The 1975 - Then Because She Goes

‘Then Because She Goes’ from The 1975’s new album, ‘Notes On A Conditional Form’. Out now - http://the1975.lnk.to/noacfID The 1975 and Ben Ditto have curated an online exhibition of 15 artists responding to tracks from ‘NOACF’. 04 Agusta Yr responds to ‘Then Because She Goes’. Agusta Yr’s art film begins with a downbeat girl in a black hoody sitting at home watching the video for ‘Then Because She Goes’; not the real video, but the video for ‘Then Because She Goes’ inside the real video for ‘Then Because She Goes’. This film is meta from the beginning, and this is only one of its doublings and mirror images. In the video within the video, a blonde dances wavily on a hillside of swaying blue flowers. “I wish I was as bad as her,” thinks the girl on the sofa. She looks the blonde up on Instagram and, in a Kafkaesque turn, her phone grows larger than her and boxes her, knocks her over. “We all know how toxic social media is but we fail to consider it a majority of the time,” says Yr. “We compare ourselves to what we see, like the fabulous life of an Insta baddie or a millionaire on a yacht. We get so caught up in this we fail to see who we actually are a lot of the time, we get lost in a whirlpool of seeing ourselves through others—we forget to utilize our own eyes.” From her perspective, ‘Then Because She Goes’ is reimagined as a ballad of self-realization and female empowerment. The story she writes for it is a romance with a twist: our hero falls into another dimension, a magical green valley, where she encounters the confident, glamorous blonde she’s fallen in love with; only to discover they were the same person all along. “‘Then Because She Goes’ is both sombre and hopeful,” says Yr. “The hero goes through a transformation when she learns to see the baddie inside her. It’s a love story with oneself. A mixture of lightness and darkness; where the main character ends up kissing herself.” Taking the artistic tradition of the self-portrait one step further, she shows how we all contain multitudes, and how we’re all performing a variety of confusing, and often contradictory, roles in the metaverse. https://www.instagram.com/iceicebabyspice/ https://www.agustayr.com/ Music video by The 1975 performing Then Because She Goes (Visualiser). © 2020 Dirty Hit, under exclusive licence to Polydor Records and Interscope Records http://vevo.ly/J9HeGI