Skunk Anansie & Ageism

Excerpts from an interview (2013) with Skin after releasing the album "Black Traffic". Skin was asked if she was pleased with the response she had received (via).
"Yeah, everyone’s been really lovely, apart from one review in the NME! [Pete Cashmore of NME rated the album 1/10 with the summary “The people who made this album have an average age of 46. They need to retire. NOW.”] (...)"



"The fans love the album they come to see us live and we have rave, rave, rave reviews apart from that NME review! (...)
The point of that review was that we’re too old to be in a rock band!!! You know, they’ve hated Skunk Anansie from like the minute we sold 100,000 records. And because this is a good album, they don’t want to admit it’s a good album so they literally had to scratch around and try to find a way to slag us off instead of being honest and saying, “You know I’ve never liked this band but this is a really good album”. A good journalist would have done that. But they landed on our age as the only thing they could slag off about us.
You know life doesn’t end at 40. If you love to do something, say you want to be a writer for the rest of your life, what’s to stop you doing that as long as you’re good and as long as you put out stuff that people want to read. It should be the same in any profession. You know if you’re a dancer, keep dancing until your body says no. If you’re a good dancer, then dance.
Ultimately it was very ageist. If you were to apply that level of ageism to racism or homophobia everybody would have gone crazy. If you don’t like the band and you don’t like the album and all you can say is that we’re old then just don’t f*** review us. I mean everybody gets old, but this is a f*** good album!"


More Skunk Anansie:

::: Squander: LISTEN/WATCH
::: You'll Follow Me Down (with Luciano Pavarotti): LISTEN/WATCH
::: Because of You: LISTEN/WATCH
::: Kill Everything: LISTEN
::: You Saved Me: LISTEN/WATCH
::: Over the Love: LISTEN/WATCH
::: You Do Something to Me: LISTEN/WATCH