“Looking For Somebody (To Love)” is a track off Being Funny in a Foreign Language, the fifth studio album by The 1975. The album was released in October 2022, amidst nationwide rising gun violence. According to the Gun Violence Archive, 648 mass shootings occurred in 2022, detailed in this New York Times article. Each individual reported shooting is detailed on the Gun Violence Archive website, with locations, fatalities, injuries, suspects, and all other relevant information included.
In 2022, the Supreme Court overruled decades of precedent by going against Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case. The case’s specifics are listed in this Oyez article, but the main outcome was that the Court ruled abortion is “neither deeply rooted in the nation’s history nor an essential component of ‘ordered liberty.’” Dobbs v. Jackson led to numerous legislative attempts to outlaw abortion completely and therefore take away women’s rights to their own bodies. Additionally, in 2022 the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published a report about the largest incel forum on the internet. The report’s findings are detailed in this article, exposing the sexist, misogynistic, racist, and violent nature of incel culture. Mass shootings, women’s rights, incel culture, and toxic masculinity were all hot-button topics when “Looking For Somebody (To Love)” was being written/produced/released.
While The 1975 is technically considered an alternative/indie group, “Looking For Somebody (To Love)” is the most pop-y and techno sounding on the album. Thinking about genre as a kind of context, it’s odd to think that a song about such violent and disturbing subjects would be paired with upbeat and almost fun-sounding music. However, I think this is definitely an artistic choice with a specific purpose–maybe to draw the listener’s attention to the lyrics even more than they would be if the song was melancholy, or maybe to make a statement about media and the way it can distract us from the true meaning of something.
“Looking For Somebody (To Love)” was written by Matty Healy (lead singer) and George Daniel (drummer/producer), as well as singer/songwriter Ilsey Juber. Healy, Daniel, and Juber are clearly offering a critique of toxic masculinity that often leads to violence, but it is very subtle and doesn’t necessarily condemn it either (the artists have adamantly condemned it in interviews). If anything, the lyrics just explore the many factors that can contribute to the phenomena of mass shootings. The line “Somebody lacking in desire / The type you just don’t fuck” refers to incels, who are categorized by their inability to have successful relationships with women and instead blame it on those same women or successful other men.
In the next verse, the line “I wanna show him he’s a bitch / I wanna fuck him up good / I wanna smash the competition, go and kill it like a man should” describes toxic masculinity, and how that often breeds violent behavior between men desperate to prove themselves. Men who feel threatened or emasculated will often turn to physical acts of aggression to make themselves appear more “manly”, and so the cycle continues.
September 26, 2023 at 9:58 am
Liz,
This is a very good discussion of the social roots of “Looking for Somebody to Love<' and I appreciated the links to the links to the gun violence archive site. I wasn't aware of that. Just because 2022 is when Roe v wade was overturned doesn't necessarily mean that it is related to the context of the song, as I don't see anything in the song that hints at abortion. (Am I missing something?) One thing that the song is doing, which I suspect you will need to discuss in your podcast, is, it seems, move in and our of the first person, which seems to be the voice of the shooter. Theres a narrator and then theres the I. Is the song attempting to give some sort of rationale for the reason for why the shooter did what he did? I don't know, but the song is going to ask you to look into the psychological reasoning for why mass shooters do what they do. Can it really narrowed down to "they were looking for someone to love"? The background research assignment will help with that. In future posts, please be sure to add (from the assignment) “features that are important to blogs and blog readers: headings, bold print to highlight important phrases in the discussion, images, embedded video and/or audio” and so on. You’re doing great with the links so far. Looking forward to future posts! Bill