It was only a kiss, how did it end up like this?
+ Harry Styles' final show, The 1975 being 'banned' from Kuala Lumpur, & a Twitter rebrand 🙃
My besties!! I’m trying to think about what I can fill you in on about my weekend, but in reality, I spent most of it at my local library. I’m in my library era in a huge way and honestly, it’s like my fave place to be right now. It’s quiet and warm and comfy and I love it!!! I’ve already finished this month’s book club read, and am currently working through Joan Didion’s collection of essays “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” and unsurprisingly I’m adoring that too!!
I’m currently writing this to you at 2am as I’m watching a very unsatisfying return to the F1 grid for Danny Ric, but it’s fun to be up supporting the boys all the same.
OMG speaking of the boys - I found photos in my old diary of when my bedroom looked like this:
and then yesterday I found a BOX OF ALL THE POSTERS. Thinking about making a video for TikTok on them because WHAT A TIME CAPSULE!!!
Last night Close Friends got to watch Danny Ric return to the grid with me in the Hungarian GP!!!
They’ve also been re-reading all my old diaries with me
Book Clubbers have been chatting about our July pick over in our subscriber-only book club chats (and they get a special podcast)
Bel wrote all about how to know when to STOP in 💌 No News Is Good News 💌
You’re all helping us stay alive by supporting the media u love 🥺
Everything you learnt from your first break-up
The 1975 were ‘banned from Kuala Lumpur’ after protesting Mayalsia’s anti-LGBTQIA+ laws with an onstage kiss
Harry Styles had an emoshe final show
Elon Musk has said he wants to get rid of the Twitter bird logo, and replace it with an "X"
Everything you learnt from your first break-up
Wow - we’ve made it to the end of our first season of Own The Feels - and holy SHIT have we learned some lessons.
Our final episode was built on all the things YOU’D sent in that you’d learnt from your first break up (ugh have I mentioned enough how generous you were with your experiences???) so I thought I’d share some of them here:
“Put the energy that you want to put into making them jealous, getting revenge, etc, into YOURSELF.”
“Your significant other should not fix all of your problems. they shouldn’t be the missing piece, but rather an extra piece.”
“You can both be good people and still not be good for each other.”
“Unfollow or block them on social media - simple, but effective”
“DO WHATEVER YOU CAN TO AVOID GHOSTING THEM - unless it’s for your safety, you both deserve some closure”
“Once the breakup is done, leave them be.”
“Trust your gut - it is like a muscle, the more you use it the stronger it gets.”
“Lean on your friends, family, or therapist.”
“Validate your feelings and let yourself feel!”
“In my first breakup, I was so young. So vulnerable. I was eager to be loved and to grant love. Now I know that love needs to come first with me (even though that’s so cliche to say), and I shouldn’t be so harsh on the decisions I made previously. It’s made me how I am today and it has taught me so many valuable lessons.”
“Pain is temporary, always.”
“After the break-up, like a bird rising from the ashes, you will phoenix.”
We talk about all these lessons and more in our final episode of Own The Feels!
And if you want more of this type of content, you can head to https://www.vice.com/en/topic/love-better for a bunch more resources on how to break-up better, and listen to this episode in our Culture Vulture feed, wherever you get your podcasts!
PS, leave a comment with any advice you’re got!!
The 1975 were ‘banned from Kuala Lumpur’ after protesting Mayalsia’s anti-LGBTQIA+ laws with an onstage kiss
Wading right into this discourse! Over the weekend, The 1975 were playing at the Good Vibes music festival in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (where sex between men is criminalised, and transgender people can be arrested just for wearing clothes “thought not to belong to their assigned sex”) when Matty Healy (never shying away from making a political statement) decided to say something. He began by saying he almost cancelled their performance but didn’t want to let the fans down, and went on to say:
"Unfortunately you don't get a set of loads of uplifting songs because I'm fucking furious, and that's not fair on you, because you're not representative of your government. Because you're young people, and I'm sure a lot of you are gay and progressive and cool."
Matty and Ross (who plays bass) then made out as the band played the song I Like America & America Likes Me.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Pretty soon after that (only 30 minutes into their set) the band walked off stage, as Matty told the audience: "Alright, we just got banned from Kuala Lumpur, see you later."
Malaysian authorities then cancelled the rest of the Good Vibes music festival, with the organisers claiming that before the show began the band’s team had assured them that “Healy and the band would adhere to local performance guidelines,” but “did not honour these assurances, despite our trust in their commitment.” The 1975 has since cancelled their upcoming performances at the We The Fest event in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, on Sunday, as well as a show on Tuesday in Taiwan.
So that’s the nuts and bolts of it all - but this act has made me think about a lot of things (and many of them contradicting - so bear with me, I’m human.)
It’s made me think about activism, and that there is no way to do it in a way that pleases everyone (of course, that’s not the point of activism) but that there are important considerations that need to be made for the people you believe that you’re ‘standing up for.’ I believe the intentions of the band were good - this is far from the first time they’ve made political statements on stage, and if you listen to their music, this is kinda what they’re about - but when you make a statement and then have the ability to jump on a plane and fly away from the fallout, who is being left to pick up the pieces? This time it’s the queer youth in Malaysia who undoubtedly have been carving out safe (albeit underground) spaces to find community, and will now be under the watchful eye of the government even more.
I’m also thinking about how The 1975 technically ‘lost’ nothing for what they did - but would we rather they did nothing? We live in a world where we expect anyone with a following or a ‘platform’ to have a stance and be vocal about everything, which has created a culture of showing up imperfectly. Of course, there will be the commentary (likely on Twitter) about how the band should have done this or that, and it would have been ‘a better way’ of taking a stand (and I believe it! There were certainly more productive ways to have done this!) but I truly wonder what someone could in do in 2023 that would get the approval the Tiktok or Twitter commentators (and no - it’s not about them, and that’s the problem - they’re still the makers/ swayers of public opinion on most things these days.)
One thing for certain is that this is the #3 trending story on the BBC, and a lot more of us are thinking about LGBTQIA+ rights in Malaysia than we were before this stunt. But is awareness worth the potential danger or retraction in small freedoms that LGBTQIA+ youth in Malaysia have carved out for themselves? We all know I don’t have the answer to these hypothetical calculations of whether it was ‘worth it’ - but if we’re looking at who really benefits from acts like this, it doesn’t feel like it’s the queer people of Malaysia OR the festival goers, and unfortunately, these are the people who were owed a performance - just not a performance in activism.
Harry Styles had an emoshe final show
On a much less complicated note (which is why we love Harry Styles so much) Harry had his final show of Love On Tour!! It was emosheeeee as hundreds of thousands of people watched him not only in the stadium but on live streams, and he played a 10-minute piano composition that he’s written specifically to send off the tour, he sang Falling, he sang Best Song Ever, and then he sunk to his knees in what I can only imagine was the most crushing weight of emotions he’s ever felt.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Elon Musk has said he wants to get rid of the Twitter bird logo, and replace it with an "X"
But Elon Musk is also known to make a promise or two that he can’t keep. Bascially, in his wild dreams to create a ‘super app’ he’s changed the name of the business to ‘X Corp’ and now he’s wanting to replace the logo, saying that it "should have been done a long time ago." He also says that x.com now points to Twitter. And that is all I know!
If you wanna:
Become a Close Friend on Instagram
Become a member of our 📚Book Club📚
AND get Bel’s Sunday morning newsy ‘No News Is Good News’
Please consider becoming a paying supporter 💌
X Corp sounds like a villain enterprise in Batman.
I'm so torn on the 1975 incident. I've been feeling odd about Matty for a while (the Adam Friedland podcast really left a sour taste in my mouth) but I do admire his desire to speak up for what he believes is right. It's such a complicated situation, I do respect what he did on the face of it (or on the face of Ross you might say), but I can also see that him doing this and then just taking off doesn't really help anyone but then again, should it be up to musicians to show up to other countries and try to change laws? Or is it enough that they have raised international awareness?