Vibes Saviour Complex

As the age-old adage goes, you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become a villain. This applies to two figures who’ve made headlines this weekend, Fahmi Fadzil MP of Lembah Pantai and national Minister of Communications and Digital, and Matt Healy, frontman of British flop band The 1975.

This past weekend, the atrociously named but timeworn hallmark of Malaysian hipster culture, the annual Good Vibes Festival, was supposed to take place. It was supposed to be its tenth anniversary as well. But on the first of the three-day festival, during The 1975's headlining act, Matt Healy had a drunken strop on stage like a sweaty alcoholic baby. He was Not In The Fucking Mood, Not Having It, Really, I’ve Had it Up To Here, which degenerated into a rant about the policing of sexuality in Malaysia. He, and I quote, said that the Malaysian government is “fucking retarded” and also smashed a drone on stage.

Aside from my personal agreement that the country’s government is indeed R-worded and that drones should be smashed instead of flown close to performers or audience’s faces, the entire thing is hard to stomach even if the superficial content of what Healy said and did was true. He’s such a sweaty alcoholic baby with bad posture and greasy hair, isn’t he. His face is that of an over-grown child, trapped in the expression of a permanent pout. Nor could I ever stand the out-dated and overgrown curly haired undercut thing that he’s had going on since he hit the scene with his discount Alex Turner impression.

Maybe the worst of it is the smarmy fat Britishness that is expressed through an entitled bewilderment that any other country on earth could be structured differently from theirs — their sick boozy conviction that all anyone needs is a trip to the pub and it’ll be alright — the loose lazy fat complacency of a once-great nation gradually sliding into a shambolic stagnancy, of brown houses and grey skies, of the same sentiments echoed back to you by everyone you pass on the streets and meet in the pub, that same watery grey indeterminacy that means that all nights at the pub will always end the same way, sick on the high street. It’s the kind of smarmy fat Britishness that allows some British tourists to land here, completely oblivious, and proceed to get piss drunk then curse the locals or migrant workers on the streets for giving them weird looks. You thought you could do anything here, you thought the world was like your village back home in Chiltenhamshire or Wolterstanton or Whereverthefuckingdon, especially as the alcohol is so enticingly cheap. You thought it’d be the same but it’s not. And you’ll go home and you’ll tell your mates, the alcohol’s cheap and the girls are alright, but these little Asians all have something stuck up their arse.

Good Vibes Festival is the sacred temple that Malaysian hipsters pay to worship at once a year. When the international acts come, especially if they’re as major and influential as The Strokes, who were slated to play on the festival’s third day this year before the entire festival got cancelled, the locals who have bought tickets come giddy and dressed up to bask in the musicians’ glory, because when they look up at the stage they see superhuman figures who have made it. These are people who have achieved worldwide influence that the creatives here can only dream of. For the types of celebrities and musicians who can take this form of adulation, it’s alright. But if you’re Matt Healy, a sleazy alcoholic whose looks are going and who, for the life of you, no matter what you do, can’t seem to attract any serious recognition for your work beyond the crazed fanaticism of fourteen-year-old girls (none of your contemporaries take you seriously), it’s hard. If you’re Matt Healy, the child of an obsolescing country that’s propped up on the fading lustre of its history as a once-great empire, whose citizens have never been taught how to develop character because simply being British is enough, and you arrive at a music festival in a third world country where the kids are just going crazy for you, you maybe realise that you’ve never known how to bear the responsibility for your desires and actions. You think your work is shit, the world is shit, you’re shit, but these Asian kids love you. They look at you like you’re their God, like you’ve got some key into some secret knowledge they weren’t privileged enough to know. It’s no wonder that when British people go to any third world country the first thing they do is get drunk out of their fucking minds.

What is Matt Healy? Is he even real? Has anyone ever listened to the music of The 1975? Name one line from one of their songs. What does the guy even look like, except for a floppy mop of hair, an alcoholic’s pout, and a victim’s pair of eyes?  He’s the soft grey indeterminacy of the middle, of a certain type of person — particularly British — who suspects that they’re not happy but can’t quite see anything to complain about. Matt Healy didn’t realise that Malaysia was a country where being gay is illegal until the night before the concert and he just couldn’t believe it, how could any decent artist perform in a country that doesn’t let people be who they are. Any other performer with an ounce of self-respect and knowledge of what they’re doing wouldn’t even stop to think about it, because they’d know that they’ve been invited to the country to perform, not to be themselves. But not Matt Healy, who is a 21st-century rockstar. For 21st century rockstars, their egos are backed not by talent but by their insistence that the world owes them something— merely because they’re the one on stage and everyone else isn’t. Matt Healy in a bad mood beneath the bright spotlights of a GOOD VIBES stage, he can feel a strop coming on, he’s hot and sweaty, the backstage crew are just a bunch of nerdy chinese guys running around, no fit girls, he’s desperate to get himself into a good mood. “I’m drunk again, I can’t do this, I hate myself” his brain thinks, but what ends up coming out of his mouth is something along the lines of, “Why can’t you just let me be who I am?” followed by furious tongue action with his bassist. Why can’t the world just accept me for being me, without asking me to explain myself; and who I am is a perverted talentless freak with a substance problem and a raging desire to fuck anything in sight but isn’t that what being human is — why can’t you just love me for who I am — why can’t the world just be filled with good vibes only.

And why can’t white people just fucking respect the customs of the countries they’re playing in, right Fahmi? Why can’t people like Matt Healy just fucking shut up and do the job they’ve been paid to do and learn to compromise in their values, just like you did, right, Fahmi?

What’s worse: the sweaty drunk who demands the rest of the world to bend to his values — or the buttoned-up nerd who sold all his values but still wants to pretend like he has them?

Fahmi Fadzil is supposed to be the progressive candidate in politics, a sheep amidst wolves, and his nomination into the position of Minister of Communications and Digital (who, in our strange retarded government, is effectively the Minister of Arts and Culture) was seen as a good sign, a sign of more open policies towards the arts and culture in the time to come. And yet, one of his biggest actions so far has been the total cancellation of Good Vibes Festival in response to Healy and his bassist’s kiss, which was regarded as a deliverate act of flouting Malaysia's homophobic laws.

“But he had to do it, what else was he going to do, white people can’t just come to people’s homes and disrupt their customs and expect to get away with it.” Neither does Fahmi have to respond so harshly to a drunk's provocations; the cancellation of the entire festival only gives substance to Healy’s accusations that this government is fucking retarded. If the festival had been allowed to run its course Healy might have just been blacklisted from Malaysia, his drunken raving taken as another nail in the coffin of his career, and his kiss forgotten as another act of queer-baiting. By cancelling the entire festival, Fahmi blew it up to national news; it became a moral act in defence of the sensibilities and customs of the nation  against a big bad evil sloppy grotesque kiss. Did I need to know about this? Did I need to have an opinion on Matt Healy?

Only pussies fight their battles through proxy. It is only a morally bankrupt, useless, and retarded government that cancels and raids cultural events as political manoeuvres. What is your role, really, Fahmi? What kind of government do you represent that considers meddling in the leisure activities of ordinary people as the most urgent form of political activity? “This is just a necessary evil, it has to be done, it’s the way Malaysian politics works. Fahmi has to care about these kinds of things in order to be taken seriously so that he can push through his other policies which will be better for the nation. Politics is all about compromise.” And how long does Fahmi expect to have the patience to deal with these petty grievances, further delaying whatever he considers his “real work”, his “real policies”? How many compromises over inconsequential events will he have to weigh before he realises that the whole thing is just a sham — and that it would have been better for him to resign and refuse to partake in such a farce instead of being the spokesperson for the outright banning of a privately-funded commercial festival? “But for him to resign would have been to give up, and to potentially let someone worse take his position.” By signing off on what he did, hasn’t he already become that “someone worse”?

Matt Healy doesn’t make me angry. I’m indifferent to him. Most people are. But Fahmi makes me angry. I was kind of indifferent to him too, but a bespectacled clean-cut nerd in government who claims to be working in the name of the people—which includes me—is something I can’t stand. Healy doesn’t claim to be doing anything for anyone except himself. Read the viral DMs with Malaysian rapper Luqman Podolski where Healy says, “They invited me, they got me.” It’s about him. But for Fahmi, it’s about us. It’s about the people. It’s about culture. There is no culture. There is no culture where the government can be expected to swoop in at any moment and cancel all the hard work of private individuals. There is no culture in a society that thinks it needs to be protected from outside influence, that thinks what Fahmi did is honourable in the least, that thinks they need the assistance of government to filter what they consume lest it be too much for them to handle, too incomprehensible and offensive to their customs and scramble their critical functions too much. There is no culture. Only, I suppose, Communications. Fahmi Communicated the right thing, which I guess is his job. Good for him. Pussy.