The 1975’s Matty Healy shares his thoughts on cancel culture and Twitter
Matty Healy of The 1975 has shared his thoughts on cancel culture and why he quit Twitter back in 2020 after posting a particularly-derided tweet. Healy had been discussing these issues with NME this week ahead of the release of The 1975’s fifth studio album, Being Funny In A Foreign Language.
After George Floyd had died in 2020, Healy took to Twitter to write, “If you truly believe that ‘ALL LIVES MATTER’ you need to stop facilitating the end of black ones”, and added a link to one of The 1975’s recently released singles, which led to several Tweeters to claim that he had used the BLM movement to promote his own work.
On this, Healy noted this week, “By that point, my reaction in the room to all that Twitter shit was like, ‘Oh fuck off! You know that I’m not using this as an opportunity to monetise the half-a-pence I get paid for a fucking YouTube play’.”
Healy added that he had become frustrated by the politics of the left, particularly those who express their opinions online. He said, “If I’m gonna write about the culture war then I’m not going to be in it [Twitter] anymore. I’m certainly not going to become a pawn in it’ – that’s what I was starting to become. The left was starting to wind me up. That’s a standard thing that an entire generation has set up for themselves. The problem with Gen Z is that they’ve set up this moral standard that they can’t even live up to!”
The 1975 frontman also feels that he has done his fair share for the progressive political movements of the 21st Century. “I refuse now to comment on the morally obvious,” he said. “I’m not proving that I’m not racist. I’m not proving that I’m pro-women. I’m not proving I’m on the left. I’ve done that dance, I’ve done that game, I’ve done the work.”
