just a year older and I’ll be the same age as Kafka when he wrote, and didn’t even publish, some of the defining works of absurdist fiction. 2 more years and Mariana Enríquez and Kelly Link (my two favorite authors) would already have written their first novel and short story collection, respectively.

Mitski, a personal hero, seems to have comfortably slid into the same head-space as The 1975. “I’m tired of wanting more,” the singer-songwriter famously sang. She retired a few years back without telling anyone, but she’s unretired now. She appears comfortable lately—not stressing as often about her age, place, and creative output. At 28, though, she’d already written 3 stone-cold classics.

The thing is, these people look nothing like me. They live in circumstances, entire worlds, completely alien to mine. So why do I keep comparing myself to them? When my biggest heroes, the biggest malcontest, loop right back into what I feel. They chased ghosts just as white as mine, just as domineering. Kafka didn’t like his own writing. Robert Smith still questions the “pointlessness” of existence. “I was very optimistic when I was young—now I’m the opposite” (that was him being optimistic?) While Smith measured his worth against the Fab Four, The Beatles themselves had measured theirs against Dylan and Brian Wilson. And the wiser and more content Mitski of today still quivers to the pangs of imposterism. And she will always sing about it. And writers will always write about it.

Really, we will continually, and habitually, be on the outside looking in, and on the inside looking out. It is human nature, a very ingrained learned behavior, to want something more. To habitually achieve for yourself that ‘more’ you see others achieve. It’s not for nothing Sartre said what he said about “other people.” We are worst enemies and personal liberators. There is probably someone out there comparing themself to me right now and feeling shit.



I keep reminding myself of John Milton and Paradise Lost (c. 1667). That poem is the author’s one big statement, his grandest opus, and he wrote it blind and old and having lost so much. When he was younger, Milton wrote some great poems riffing on melancholia that I really took to—but I wouldn’t have read or known of any them if he wasn’t “John Milton, the guy who wrote Paradise Lost.” He defined his own life as a poet, his place in English literature, at the age of 59—and who cares that he was?

Abbas Kiarostami was 47 when he started filming the astonishing Koker trilogy. At 57 he made Taste of Cherry (1997), one of my favorite movies ever, and at 70 made Certified Copy (2010), one of the simplest and most confounding films of this century.

Hell, David Lynch made his best works in 2001, 2006, and 2017, around and beyond his sixties. Maybe we can learn from Lynch and his “art life:” he says he doesn’t watch movies. The great surrealist filmmaker is not a film buff. And it shows. Sure, you can trace Carnival of Souls (1962), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) in every Lynch production, but those principal influences came early and remained static throughout the director’s long career.

There hasn’t been a single film beyond the 1970s that Lynch has gone out of his way to see, let alone praise. Whatever you see, or hear, in a David Lynch creation comes from him. His dreams, his whims, his memories, his ideas. No conscious external stimuli.

︎Lost Highway (1997) // PHOTO: October Films/Interiors

Disconnection might be a necessity at some point. Disconnection from les autres, the many and undefined “other people.” Slowing down might be a necessity. Looking at the calendar and seeing only numbers.

“Do you have the desperately insecure need to feel morally and/or intellectually superior to regular people? Are you so desperate to impress & to fit in with the ‘in crowd’ of hip elitists that you can be tricked by a chimp? And are you so desperate to display allegiance to an ideological/cultural tribe that you’ve forgotten how to be an authentic free-thinking individual?” asked a commenter on a forum post dedicated to Pierre Brassau. A little heavy, but he’s going somewhere.

It’s not that deep. Society doesn’t know itself any better. Here’s another hoax that went perfectly according to plan: in 1996, physics professor Alan Sokal sought to investigate if a leading American journal of cultural studies would publish an article “liberally salted with nonsense, if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.” It worked. The paper Sokal wrote was completely bullshit—and it was published—and praised. These are the people we’re trying to impress?

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^{︎︎︎inteview: dj sabrina the teenage dj}