[scottyxx]

Tough to try and sum up into a title, but when I play music on my Arctic Zephyr skinned Pi 2 running OSMC, I get a completely black seen as the background. < fixed this - my visualizations were turned off - I get the artist and song information at the bottom of the screen, but no play pause stop, etc buttons.

Any idea what is going on? I am using my TV remote to control the device - all I want is to be able to stop the music playing without having to start a movie.

[jurialmunkey]

Not a skin issue. You need to modify your keymap so that a button is mapped to show osd controls.
See here for more info: http://kodi.wiki/view/Keymap

There is also a keymap editor addon that provides a gui interface.