If you’re a card-carrying member of the Snake Fam and you want to know more about Taylor Swift’s new boyfriend, this New Yorker piece is probably where you should start. I’m not saying I like Matt Healy now or that I no longer find him deeply unproblematic, but I do understand a little bit better how he got to this place. The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino had been following him and interviewing him for months before the Taylor Swift stuff started happening, when he was already in “his current persona: a post-woke rock star, switching unpredictably between tenderness and trollishness.” It’s a portrait of a self-conscious douche who tried to do “the right thing” for a while, then grew tired of that persona and so he developed a new one. Or maybe this was always who he was: a guy who does Nazi salutes and says racist sh-t in interviews. Some highlights from this New Yorker piece:

Taylor Swift’s appearance at The 1975’s show in January. “It was really based of Taylor to do the show,” he said, seeming a bit awed that it had happened. Healy had skipped his make-out routine during the previous night’s show. “I’m not kissing anybody in front of Taylor Swift, have some respect,” he’d said

On Harry Styles: In the British press, Healy is sometimes positioned as Styles’s Wario, his evil twin. Their bands became popular around the same time; both men are straight-leaning but, like Mick Jagger and David Bowie before them, enjoy revelling in sexual ambiguity. Healy said the band had asked Styles to come. “He gave us a hard no,” he added, laughing. “He’s afraid that he would have to say something.” Healy found it annoying that, at a certain level of fame, celebrities can cultivate liberal auras while avoiding the risk of taking real political stands.

Music & love in his 30s: “All of the things that used to define my work, or the nihilistic part of one’s twenties—postmodernism, addiction, individualism—they’re all cool and sexy and appropriate at the time, but, for me now, are those the things I yearn for?” In his personal life, he had found himself wishing for consistency and reliability, “the things we get from a partner that we don’t get from the rest of the world.”

His politics: Healy often laments that “we used to expect our artists to be cigarette-smoking bohemian outsiders, and now we expect them to be liberal academics.” He has also said that, although he doesn’t count his political views as particularly educated or authoritative, he knows that they stem from impulses toward empathy and freedom that are important.

The debacle of his interview on ‘The Adam Friedland Show’: I asked him about the podcast. He’d been doing so much promo, he told me, that he wanted to do something that felt more like simply talking with his friends. But, of course, he had done this all in public, on mike. Had he baited his fans on purpose? “A little bit,” he said. “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…If it does, you’re either deluded or you are, sorry, a liar. 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.”

His thing with Taylor: Neither of their representatives would comment on the record, but I kept getting texts from people who knew them, and who insisted: this time, it’s real.

[From The New Yorker]

His answer to how people are *still* responding to his racism, bigotry and problematic words and behavior is basically “the only people who care are too online.” Not even that, he doesn’t believe that it should be or actually IS important that Taylor Swift (arguably one of the most famous women in the world, a woman who encourages a parasocial relationship with her fans) is dating someone like him, someone with a long list of problematic behavior. The snake fam will cry that Taylor is not responsible for Healy’s sh-t and I agree, she’s not responsible. She wasn’t the one calling Ice Spice “Inuit Spice,” complete with a fake “accent.” No, Taylor was the one trying to clean up her boyfriend’s mess by bringing Ice Spice on stage as a prop. Anyway…

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.