015 // love it if we made it

modernity has failed us.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:12

Hello out there, and welcome to Television of Your Mouth, a nineteen seventy-five podcast. We are at episode 15, which is wild to say. Um, I'm happy that I've been able to continue to do this, really just like self-motivation. But I got a email last week from my podcast hosting uh website that I have over 500 downloads on this podcast. So thank you to everybody who has listened. I know if you are a big fan of the band like I am, I'm not really saying anything you probably don't already know, unless I have a guest on, like I did for um the somebody else music video. But I hope if you are new to the band, this can be sort of an oral history, so to speak, for their music videos. So thank you guys for listening. And last week we kicked off the music for Carr's era of music videos with Give Yourself a Try. And that song is filled with hope and lessons learned that comes with getting a little bit older. And this week we sort of keep that trend of hope going. I guess it's up to you and how you want to interpret this one. I'm going to talk about the second music video for the second single off a brief inquiry, Love It If We Made It, released on October 15th, 2018. The single was released a couple months before the music video on July 19th, 2018. I briefly talked about it in last week's episode about how the band had been touring when a lot of crucial political events happened, including Trump getting elected and the Brexit ruling. Remind you, I can only speak as an American, so a lot of what I talk about is from that perspective, obviously. But these two rulings cause a chain of events that were a direct fallout from these decisions. Between the release of I Like It When You Sleep and A Brief Inquiry, any existing tension between the human population was amplified by a billion. It seemed like empathy no longer existed as communities were divided like never before. Truth did become hearsay. You had the Me Too movement, Black Lives Matter, a renewed war on immigration, LT LGBTQIA plus, and women's reproductive rights, black people were being murdered at the hands of police, and of course this isn't all of it. Maddie told Genius in 2018 that he did not want to write a protest song. His first iteration of the song came from the news headlines, but said, quote, the sad thing is that using the actual things that were written, it was just becoming too slapstick and funny, end quote. The Beatles used to get a lot of ideas for songs by reading the newspapers, actually. Famously, uh John's verses in A Day in the Life came from newspaper headlines as well as the premise for the song She's Leaving Home off of Sergeant Pepper's. But back to the 1975. So instead of using headlines, he started to keep a list of events and things that would get his attention and wrote the songs from there. They also sampled the song Downtown Lights by one of their favorite artists, the Blue Nile, for this song. When you think of everything that did happen between 2016 and 2018, it's surprising we don't have more songs you could consider protest songs, especially compared to the songs that came out of the 60s and 70s that addressed civil rights and the Vietnam War. In 2025, Rolling Stone released a list of the 100 best protest songs of all time. And in another example why Rolling Stone sucks, they made an egregious error and left Love It If We Made It off the list. It doesn't need to be top 10, but like to not even be on the list at all is crazy to me. Does anyone remember the mini surge of America First protest songs right after 9-11? I was only 12 when 9-11 happened, so in the moment I didn't really have an opinion on any of it, on any of the prophetic hardcore patriotism that was happening. What I do remember was Budweiser changing their real American Heroes ad to Real Men of Genius because they didn't want to insult first responders. And I remember the songs recorded in response to 9-11. There were patriotic anthems from country artists, of course, and I think a lot of people remember The Rising by Bruce Springsteen from that time. But being an MTV kid, does anyone else remember these two songs that got a lot of music video airplay? Where is the Love by the Black Eyed Peas and The Artist Against AIDS, all-star cover of Marvin Gay's What's Going On? This was a very specific moment in time when these kind of songs were released. And the music video for the latter is truly wild to re-watch. Every artist has a long blindfold over their eyes that has just different words on it, like non-believer, poet, and just the words the truth. And they would slowly unravel it until it came off. Inspiring. I don't want to downplay or ignore the protest songs we have gotten in the 21st century because there have been some great ones. Historically, black artists have been at the forefront when it comes to creating art and songs in response to injustice, and that is definitely still the case in the 21st century. I think of artists like Kendrick Lamar and his album To Pimp a Butterfly, and most famously his song Alright. Fuck Donald Trump, FDT by YG and Nipsey Hustle. Bombs Over Baghdad by Outcast, taking it back a little bit into the beginning of the 2000s. This is America by Charles Gambino. And Land of the Free by Gary Clark Jr., which, by the way, was the song Give Give Yourself a Try Lost To at the Grammys. In the rock genre, System of It Down gave us BYOB after 9-11 in response to the Iraq War. Against Me wrote Transgender Dysphoria Blues in the support of the trans community. And of course, Born This Web Lady Gaga in support of LGBTQIA Plus. These are just some of my favorites, of course, there are more. So let's get into the music video for Love It If We Made It. The music video for Love It If We Made It was directed by Adam Powell with lighting effects by Tobias Rylander, who is a lighting master and has done incredible work for not only the 1975 live shows pretty much since the beginning, but artists like Beyonce and Childish Gambino. As of today, the music video has over 23 million plays on YouTube and was nominated for Best Rock Video at the American and UK MTV VMAs, but it lost to Panic at the Disco and Sam Fender, respectively. Talking to Vivo in 2019, Maddie said it was quote very, very, very difficult to make this video because it was hard to get right. I'll let Maddie speak for himself on this. Here is a clip from that interview.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

It was very, very, very, very difficult making this video. Not because it was hard to look at, because it was hard to get right. It's a list of information. The idea stemmed from the fact that over a year we collected tabloid newspapers every day to make the lyrics beloved if we made it. Unfortunately, when we got to trying that, they were too slapped. The song was hard to get right. It needed to be as objective and as fair and as anti-watch out people as possible. And that's hard to do because we know all of this stuff. That's why it resonates. I don't want to be provocative, but the point is that if we're talking about shocking stuff and we're relating to shocking stuff and we're resonating with the song because of our relationship to that shocking stuff, we have to see the shocking stuff. This is an unfortunate Michael Jackson the way you make me feel. It's a pop song, and that bit makes you want to dance. This song is quite impenetrable in its verses and then quite uplifting and celebratory in its choruses. That bit felt right to kind of part the clouds mode. Stop there. All we did was do a performance scene about five or six times and move these light sources closer left and right. I didn't want us to be there. I wanted just our presence to be felt. You see, this is from the two-time day. This is where we got all the portraits of all the kids, all of our fans. Because I'd love it if we made it, I suppose, is about, you know, the youth, right?

SPEAKER_01 9:36

So the music video starts with a plastic bag floating through the sea, a commentary on the plastic crisis and the detriment it has to our wildlife and oceans. The only person from the band we fully see in this video, and it's not much, is Maddie. We mostly see the colorful silhouettes of the band, which was achieved by moving the different light sources around. Like Maddie said, this was a deliberate choice. The focus of the video should be the horrific issues that are in the lyrics, and that is what they did. Because the video intersperses different footage with these bright silhouettes and the lyrics, there is an epilepsy warning in the caption of the YouTube video. Blink and you'll miss it, but in classic 1975 Meta fashion, there is a quick shot of Maddie fucking himself from the somebody else music video in the beginning to go along with the lyric. And there is so much covered in this video, and watching this back, I can't believe this came out uh math eight years ago. And things in the world have only gotten worse since then, I think. I know I'm going to miss something, but here is a list of the footage and topics covered in this video. British far-right leader, uh Milo Yannopoulos, Black Lives Matter, and the police brutality faced by the black community, including footage of the murder of Eric Garner, the prison industrial complex, NRA, and America's Fascination with Guns, Poison Me Daddy Billboard. Um, this is a commentary on fandoms and fan culture behavior and vernacular. Maddie takes selfies with it in the video, much like many fans did in the wild during the a brief inquiry album rollout. Harvey Weinstein and the Me Too movement, Westboro Bapt Baptist Church, the 2011 London riots, which were sparked by the death of Mark Duggan at the hands of the Metro police. This one is the most difficult one for me to to watch, and it makes me nauseous every time I see it. Um Alan Curdy, the three-year-old boy who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in the midst of the European refugee crisis. Lil Peep, the Grenfell Building Fire, which was actually very close to the Dirty Hit offices in London. Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump, Kanye West, the KKK, 9-11 World Trade Center attacks. And around the two-minute, eight-second mark, we get a bit of whiplash as Maddie does a homage to Michael Jackson's The Way You Make Me Feel video. For me, I view this to represent the way we as people go about our days now. We see and hear about all this truly awful stuff happening in the world and we scroll on. You could see video footage of a school getting bombed in a foreign country swipe up and be presented with a food review. So for two minutes, we are consuming serious news footage followed by a dance break cleanse. Around this time, the guys were also filming the two-time music video. So they pulled footage of fans from that for the Love It If We Made It video. The youth is inheriting the problems the older generations created. And the video ends with the iPhone power off button sliding to off. Because just like in the real world, you can turn off from the internet if you want, but the world is still going to happen around you. And like Maddie said, this music video is very difficult to get right. And I think they did. They got it right. Because unlike other songs you can classify as protest songs, Love It If We Made It is not telling you what to do. It is not telling you to rise up and fight. It's not telling us that we shall overcome. Although that would be nice if we did. It's not even really a warning. It's an oral history of some of the biggest world events during that time. It is, without a doubt, the 1975's most political song. Which is why Maddie's statement at Glastonbury was so, so weird and baffling to me. In case you're not familiar, when the 1975 headlined Glastonbury for the first time in 2025, Maddie said this on the biggest stage they've played, with thousands of people watching in person and on stream. He said, quote, People who are watching this may, I don't know, they may be disappointed in the lack of politics in this show and our forthcoming shows and probably our future shows. I want you to know that it's a conscious decision. We honestly don't want our legacy to be one of politics. We want it to be that of love and friendship. I'm not trying to be too earnest, but you can go out into the world and there's loads of politics everywhere. We don't need more politics. We need more love and friendship. I know that's really basic, but if you are a young kid and you are inspired by like this band or something like that, don't aspire to play a stage or be a certain size. Aspire for this level of friendship and love and what you do, and you'll never fail. And I love you. End quote. Then the band went straight into I always want to die sometimes, followed by Love It If We Made It. So uh when I first heard this quote, I was I was very surprised. Um I've read the articles from critics and the online essays by fans on Reddit and Instagram. And when I was preparing for this episode, I posed the question on Instagram to 1975 fans to tell me what they thought of that speech, and I got a range of responses. Um, some people saying, you know, weird thing for him to say, considering how political their music often is. Some people thought it was a joke, said, you know, somebody said he said it just before Love It If We Made It, so hopefully just a joke, and they'll be back to politics soon. It seemed a bit like he was trying to convince himself, especially following it with Love It If We Made It. Um, some fans highlighted that Maddie lies a lot. Um, one person said he says a lot of stuff, like drive like I do as soon, which he said two years ago, so I wouldn't read too much into it. Uh I like this quote. Somebody just got straight to the point and said it pissed me off. Um, what else? Consistent with his statements from last tour, but disappointing in that he was willing to be so very divisive to quote explain men, but then randomly pulled back because of internet uh virality. Both the content and pullback seem ill-considered. Somebody else made a great point saying they aren't safe to say what they want right now, but hopefully they will be again in the future. I mean, I agree with that. I you know, I understand where fans are coming from. And when they say the being funny in a foreign language era, specifically 2023 through 2024 was absolute hell for the 1975, and Maddie more specifically. That's true, and to be honest, it wasn't much fun sometimes being a fan during that time either. And what Maddie said could be his way of protecting himself from any more hate from any kind of controversy. You know, damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. Stop talking about the big stuff, stop posting on socials, which I think is the right move for him because Maddie knows the internet, but he's also really bad at it. You know, nothing revealed, everything denied. And that's true. That is one way to take what he said. And I've heard the quote, it was a joke, it was ironic, take because they played Love It If We Made It two songs later. I mean, okay, but I don't want to have to solve a riddle three every time Maddie speaks. I don't want to do this, is it a bit, is it serious? You know, I want genuineness from the artist I listen to. And mind you, no one but Maddie actually knows the intent behind this statement. So we are all just speculating. But by him saying that, it's making a statement. Why would he just not acknowledge politics at all and just let it lie? To me, this is kind of putting a stake in the ground. By not being political, you're being political. I didn't get into the 1975 because they spoke about politics. It's always the music first for me. Always. But when you have a history of speaking your mind, whether it's politics or not, and then you say, like, nah, I'm good on that to your fans, you can't blame them for being confused or disappointed, maybe sad or angry, especially during a time where things are so shitty, to put it very plainly. People used to be outraged and now apathy and hopelessness have settled in, it seems. It kind of reminds me of when he removed Human 2 and in turn walking back on the message in that song. Like, why? Why is he doing that now? This is also being said during a time where a lot of people are not speaking up for fear of being seen as quote, cringe. Do you want to know a surefire way to kill genuine good artistry? It's putting that mentality out there that it's cringe to have passions and to care publicly and to release your honest thoughts and opinions, whether it be through art or not. If this is a prelude of sorts for the next era of the 1975, an era that is more by the book, more safe, more like many other mainstream artists out there, then okay. That would be a shame, and I would be very bummed out personally. That would be super lame. But I I doubt that could be a path the band would ever take. But I'm just a fan, I don't I don't really know anything. And it's true. We do need more love and friendship. We need more community, real community. But why can't you have that and stand up for what you believe in? I don't think it's an either-or. How can we have a community of love and friendship when we are so divided? I'm not asking for a response. I don't have the answer. I'm just asking the question. Thank you for listening to Television of Your Mouth, a 1975 podcast. Episodes are written and produced by me, Britt. You can follow the podcast on Instagram at Television of Your Mouth, and I hope you enjoyed and see you next time.