The 1975 frontman Matty Healy has addressed controversial comments made about rapper Ice Spice during a podcast earlier in 2023. Healy had appeared on The Adam Friedland show in February, and laughed along with Friedland and co-host Nick Mullen when they made offensive comments about the Bronx rapper and her racial heritage.
At one point, Mullen and Friedland had impersonated Hawaiian, Inuit, and Chinese accents, while Healy had laughed along. After copping significant backlash, Healy initially apologised to Ice Spice – real name Isis Gaston – on stage in New Zealand in April, telling the crowd he didn’t “want Ice Spice to think I’m a dick”.
Matt Healy On Ice Spice Comments: “It Doesn’t Actually Matter”
“I just feel a bit bad, and I’m kind of a bit sorry if I’ve offended you. Ice Spice, I’m sorry,” Healy told the crowd. “It’s not because I’m annoyed that me joking got misconstrued. It’s because I don’t want Ice Spice to think I’m a dick. I love you, Ice Spice. I’m so sorry.”
Healy has now elaborated on the incident in a new interview with Jia Tolentino and The New Yorker. When asked whether Healy was “baiting” his fans, he responded with “a little bit”.
“But it doesn’t actually matter,” the singer went on to say. “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.”
When Tolentino counters that that kind of thing might actually happen, Healy shrugs it off.
“If it does,” he said, “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.”
Elsewhere in the profile, Healy discussed the strange nature of fame, telling Tolentino he is “not trying to make myself famous”. “I want to be known for what I do,” he explained. “But now fame is about being known for who you are. And people are complicated.”
He also told Tolentino that he was “really anxious”. “Like, I think the whole exaggeration of my shit throughout the past year and a half, maybe it proves there’s something oppositional happening, that I’m getting something out of my system,” Healy explained. “Because the truth is, I’m really quite anxious. We’re all anxious, but at the moment I’m really anxious.”
Read the full New Yorker profile here.
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