After a few years of a long inevitable break due to the pandemic, Good Vibes Festival finally returned this year, marking a comeback for Future Sound Asia as the organiser and a celebration of the festival’s 10th anniversary.

Though the lineups could be vastly improved, especially with the selections of local acts that need stronger inputs from people who actually listen to local music, almost every performer turned the humid Sepang International Circuit into a somewhat wonderful night. There were no major technical glitches, the food was great, everybody was happy. For a moment.

Everybody and their mothers know what happened at the Good Vibes Festival 2023: The frontman of The 1975, Matty Healy threw a tantrum on stage, kissed his bassist apparently as a “middle finger” act to our government and The 1975 was banned from the festival after only performing five songs. Simply put, Healy was in a bad mood, and he wanted to make sure everbody else acknowledge this.

But to give this much of the spotlight solely to Matty Healy’s somewhat anticipated antics would mean to dismiss the hard work of everybody else who just wanted to put on a good show. So, here are a few of the best and the worst moments of the only day of Good Vibes Festival 2023:

The Best

Lunadira gave an electrifying performance

I saw Lunadira first perform at Tapau Fest in 2019. She was timid, clutching only a few singles as a rising bedroom pop singer. Over the years, her bedroom pop confessional lyrics evolved into more mature, ethereal pop songs. On the Red stage, wearing a purple dress that almost resembled the modern Nusantara princess dress she wore for her performance in the hit Youtube show Colors, she delivered hits such as “Hoodie” and latest singles including “Go Slow”. The best song she performed that day was a soon-to-be-released track titled “I’ll Be Alright” — a song that’s electrifying to hear live that I hope to include the studio version in our year-end lists. Her spontaneous vocal flows torched an idea that I desperately want to see come true: a Lunadira pop rock record.

NxWorries has the coolest set of the evening

With bursts of confetti and infectious beat tapes, Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge of NxWorries enchanted the crowd seamlessly with songs like “Wngs” and “Daydreaming” — enough to get everybody on the ground to lose themselves in the superduo’s undeniable charm.

Sabrina Carpenter’s “Nonsense” outro

Backed by visualizers of glamorous red rooms with Old Hollywood aesthetics, Sabrina Carpenter captured the crowd with sultry performances of “Tornado Warnings” and “Read Your Mind” among other tracks from her latest album emails i can’t send. Of course, you can’t talk about a Sabrina Carpenter show without anticipating the tradition of her “Nonsense” outro, customised to the city she’s performing in. Just before her song ended, almost everybody got their phone out to record the moment. Sabrina flirtatiously covered her mouth before singing: “Bitch, I’m in Malaysia it’s a world tour / Played it so good you don’t need an encore / Let me hear you scream Kuala Lumpur!” That’s poetry, if you ask me. And like how everybody else joked and praised on Twitter, her pronunciation of “Kuala Lumpur” seemingly sounds like it came not from an American pop star, but rather just another local girl who enjoys spending her weekend wandering around the corners of Petaling Street. I know we Malaysians tend to applaud mat sallehs for the most mundane things, but boy, she really felt like one of us.

The Worst

Can we be done with the Sepang International Circuit already?

I’m writing this as a person attending the festival for the first time, and quite possibly the last. The venue is inaccessible by public transport, a couple of girls asked me if it’s possible to go back to Damansara by public transport at 1:00 AM and unfortunately, the only option they had was to book a Grab ride — good luck to their bank account. If you’re going by car, the parking costs a whopping RM20. And then it takes approximately a 20 minutes walk from the parking lot and into the venue. That night, having to walk for 20 minutes while still trying to process the shittiest international headliner to ever perform in a Malaysian music festival, with hundreds of people who were just as dazed and confused as you, through the decrepit stairs and dimly lit roads, was the most miserable I’ve felt at a music festival.

No, RM15 for two mineral bottles are not a good deal

Good Vibes Festival is supposedly Malaysia’s answer to Coachella, and just like the overpriced music festival in the US that’s so obviously designed for the rich, you have to expect the beverages to be sold at nothing less than insultingly expensive. When I queued under the orange sky of Sepang, I did anticipate the mineral bottles to be priced at RM10 each. After 36 minutes in line, I was still stupidly surprised that indeed, the mineral bottles costs RM10 each. But fortunately for the organiser, they offered a great deal: “So the mineral water is RM10 each but if you buy two, you can get them for RM15,” said the girl at the counter. I blanked and thought about the 30 minutes queue and said, “Two, please.” I walked away, with cold mineral bottles in my hand, with an aghast look on my face so everybody else in the line knew what they were expecting.

The best part? They were just Dasani.

Why can’t Malaysians throw their trash?

Amidst the catastrophic aftermath of Good Vibes Festival, a few people on Twitter pointed out how the venue was trashed with water bottles and paper boxes of sandwiches, pizzas and other food sold by the vendors. A group of people even left their leftovers and water bottles inside their folded picnic mat right before Sabrina Carpenter’s set, leaving it to be trampled by everybody else who couldn’t see it in the dark. Frankly, this isn’t a Good Vibes Festival thing — this is sadly common at Malaysian music festivals. I recalled a similar incident at Atas Angin Festival 2022, where the floors of Gamuda Cove were tainted with mineral bottles and plastic cups after the show. At Tapau Fest 2022 in Lenggong, immediately after Hindia bid his farewell to the crowd, the emcee requested for the attendees to stay and pick up the trash together. It’s a good move, though I can’t help to wonder why festival goers, who are mostly adults, are so ignorant to the point they need this level of reminder to throw their own trash.

The 1975.

Speaking of trash:

To hear people aged 50 and beyond, the TikTok extremists, the boomers of local politics and pretty much everybody else discussing the repulsive behaviour by The 1975 was something that was once unimaginable even in an alternate universe, but now a painful reality we have to live in.

As someone who was in the crowd, watching Matty Healy shamelessly throw a tantrum was confusing and yet so expected from a man like him. Personally, he deserved to be banned way before his speech — when he smashed the drones to the point VIP attendees said they could feel the drones’ debris hitting their face was enough reason to pull the plug. When he spat and vomited on stage, the camera unfortunately was too close to his face, showing his saliva dripping on his microphone. I felt sick — nobody has ever looked this pathetic on stage before.

But the crowd reactions were divided. A guy behind me shouted, “Shut up and just play the show!” while the girl next to me said, “Did he just kiss the guy? Oh my god, I love them!” The crowd wooed every action he did, until the woos finally turned to boos when they realised what was going on. The 30-minutes fiasco was a rush, something you couldn’t process until the band left the stage and we all stood there, hoping it was all a joke and we didn’t spend this much to watch performative activism done by a 34-year-old white man. At home, I scrolled through polarizing comments and deleted Instagram stories. A macro influencer applauded Matty’s bravery to kiss his straight, male bassist in a homophobic country, and later deleted it, perhaps realising that what Matty did was actually the opposite of bravery.

As a fan of The 1975 in 2012-2014, Matty Healy has always been a pathetic loser who stand up for issues by pulling stunts that will only get the approval of degenerates like him. Many years later, when The 1975 no longer exists in my Spotify library, Healy is as invincible as ever, thanks to his status as a white man. He has always been this way, yes, even when The 1975 first performed at the same festival in 2016. The question that many were left asking is: Why didn’t he protest our decades old anti-LGBT laws back then? Was he as homophobic as our laws in 2016 and finally did his research, not before booking the shows, but seconds before walking to the stage in 2023?

Matty Healy purposely painted himself as a hero and later mocked us for not seeing him as one — you could almost imagine him practicing his pathetic rant in front of the mirror in his five star hotel room, his first-class seats, his drunken bathroom visits. With everything he’s known for — you know how awful of a person you are if there are way too many recorded evidences of the disgusting, problematic shits you’ve done in your career — both the organiser and the local fans made a huge mistake to think that Healy, a pathetic, egotistical man, and a fucking coward who relentlessly craves attention and drama, would actually respect the audience that he willingly agreed to perform for.

Unfortunately for us, the situation and its aftermath were made to be felt almost inexplicable to everybody else outside the Asean region. Matty Healy’s white saviour complex thrives in an environment where everybody else enables him as one. To see music publications like Pitchfork, The Fader and independent music writers paint Healy as somewhat a hero or an anti-hero for speaking up against Malaysia’s homophobic laws were insulting. Every headline and articles written about the incident felt like they were summarised by a white journalist who rewatched the video posted by PopCrave. None of the publications, in exception of NME and BBC, bothered to actually interview the festival goers and most importantly, Malaysian queers to get their point of view. Go to your social media and watch how Malaysians relentlessly explain how Healy’s bitch ass rant will only be used as a political ammo to further harm the marginalised communities and the local entertainment industry, in light of the upcoming state elections. Sadly, their perspectives were blatantly ignored and dismissed by his fans, who, in a pitiful defense, argued, “If it were someone else, y’all would applaud him!” — further championing the notion that Healy is nothing but a poster boy of white privilege. Several days after the incident, the colonisers — from the performer to the media to their fans — whose activism exist only within the vacuum of Elon Musk’s then-Twitter now-X are still highlighting non-existent changes supposedly perpetuated by Healy’s ostensible bravery. This is also helped by their projection of Malaysia as a third world country that desperately needs their teachings about a progressive society, seemingly extracted from the textbooks of TikTok and Instagram activism.

In reality, the battle is complex as it is to be fought by ourselves, let alone to have a white saviour thinking he has bravely put himself in the frontlines. We get it, our government sucks and there could only be worse options than what we currently have now. But to be represented by a drunken white man feels more insulting than convenient. His defenders thought Healy has started a revolution, igniting sparks that will change Malaysia for good. How so? Healy left immediately after The 1975 was banned. This is only his second time in Malaysia and he doesn’t have any future plans to settle down here and further fight for the community he supposedly cares about. To come here for less than 24 hours and lecture us on a stage that you were paid to perform, not preach, is not activism; it’s just a calculated shitshow that Healy will most definitely brag about in front of his predominantly white audience in their upcoming North America shows. Truthfully, his move to flee out of the country at four in the morning, cancel their shows in Jakarta, and pro-LGBT Taiwan was more cowardice than if he had chosen to criticize our laws after he had performed the whole set. Matty Healy’s so-called act of heroism existed nowhere near the everyday battles Malaysians face for a better country, a battle that’s beyond his tiny brain could ever comprehend. Unfortunately, there is no way up from here; only a mess that we have to clean ourselves. All of this could’ve been avoided if only Healy had listened to the guy behind me: Just shut up and play the damn show.

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Ticket fee: RM811 for 3-days General Admission (including service fee)

Venue: 2/5

Performances: 2/5 (I wanted to give 0.5 and you can blame the 1975 for that but it wouldn’t be fair to other performers.)

Vibes: Bad

Overall score: 2/5