Skunk Anansie vocalist Skin really, really doesn’t like people leaving hate comments.
In a new video interview with Metal Hammer, the British rock icon names recent single An Artist Is An Artist as one of her band’s five essential songs. The track, released last month, is about the enduring nature of creativity, with Skin singing, ‘An artist is an artist till death do us depart-est.’
Discussing the song, Skin broaches the topic of armchair critics on social media who try to dictate what an artist should or shouldn’t create.
“It’s just something that I feel a lot of us feel: ‘What does it mean to be an artist now in this social media world? In this world where there’s a lot of toxic negativity? In this world where everything you’re about is just hen-pecked and stripped down and destroyed?’” she rhetorically asks. “That seems to be the modern way, that an artist puts something out and everyone just destroys it.”
Skin adds that several lines in An Artist Is An Artist attack that mentality, such as, ‘I didn’t hang around to be my own echo.’ “There’s just a lot of words that sum up how I feel and how a lot of artists feel about what it is to do what they want to do,” she continues.
“We are the creators, and sometimes you guys need to [shut the] fuck up and enjoy or not enjoy. But you don’t also need to comment and destroy the artist and take something away from the artist. And you don’t need to put out your first ignorant thought and write that down as a comment.”
Skin then offers advice to people who do want to leave their thoughts in comment sections, encouraging them to think their stance through and not broadcast a knee-jerk reaction.
“Think about it: ‘What do I want to say about this, if I want to say anything,’” she suggests. “Most of the time, I think people need to just shut the fuck up. You ain’t got nothing to say, you haven’t done any research, you don’t know about this band, you don’t know about the art world or about the interior design world or architecture or… – you don’t know about these things with any depth at all.
“So, to say something’s terrible or say something’s awful, just stop with the first ignorant thought and think about it. I think, half the time people will just say, ‘You know what, I’m gonna move on, keep scrolling.”
Skunk Anansie first found during the Britpop era, their 1995 debut album Paranoid & Sunburnt reaching number eight in the UK charts, and are now six albums deep into their career. Their most recent, Anarchytecture, came out in 2016.
The band will tour Europe and the UK from February to April, starting with a gig at Porto’s Coliseu Porto Ageas on February 28. See all dates and get tickets via the band’s website.
