"Love It If We Made It" is a song by English band the 1975 from their third studio album, A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships (2018). The song was written by Matty Healy, George Daniel, Adam Hann and Ross MacDonald, while the production was handled by the former two. It was released on 19 July 2018 by Dirty Hit and Polydor Records as the second single from the album. Daniel created the song's production in 2015, while Healy collected daily tabloid headlines from 2016 to 2018 to use as lyrics. They became too humorous, so he rewrote the song to summarize the volatile social and political events in that period, using Prince's "Sign o' the Times" as an inspiration.
A mid-tempo electro-rock ballad, "Love It If We Made It" contains sophisti-pop melodies, harp-like arpeggios, disco riffs and staccato chords. The song also incorporates elements of synth-pop, power pop, funk and pop music. Thematically, it deals with the vices of modern humanity, hypocrisy and disinformation, while the lyrics reference multiple events such as the US national anthem protests, the death of Alan Kurdi, the death of Lil Peep, and the Donald Trump Access Hollywood tape, among others. Healy delivers the track in a stream of consciousness style using a mixture of shouting, screaming and rapping.
Upon release, "Love It If We Made It" received widespread acclaim from contemporary music critics, many of whom deemed it both an album highlight and the record's overall thesis statement. Praise was directed at the song's themes, lyrics, production and Healy's vocal delivery. The track was included on numerous critics year-end lists, and lauded as the best song of 2018 by several publications, including The New York Times and Pitchfork. It later won the 2019 Ivor Novello Award for Best Contemporary Song. It is generally considered among the best songs of the 2010s, a generational anthem and the millennial equivalent to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire", with several contemporary critics referring to the track as the 1975's greatest song.
Commercially, "Love It If We Made It" peaked at number ten on the US Billboard Hot Rock & Alternative Songs and number 33 on the UK Singles Chart, while also reaching the top 50 in Scotland, Ireland and Canada. The song was later certified silver by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). Two music videos were released to accompany the track. The first, created in a vertical format, was released to Spotify on 12 August 2018. The second, directed by Adam Powell, was released on 15 October. The visual depicts the 1975 performing the song as neon-coloured silhouettes, interspersed with found footage-style clips of war and significant pop culture events from the 2010s. The video received positive reviews and was later nominated for Best Rock Video at the 2019 UK Music Video Awards and the 2019 MTV Video Music Awards.
Writing and recording
The instrumentation of "Love It If We Made It" was created by Daniel in 2015. Development of the lyrics began immediately after the 1975 concluded the recording of I Like It When You Sleep, for You Are So Beautiful yet So Unaware of It. The band was inspired by the Blue Nile's Hats (1989), which they frequently listened to during their I Like It When You Sleep Tour. They sought to create something similar but "slightly different [...] like [the] Blue Nile on steroids", and wanted the song to sound "really machine-like, in an industrial sense". In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Healy said the song was based on "The Downtown Lights", adding: "I didn't want to hide away from referencing it. I wanted it to be fucking obvious to people that know."
Healy requested that Ed Blow, the Dirty Hit product manager, go to the local newsstand every day to grab the daily newspaper. The singer had an idea to collect a list of tabloid headlines and turn them into a song. He realised the headlines had become too slapstick and humorous during the writing process, so the idea was scrapped. The June 2017 Grenfell Tower fire, which occurred close to the Dirty Hit offices, had a significant impact on Healy. According to the singer, the event acted as the song's catalyst, saying, "that's when the song became this outward exorcism".
The first concerted effort to write "Love It If We Made It" occurred in June 2017. While on a flight during the 1975's I Like It When You Sleep Tour, Daniel encouraged Healy to build the song's lyrics around his 2015 instrumental, which consisted of two chords at the time. The singer had the phrase "fucking in a car, shooting heroin" and a line about Eric Garner, but most of the verses did not form until very late into the recording process. He revisited the idea of tabloid headlines, choosing to document the events of 2016 to 2018 in a collection of notes, adding to it every time something angered him. Healy procrastinated work on the song, eventually rewriting it several times. Once the lyrics grew more substantially, he realised it had become a benchmark for A Brief Inquiry into Online Relationships, changing the album's overall structure from a personal, introspective diary of the singer's life into an outward-facing record. Healy did not want to create a protest song, feeling "Love It If We Made It" needed to be an objective summary of events rather than a subjective opinion. To accomplish this, he looked to the narrative of Prince's "Sign o' the Times" (1987), seeking to create a "super modern" version that documents the most political and socially volatile period of the band's life.
As the writing process continued, the singer amassed so much content that several lines needed to be removed. Such lyrics included a "Horse Burger Butchered by the British" and one about foreign nurses. Ultimately, Healy remarked that the most challenging part of the songwriting process was making it all rhyme. He composed the bridge as a "dump of ideas", writing down the words that came to his mind in the moment. Healy had previously written "Consultation, degradation, fossil-fueling masturbation / Immigration, liberal kitsch, kneeling on a pitch", followed by a missing gap of seven syllables and the line "excited to be indicted". Having referenced the Twitter interaction between Donald Trump and Kanye West, he sought to incorporate a second famous soundbite from the former president of the United States. While singing the melody to himself in a car, Healy realised that "I moved on her like a bitch" – a remark made by Trump captured on the Access Hollywood tape – fit perfectly. Although the other band members urged him not to include it over fears of further censorship, the singer refused, saying censorship was an acceptable consequence for verbatim quoting the president of the United States.
As the I Like It When You Sleep Tour reached its conclusion, the 1975 returned to the studio to record "Love It If We Made It". Having heard the song in full for the first time, the band felt that it was "fucking crazy", with Healy describing a purity to their reactions. However, he felt uncomfortable recording it. While not being uncomfortable with the lyrics themselves, he was in disbelief over what he was saying, specifically his awareness of how bizarre the world had become. Speaking to Genius, the singer noted that radio stations would censor the line "I moved on her like a bitch", despite the band merely repeating a statement uttered by the president of the United States. Remarking on how unusual it seemed, Healy said, "that's a weird reality, that's weird, that's some Idiocracy kind of stuff".
Inspiration While "Love It If We Made It" is inspired by the failures of modern life, the 1975 wanted the title to represent their optimism in the human spirit's resilience. One topic that influenced the lyrics was the growing acceptance of alternative facts and post-truth in society. Healy cited the rise of the Flat-Earther movement as an example of this, noting their beliefs contradict tangible physical evidence. On a larger scale, he was interested in global online interconnectedness and the weaponization of the internet, noting its use as a tool to sow distrust, promote lies and spread misinformation. Elsewhere, the singer was partially inspired by conservative pundits Milo Yiannopoulos and Candace Owens. Regarding their ability to be provocative, the singer sought to emulate this and attempted to write lyrics that captured listeners' attention in the "attention economy". Similarly, he borrowed a line from a Trump T-shirt that read: "Trump 2016, fuck your feelings."
The 1975 were inspired by the world's reaction to the death of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old boy who drowned attempting to cross the Aegean Sea during the European migrant crisis. Healy felt ashamed that it took a picture to garner the sympathy of the British public, while also criticizing the reaction of the conservative-leaning press in the country. Elsewhere, he wanted to pay tribute to Lil Peep, calling him a pioneer. While the singer was not "his biggest fan", he understood the gravity of the rapper's death, saying, "it was just really untimely and really sad, and I literally wanted to celebrate him, if I had an opportunity to do so". Healy's calls for Jesus in the "Love It If We Made It" stemmed from his changing outlook on religion, noting his once rigid and outspoken atheism had softened, which the singer credits to his growing empathy and understanding toward the overall culture of religion.
Healy's use of "daddy" in "Love It If We Made It" stemmed from his fascination with internet meme culture, noting the term has evolved to denote a sexual connotation in the online world. His inspiration to include the "Poison me daddy" line came from the 2018 Salisbury poisoning, saying he was reading about the incident while simultaneously receiving comments from fans calling him "daddy". Elaborating further, the singer said: "[If] you told somebody 15 years ago, 'You're gonna have this computer where people are gonna be calling you daddy, and you're gonna be able to read BBC news at the same time,' it's [a] weird little reality." While recognizing his lack of knowledge regarding the history of anti-black racism in America, the singer wanted to draw attention to a paradox he observed. Healy viewed American culture as fetishizing black people while simultaneously thriving on a prison system that preys on young black men. He portrays this through a neutral observation in "Love It If We Made It", saying he "[does not] have any solutions, but [he is] an artist, it's not [his] job". Similarly, the song addresses the US national anthem protests. Healy was confused by the controversy, noting that American conservative media portrayed the issue as anti-American and anti-democratic, despite traditional American traditions of peaceful protest and standing up for one's beliefs.
Music and lyrics
Musically, "Love It If We Made It" is a mid-tempo electro-rock ballad with a length of four minutes and 13 seconds (4:13). The song's industrial and new wave-influenced electropop instrumentation makes extensive use of synth-pop, power pop, disco, funk and pop music. According to sheet music published at Musicnotes.com by Hal Leonard Music Publishing, "Love It If We Made It" is set in the time signature of common time with a tempo of 90 beats per minute. The track is composed in the key of E major, with Healy's vocals ranging between the notes of B2 and B4. The production of "Love It If We Made It", described by DIYs Will Richards as sharp and harsh, contains sophisti-pop melodies, a soaring choral section, squealing filtered disco riffs, a psychedelic, pulsating metric, gleaming, jittery electropop synths, "gigantic", insistent drums, harp-like arpeggios and hazy electronic production elements. Healy's delivers the song in a stream of consciousness style, sung with impassioned vocals variously described as a near-shout, scream, howl and shout-rap.