Matty Healy, Taylor Swift, and the Based/Woke Paradigm

a guide to irony-pilling for the perplexed

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from my latest piece in UnHerd, with extra unpublished snippets

When asked to comment on several controversial jokes he made earlier this year on The Adam Friedland Show podcast, The 1975 frontman Matty Healy (and Taylor Swift’s latest boyfriend) told the New Yorker that it didn’t bother him. “It doesn’t actually matter,” he said. “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.” Addressing those who claimed they were hurt by his views, he insisted, “You’re either lying that you are hurt, or you’re a bit mental for being hurt.”

Reactions have ranged from Twitter users expressing their “depthless horror” and  “demanding” that Taylor Swift dump “that thing”, to rapper Azealia Banks warning Swift about catching various diseases from him. The debacle over Healy’s provocations is emblematic of the continuous tension between what in the ever-ironical internet jargon is known as the “based vs. cringe” paradigm, which at its core involves conflicting modes of sincerity.

The term “based” has evolved since its first emergence in the 1990s when it referred to someone who is high on crack cocaine (see the Wu-Tang Clan’s song “C.R.E.A.M.”) to its reemergence in the early 2010s when rapper Lil B anointed himself the “Based God,” in this case using the term to refer to his honesty, authenticity, and freedom to do as he pleased. Since then, the term has morphed in internet culture to signify the antithesis to personality traits, cultural interests and political stances that are “cringe.”

Someone who is overly earnest or sentimental is “cringe”, as is someone who is trying too hard or is ostentatious about their politically correct moral convictions.

One may think of middle aged women who delight in being allies to gay men, professors who proudly announce their pronouns on the first day of class and make statements about the indigenous peoples whose land the campus has robbed, or posting a profile photo of yourself wearing a mask, a photo of your pumpkin spice latte with the hashtag #PSLseason…or worse, being a white girl who posts a video to her Instagram story of herself crying at Taylor Swift’s concert.

Someone who is “based”, on the other hand, isn’t afraid to “call a spade a spade”, and coolly defies moral and artistic conventions. This is not to be confused with neoconservatives and reactionaries like Fox News and Daily Wire commentators, Andrew Tate, and Elon Musk, whose overly earnest attempt to “own the libs” renders them painfully cringe. Rather, someone is only “based” when they make politically incorrect statements from a position of apathy, giving off the air that nothing actually matters.

The popular touchstones for this attitude range from high culture to the grungier artforms: philosopher Camille Paglia’s take on middle-class white girls, singer Morrissey, Michel Houellebecq novels, “alt-literature”, The Adam Friedland Show and other podcasts associated with the “dirtbag Left” like Red Scare. This eclectic group is not fazed by opposition or insults (a la Red Scare co-host Dasha Nekrasova’s viral “Sailor Socialism” video, in which she made a mockery of her Right-wing interviewer), or of blowback when they utter ironically intended slurs like “fake and gay”.

Some have critiqued the imperative to be based for being decadent and self-indulgent. Critics such as Sylvie McNamara and Andrew Marantz have dismissed the hosts of dirtbag Leftist podcasts in particular for sowing the seeds of nihilism. Others like Joshua Citarella maintain that based culture’s ironic, contrarian posturing is simply a means of coping with the dread that comes with living in a pessimistic, atomised age. In a recent Rolling Stone op-ed, Taylor Lorenz declares that she takes pride in the sincerity of being cringe as an antidote to said apathy. Yet, to my mind, she appears to misdiagnose the nature of both the illness and the cure. 

We might also include here being a white girl who posts a video of herself at Taylor Swift’s concert with a self-deprecatory hashtag like #basicwhitegirl.

The ironic detachment associated with basedness requires humility and a form of self-abnegation — I must reach a point when I realise that I’m not the source of meaning in the universe and that my sincerity will not, in fact, solve the world’s problems. Without doubt this can develop into a form of nihilism (which at least doesn’t mask itself as something other than what it really is–like being cringe does). But it can also lead, as Healy’s comments demonstrate, to rediscovering what actually matters most in life: “dealing with how my mum’s feeling” and “trying to be in service to people”, rather than losing yourself in internet squabbles.

Healy’s comments here echo a recurring point that Red Scare co-host Anna Khachiyan makes about the “forgotten” virtues of being a loyal friend, having and raising children, and investing time in religion and community, which “cringe progressives who have no skin in the game” don’t understand. (I often remind people that she’s said this when people accuse Red Scare’s decadent irony-pilling of indulging too much in nihilism.)

The truth is that Healy’s nonchalance, and the culture it springs from, have become a way of hinting obliquely at the most important parts of our existence.

There’s a thin line between caring so sincerely about not being sincere that one becomes cringe, and being so thoroughly insincere that one becomes a vapid asshole. Walking said line requires a form of humility and a moral code so deep that it presents as ostentatious egotism and amorality–a feat that few other than Oscar Wilde have managed to pull off. In a similar way, Healy’s points us indirectly to what actually matters in life. “We used to expect our artists to be cigarette-smoking bohemian outsiders,” says Healy, “and now we expect them to be liberal academics.” Dare we hope that other artists can be based–or responsible–enough to take up the prophetic dimension of their vocation.

On a final note, this whole situation has made me reconsider my dismissal of Taylor Swift as a standard “normie” white girl pop star, who conforms to the liberal pietism du jour. The fact that she seems to be playing along with Healy’s game…especially after bringing Ice Spice (the rapper who Healy “insulted” on Friedland’s podcast) on stage, and is not kowtowing to her fans’ puritanical demands, makes her a little more, well, spicy. That being said, I still think Camille Paglia’s take on Swift as a “Nazi Barbie” still rings true when one looks at the sway she has over libfem bourgeois suburban WASP girl fans.

For further reading, check out my articles on the prophetic dimension of the Wildean ironic posturing of figures like Trump and Milo Yiannopoulos and of the Red Scare podcast.

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photo taken in Morningside Heights.