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An interview with Matt Healy in The Guardian has the following paragraph:

Another striking line on Being Funny in a Foreign Language comes on its opening track, titled – like every opening track on every 1975 album – The 1975. “I’m sorry if you’re alive and 17,” he sings. It is an odd thing to sing as a band with a sizeable teenage following. “When I was 17, all the cultural ideas that I was sold were about the future,” says Healy. “Being 17 now must be terrifying. You must look at the state of the economy and the world and you don’t know if there’s going to be a future. If I was 17 now and I was having to deal with the things that young people are expected to deal with – you need to be informed on racial issues, how economies work, all this stuff … When I was 17, I was getting stoned, and there was no one shouting at me on the internet that I wasn’t doing my part. It felt like the apocalypse anyway, because of some girl or a lack of weed or something like that. It wasn’t like trying to understand these huge ideas and being expected to have this pre-signed-off opinion on anything.”

Hi. I’d like to know what pre-signed-off opinion means here. I think it might mean an opinion that can’t be changed afterwards, like the definite opinion. Is he saying that when he was young, no one expected him to say the absolutely correct opinion on the world issues or anything?

Thanks in advance.

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    Hello Whitewater. Do you see how I've added a source and a link? Please make sure you add a source and a link for any quoted text.
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    Sep 8, 2022 at 17:52
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    Sorry. I forgot to do that. Thanks for the edit.
    – whitewater
    Sep 8, 2022 at 18:58

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To "sign off" on something means to give it official approval for other people to use. "Pre" doesn't add anything, and if this were in careful writing rather than extemporaneous speech, Matt Healy probably wouldn't have said "pre", so I'll ignore it.

We normally don't sign off on opinions, but in modern North America and Western Europe, there's a common view that you have to express certain progressive opinions and ideologies to fit in and succeed in society, and even that failure to do so could leave you "cancelled". The view goes that people claim to hold these beliefs, and even believe they do, despite never having critically analyzed them, similar to a religion.

So Matt Healy is referring to this list of ideological opinions that every young person is expected to have already developed just to fit in.

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