Matty Healy thinks it's dumb to be mad on the internet

The 1975’s Matty Healy is a provocateur, but if you’re provoked by him, that’s your problem. His problematic schtick has never been more discussed now that he’s romantically associated with Taylor Swift, and that is, at least to some degree, by design. “If people are going to make me this famous, I’m going to make people work for it,” he says in a new profile for The New Yorker. Just don’t get too invested, because Healy finds that notion ridiculous.

Healy was baiting fans “a little bit” with his controversial comments about Ice Spice, he tells writer Jia Tolentino. “But it doesn’t actually matter. Nobody is sitting there at night slumped at their computer, and their boyfriend comes over and goes, ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ and they go, ‘It’s just this thing with Matty Healy.’ That doesn’t happen.”

These comments were delivered before Swift and Healy went public, so perhaps he has now become much more aware of fans slumped at their computer lamenting Matty Healy’s indiscretions. Nevertheless, he thinks “you’re either deluded or you are, sorry, a liar” if that’s your reaction to his provocations. “You’re either lying that you are hurt, or you’re a bit mental for being hurt. It’s just people going, ‘Oh, there’s a bad thing over there, let me get as close to it as possible so you can see how good I am.’ And I kind of want them to do that, because they’re demonstrating something so base level,” he says.

In April, Healy announced that “the era of me being a fucking asshole is gonna come to an end.” However, he tells Tolentino that he’s “done my decade trying to be” politically correct. (That assertion might surprise long-term fans of the singer.) “I’m more interested in actually being wrong, and people seeing that, and knowing what’s right because of it.” That’s one way to frame it!