The 1975 frontman Matty Healy appears to have deleted his Twitter account, after facing criticism over a post about the death of George Floyd.
On Thursday, the singer was among several stars to speak out about the tragic death of Floyd, a Black man who died earlier this week after a police officer kneeled on his neck while he was handcuffed on the ground, shouting that he couldn’t breathe.
Responding to those who were using Floyd’s death to promote an “All Lives Matter” message, Matty tweeted: “If you truly believe that ‘ALL LIVES MATTER’ you need to stop facilitating the end of black ones.”
However, he faced a backlash over his decision to include a link to The 1975 song Love It If We Made It in the tweet, with many accusing him of using the Black Lives Matter movement to promote his own music, and using the death of George Floyd as self-promotion.
“Sorry I did not link my song in that tweet to make it about me,” he insisted soon afterwards. “It’s just that the song is literally about this disgusting situation and speaks more eloquently than I can on Twitter.”
His Twitter account was deactivated soon afterwards. HuffPost UK has contacted Matty Healy’s representatives for further comment.
The song in question features lyrics about police brutality and institutional racism, with Matty singing: “We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin. Saying controversial things just for the hell of it, selling melanin and then suffocate the Black men. Start with misdemeanours and we’ll make a business out of them.”
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Matty previously told Genius about the song: “I’m not as educated as I would like to be on Black American history, you’ll be really surprised by that, as a white Englishman. But the obvious things are the things that I’m talking about in this song, the obvious things about reality, the obvious paradoxes and conflicts in logic and stuff like that.
“It’s made quite apparent that Black people in America are one of the only things that I noticed that are fetishised, that people have a fetish for and a phobia of at exactly the same time.
“Black culture, it’s what is celebrated culturally most in its superficial form, but then you move onto the next line where you have a prison system that preys on young Black people in order to keep itself in business and turning over. This weird paradox. It’s just strange, isn’t it? Like I said, I don’t have any solutions, but I’m an artist, it’s not my job.”