Matty Healy: “If you took a piece of ’90s Aphex Twin back 30 years, they would go, ‘This isn’t even music.’ If you took a piece of music now back 30 years, they’d be struck by how not different it is”The 1975 frontman Matty Healy says progress in terms of musical creativity has been stifled by the lack of revolutionary new physical technology, and how the modern musical landscape has driven a greater need for commercialisation for music making to be viable.
In a lengthy new conversation with Joshua Citarella for the Doom Scroll podcast, Healy speaks on how new technologies defined the sound of the decades preceding the ‘90s, but how “physical technologies disappearing” means music hasn’t changed that much since then.

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Citing writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher, Healy explains: “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.”
He postulates that “neoliberalism” and “horizonless progression” with regard to commercialisation are reasons for creative stagnation. He explains that they “started to erode art funding, any space where a squat or a rave or anything truly culturally generative could happen”.
“That is partly to do with economics, but it’s also to do with physical technologies disappearing,” he adds.
“Very simply, the ‘60s: Jimi Hendrix and the overtly distorted guitar.  The ‘70s: Brian Eno and the synthesizer. 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.
“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 interview, Matty Healy does concede that revolution has happened lately in the music world, but “only in the space of distribution”. “It hasn’t happened recently in the space of creation…” he says. “In the ’60s and ’70s, young artists were really interested in changing the world. Now, you’re not really encourage to do that.”
Listen to the full conversation below. The above segment can be heard from 41:35:

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