Courtesy of Gigwise.

I‰’ve been thinking about The 1975 a lot after I saw them live at Echostage in December. I knew who they were before the concert and I knew about their fanbase. The thing is, The 1975 is a Brit-pop alternative-type band from Manchester, but their primary fanbase is an odd combination of your average British 20-somethings and American teens aged 12-17.

The weird demographic isn‰’t just because of a cultural obsession with young British men – well it is, though not directly.

Just downloaded the new @the1975 album… It’s all very exciting.

— Harry Styles. (@Harry_Styles) September 2, 2013

So The 1975 has been receiving some promotion for the last two-odd years from One Direction, which escalated very quickly after The 1975 decided to make a pretty crappy cover of “What Makes You Beautiful,‰” probably more as a slight against One Direction than as a compliment. It‰’s hard to imagine someone who schlogs around a bottle of wine at concerts earnestly singing an R&B cover of a One Direction song.

What‰’s weird about the whole somewhat-obscure-band-suddenly-acquires-a-huge-fanbase-because-a-boybander-tweeted-about-them thing is that other bands haven‰’t gotten to the same level of fame as The 1975 when One Direction has mentioned them. So I sort of wondered for awhile exactly why they win out over Naughty Boy or Cher Lloyd (especially when Cher at least falls into the same genre as One Direction).

The answer lies in Matty Healy. The most important thing to know about Matty Healy is his self-knowledge. He fulfills a certain stereotype, but he often acknowledges it in interviews. He has an incredibly complicated relationship with fame (namely one he didn‰’t even ask for) and his opinions on that fame aren‰’t as Robert Pattinson-esque as one might think.

His persona, and it‰’s incredibly unclear exactly how much is staged and how much is genuine (or even if the staging makes the persona less genuine), is that of a Dorian Gray sort. He‰’s a depressed artist who flings himself into lounges and runs a delicate hand through his thick, wavy hair. He brings a bottle of wine onstage, which he proceeds to drink in its entirety throughout the course of his concert.

At one point, he was holding the wine bottle and cigarette in one hand and the mic in the other as he tried to drunkenly talk philosophy with an audience of screaming 15-year-old girls. He is a parody of himself, but if you read any interview about Matty Healy, you will see that he somehow manages to grimly embrace it. I hadn‰’t realized people could grimly embrace anything unwanted.

I somehow didn‰’t realize that I would soon be surrounded by a large group of teenaged girls, many of whom had been waiting outside of Echostage for over a day in the freezing December rain. The girls at the concert pushed each other, all trying to get closer to Matty‰’s face, to hold some essence of him.

At one point Matty requested that everyone put their phones away for a specific song, and by requested I mean he said (in an overly exhausted but somehow incredibly endeared voice), “Can everyone put their fucking phones down for just one minute?‰Û

Near the end of the concert, when Matty had started slurring his words with more regularity and his shirt had become completely unbuttoned, he asked everyone to be quiet. He brought out a piano and tried to sing completely acoustically, no mics. He stopped halfway through the song because no one could listen. Everyone was too keyed up; no one could control their emotions. The guilt and shame we felt from the drunken disappointment of this ridiculously over-the-top consumptive poet was nearly unbearable.

If you couldn‰’t guess it before, I was entranced by such a weird and enigmatic persona. He is the one you want to fix when you‰’re 14-years-old and invincible and full of misplaced love. He‰’s a version of One Direction that doesn‰’t keep his lyrics to innuendo. He is unsanitized and wild and beautiful. His lyrics are raw; they‰’re dialogues.

After the concert was over, I sat with my friend on the cement stairs next to the stage and watched The 1975‰s entourage clean up. Beer bottles and Solo cups once full of liquor didn‰’t litter the floor.

I doubt that many of the girls at the concert realized just how drunk – how clearly depressed – Matty was. I‰’m not sure that they, like us, deeply considered his parodic characterization of his broken self before creating a judgment on the value of his performance.

But I worry less about what Matty‰’s audience thought of him because those realizations will come in time, when they can better understand the inauthentic authenticity of Matty‰’s embodiment on the stage. I worried much more, and I still do, about what Matty thinks of his fame. Does he think he deserved to get here? During the concert, he repeatedly told the audience that he loves them more than they could ever love him. He‰’s certainly grateful, but surely he‰’s conflicted?

The 1975 isn‰’t a boy band; their music possesses a complexity mainstream critics usually eat up. While The 1975 certainly wouldn‰’t merit a glowing review on Pitchfork, they‰’re fairly reputable for making “good‰” music. So how does Matty Healy feel about the fact that the same people who are absolutely nuts over One Direction are also absolutely nuts over him?

(epilepsy warning: strobes)

While I‰’m sure the music The 1975 produces lends itself to Matty‰’s persona, he has to realize that these young girls are there because of him. The most important question I came away with was this: what does Matty Healy do with this new found power?

Does he try to “educate‰” his audience with “quality‰” music with “acting‰” like adults? While he certainly behaved as if he were disgusted or exhausted with us at points throughout the concert, it seemed as if he also respected us, often at the same time.

Does he refuse to care that his audience is made up of teenagers, more hungry for money than anything else? Even though I know this is rationally the best answer, I often feel so caught up in his enigma that I can‰’t make sense of a world where that could be true. Everything about Matty‰’s character screams “Art for Art‰’s Sake!‰” and “Fame Is a Complicated Thing!‰” And it‰’s not as fun to ruminate on something so mundane as doing it for the money.

The best answer for what Matty Healy can do with a fanbase of teenagers is nothing. At least, nothing externally. He should respect them, not despite their connection with One Direction but because of it. He should realize that teenage girls are more valuable than society allows them to be. He should listen to his audience and start to understand that young girls are passionate and unafraid to be themselves in the face of a culture that tells them not to be.

If Matty Healy really does embody the traits he holds a claim to, he will take the gift bestowed upon him and make himself a better person with it. Teenage girls need someone to respect them and I have completely misplaced hope that Matty Healy, through all his bravado and showmanship and performative identity, could be that person.