The 1975 – Love Me (Music Video)October 2015

For most indie artists, music videos are encoded with deeper and more complex ideas to be decoded by their niche audience, as in accordance with Stuart Hall's reception theory. The music video accompanying the song 'Love Me' by The 1975 is directed at the audience the group is familiar with, and throughout the video the main artist, Matty Healy, makes it clear that his viewers should be in on the 'joke' throughout. This performance and metaphorical based piece is designed to not necessarily parody but make a statement about Healy's indie/rock culture and the superficial generation that we are so familiar with. Nothing in this video can be taken entirely seriously, and almost all seems to be presented with what can only be described as a sprinkle of glitter; from the plethoric colour pink, to the girls in short and overtly feminine tutus, to Healy's interaction with cardboard cut outs of well-known celebrities and musical artists.

The most recognisable iconography in the video for 'Love Me' is the multitude of cardboard cut-outs of familiar faces, including Miley Cyrus, Rita Ora, and Mr. Bean. Healy's interaction with these is comedic, from making out with a cardboard cut-out of One Direction's Harry Styles to offering a glass of champagne to an inanimate Elvis Presley (consequently dropping it).

Behind the comedy at play, the artist parodies fandom culture, and the way people treat celebrities, whether that be sexualising them or honouring them beyond what is justifiable. As artists, the bands are used to being idolised and recognise that they have no control over this, as the lyrics say "love me, if that's what you wanna do." Nevertheless, Healy also makes a comment on the lack of character from those who experience music second-hand by using the cardboard cut-outs as a metaphor to represent their two-dimensional audience. Another example of this in the video is the iconography of the pink guitar apparently playing itself. To the narrative theorist Roland Barthes, this presents two of his five codes. Firstly, the semantic code of the pink guitar directly denotes the music being played. More significantly, it is a symbolic code. Stereotypically, girls over-sexualise and overrate any male who can play a guitar and is in a band. Girls want to get with guys in bands and flock to them; you don't need a person behind the guitar because their actual personality is irrelevant, it's the fact that they're on stage and playing the guitar, culturally relevant, and the more famous the better. In this screenshot, it comes with the lifestyle of being a rockstar that girls are part and parcel.

The girl dancing with the guitar is dressed in pink to match everything else in the video semantically, but we can decode this to suggest that she is objectified as part of the lifestyle being observed. She blends into the mise en scene as a part of it. Her dress code is comparable to that of a ballerina, ready to dance. Although she is presented in this manner as a parody of the culture and modern representations of women, some could argue that this is equally as sexist as old representations from the previous generations, and this may lead some viewers to take an oppositional reading to the video. However, viewers that take this reading are unlikely to understand the purpose behind The 1975's production nor their artistic standing as a group and are, by extension, not the intended audience for the video anyway. In an interview with NME on the video, Healy states: "the people who don't know my band don't know my band, but especially our fans, the way that I address them is by giving them the benefit of the doubt and assuming that they're in on the joke." The video's setting is in a dance hall, and the track is groove based; overall, her as a piece of iconography with the guitar and the balloons create an atmosphere which, although artificial, is glittery, glamorous and fun.

This representation of girls and everyone else enslaved by modern rock culture can be heard in the lyrics to 'Love Me', where Healy sings:

"You look famous, let's be friendsAnd portray we possess something importantAnd do the things we like, meaningWe've just come to representA decline in the standards of what we acceptYeah... Yeah? Yeah?! no."

Another piece of iconography in the video is the balloons; a stimulating aesthetic visually, but also come with the idea that they can deflate just as easily as The 1975 can become irrelevant. Paradoxically, balloons can also float away and get increasingly higher (in recognising the history of the group, this could arguably be a subtle drug reference) and reach another stratosphere in the pop

world, becoming a massive thing. Moreover, the balloons write the band's name but miss out the 'The' in 'The 1975', playing on the knowledge that so many people call them '1975' and forget the word 'The' from the band name.

In other shots, the artist is tattooed all over with pictures of himself and overtly dramatic make up symbolising the narcissism and self-obsession of artists in his area of the music industry, suggesting that this is as much a part of the lifestyle and the glamour of being a rockstar as the music itself. Alongside these, there are shots where the band members are in

a hot tub with girls, and the scene is highly sexualised. Again, the representation presented here is that polyamory simply for pleasure is just part of the glitz and the pizazz of being a rockstar. Here, Healy is a rock artist known for involvement in drugs and self-obsessed behaviour consciously and ironically playing the hyperbolised character of a self-obsessed and off-the-rails rockstar. The theorist David Gauntlett argues that we create and construct our own identities by collecting influence from the world around us. Healy recognises this, but is making the observation that most artists become addicted to everyone loving them and become, in themselves, a media construct. As Gauntlett says, we create a ‘narrative of the self based upon our social interactions and interactions with others’ and for celebrities like The 1975, this can be toxic. Nevertheless, Healy’s representation is hyperbolic and self-aware, and at no point does he imply any negative opinion towards this observation. They enjoy and thrive in the superficial lifestyle, as he says:

“You've been reading about yourself on a plane, fame for a changeCaught up in fashion, Karcrashian panache and a bag of bash for passionYou've got a beautiful face but got nothing to say (Oh!)…Oh so sack off your calendar, give it to the people!Be the man that gets them up on their feet…And love me, if that’s what you wanna do”

All of these different scenes of the video are intercut with one another to create a fast-paced video which is the embodiment of music industry glamour. The abundance of pink is suggestive of eroticism, femininity, and self-love. This observation is both serious and not serious in essence, but cannot be taken seriously as part of this album where everything is ludicrous, from the album title “I like it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it” to their jabbing comments on their own band and previous songs in the music video for another of their songs, “The Sound”.