The 1975 frontman Matty Healy has explained why he ditched his Twitter account two years ago in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police officer Derek Chauvin.
Healy was criticized on the social media platform after he tweeted: “If you truly believe that ‘ALL LIVES MATTER’ you need to stop facilitating the end of black ones” and included a link to “Love It If We Made It,” his band’s track that includes the lyrics “Selling melanin and then suffocate the Black men / Start with misdemeanors, and we’ll make a business out of them.”
He followed up with an apology (“Sorry I did not link my song in that tweet to make it about me it’s just that the song is literally about this disgusting situation and speaks more eloquently than I can on Twitter”) and then deactivated his account.
“I didn’t run away from Twitter,” Healy told Pitchfork. “I was just like, ‘You know what? If I want to write about the culture war, I don’t wanna be a pawn in it anymore.’
“We used to want our artists to be cigarette-smoking bohemian outsiders who were gonna take risks that the rest of us wouldn’t. Now there’s this desire, especially online, for them to be liberal academics.”
Healy said he would rather express himself through songs – like those on The 1975’s new album Being Funny in a Foreign Language.
“I’ve thought about every single word on this album for two years,” he explained. “I’d think about a tweet for 20 seconds.
“My album’s gonna go out to, what, 10 million people, but a tweet could go out to a billion. The maths doesn’t work out. I’ll die on the hill of my records, but I won’t die on the hill of my tweets. It’s better to say good things less than to say average things more.”
Last week, the unverified Twitter account @MatthewTHealy popped up. So far there have been only two tweets: “eating caviar but it’s nutella” and “just for a few weeks. like a little treat.”