A look at the spectrum of opinions on how you separate art from artist, and a very special edition of "If You Like [X], Then You'll Like Y": new music recs based on your problematic favorites
I’ve been having this discussion ever since the Michael Jackson documentary done by the two victims. I just can’t listen to him without thinking of the things he was accused of.
I think I’m of the mindset that there’s certain things I can look past and others I can’t.
You cheat on your spouse-not nice but legal.
You rape women or hurt children-you’re dead to me.
I’m a Gen X girl who danced a lot to Marilyn Manson and loved his music-but after everything came out I simply can’t hear his voice. Especially when his music represents what he is accused of-he basically told us what he was capable of when we thought he was just being edgy to shock.
I love that you brought this up. I have found this so troubling at times. Your article is terrific. I will restack and save. This is the kind of discussion that makes me love Substack.
it's interesting, isn't it? i'm VERY much against "cancel culture." even setting aside the epidemic of misinformation, i think it's anathema to the idea that humans are, you know, human. fallible and capable of both terrific harms and terrific good. we must allow grace and apology and repair. but at the same time we all have our own limits and don't really owe anyone anything, least of all strangers, and what we do with the information we learn is our own business (short of turning around and doing harm to others, i suppose). all that to say... you're valid for this. and you also don't need to necessarily do anything now that you know about prince, either. this shit ain't easy.
I'm squarely in the "artist isn't art" category, and even that's nuanced. Were Michael Jackson still alive, I wouldn't pick up any of his records, nor feature/review them. His actions were abhorrent. But that doesn't mean Thriller is any less of a record that brought incredible joy to millions. Both can be true w/o being intellectually dishonest. I associate R. Kelly's "She's Got That Vibe" with a very narrow time/place in my life. That doesn't mean he ever deserves to see sunlight again (he doesn't).
Everyone's redline will be different, and that's fine too.
Also: Nourished By Time's The Passionate Ones is a great pick, and I hope a lot of people see that and check it out!
This is superb - going to use this with my Human Flourishing class 2nd semester, if you're OK with it. Starting the course (HS, 2nd semester seniors) built with a very self-reflective, music immersive class or two, inside and outside the classroom. Your look here offers some meaningful steps into discussions I've wanted to have about art, commerce, community, and daily life. TY!
go nuts! it's a community-informed assessment, so while i'm tempted to ask you to give me credit, ultimately i'm indebted to all my readers for the enormous insight into the issue and for allowing me the opportunity to synthesize the information
How about this - most of the Human Flourishing class is about listening and speaking first and second, then reading, last writing. Intentionally flipped.
If this appeals to you, would you be willing to talk to one of my classes via Meet or Zoom, about running this Substack and your life and connection to music? You'd be a great voice mixed in with everyone else - there's a bit more about this class on pg 6 of the PDF attached. It's been a fun ride and I'm happy to keep centering music in the middle of it! https://grable.org/publications/both-and/
Financial disengagement. I think this conversation stems from a music worldview of streaming and social media. All my music is offline on my personal NAS and I don't have social media. Using Kanye as the easy reference point, I am not buying concerts or albums, but there's no logical reason I would need to delete MBDTF -mp3s I have had for like twenty years- off my hard drive.
The endless consumption model of the algorithm and the endless scroll create a feeling (or reality) of many/endless micro decisions. When you opt out of all of that, it becomes much more simple. Do I buy the new Kanye West album or not? No? OK then let's move on.
honestly the new music angle is a great addition to this particular stance, too. when there's finite money to go around and (practically speaking) infinite new talent in search of financial support, why not spend your hard earned $$ on some new talent instead? Kanye got his, anyway.
Thanks for coming up with that scale, Gabbie. I think it's really helpful in terms of helping the music consumer to see where they fall and maybe exploring why.
As someone who reads a lot of rock biographies and autobiographies, I've found that you'd have to throw out just about every artist for one form of bad behavior or another. Having sex with minors is a common theme to the present day, as is drug and alcohol abuse and the impact of that on people around the artist. A lot of musicians (and actors), given that they're on the road for long periods of time, have been neglectful parents whose kids are messed up as a result. That characterizes both male and female artists.
People also forget about era and context. Successful artists (and powerful people) are not living in the same world as the rest of us in terms of what's considered moral and ethical. And what they have on offer in terms of temptations and 'rewards' can be absolutely mind-boggling. Witness the huge number of artists caught up in the Epstein and P. Diddy scandals, as well as the many who patronized the Playboy mansions. The history of Hollywood, a center for film and music, is quite a sordid one in terms of abuse, rape, murder, you name it. Should we stop watching Hollywood films?
I do agree with another commenter (echoing you) who has identified her own persomal hard line. I think that's what we each have to do as we all have own personal moral and ethical code. But it does beg the question of whether there are some things that should be considered completely beyond the pale. I'm just not sure that we would ever reach agreement on that.
this is very well stated and reasoned, thank you for the thoughtful response.
have you come across the increasingly popular notion that era/context is not an excuse? I find that gaining traction with Gen Z and younger and I'm trying very hard to square with it but it's quite hard for me. It's what makes people less culturally literate, in my view (the most famous recent example is people refusing to read Nabokov because they find Lolita abhorrent, but that also extends out to other tangentially related criticisms, so maybe not the greatest point for me to raise!)
Regardless, I do agree that this isn't something we can ever hope for consensus on.
My generation found the Lolita story repulsive too, but we were required to read and discuss it. We identified the bad behavior with the older generation. If only we'd known what rock stars were up to!!!
What I would say as a psychologist is that people at that stage in life-- where Gen Z is now-- tend to have black and white views no matter the era. Teens and young adults in the 60s when I was growing up were very judgmental and rejecting of the older generation and its values. We called them 'squares' and 'drags' and 'The Establishment,' and they were just not 'cool' or right like we were. I remember being annoyingly opinionated at that age. Now we boomers are the bad guys -- ha!
So I expect once the Gen Z-ers have some more experience with life, they'll start to come up against all the shades of gray and get into situations where they become the bad guys and have to justify themselves (because we're all human!).
In the meantime, we'll just have to have fun challenging their thinking and scrambling their brains (like you have in this post!).
I hope you're right! It's not that we (elder millennial here) didn't find Lolita repulsive but I don't remember anyone having a problem separating the story from the author or feeling outraged by the hero to the point of refusing to read it. Deplorable characters don't speak for their creators. But yeah of course we thought our parents were cringy! Teenagers are teenagers and are always right no matter what 🤷🏻♀️
It's interesting too, that modern tv/movies/etc. are so often centered around main characters that behave terribly, or the whole thing is just rich people behaving badly...(think Succession, All Her Fault, The Studio). Point being, that the generation isn't against bad behavior per se when it's for their own enjoyment.
While they might be quick to judge (as we were at that age), I think they pick and choose based on whether the medium speaks to them. Hell, Kanye still has 69M monthly listeners on Spotify. Lolita doesn't have the connection with them to cause ambivalence.
So, I guess I'm saying I agree with you that youth brings absolutes in way that older, wiser humans have mostly grown out of. In addition, it think bad behavior in general is a source of entertainment, as a feature not a bug. Plus, the absolutes are a lot easier to throw at sexually abusive white men (for them), than say, holding antisemitic behavior accountable in this time when the Israeli government's behavior is worse in their eyes.
Good points! I think people get up in arms about things that threaten their own identity or belief system, whereas they are able to keep a sense of distance and maintain interest or humor in something that isn't personally threatening or offensive. (I used to get so up in arms about sexism, but now I make fun of it and lampoon it in my fiction.)
Someone pointed out to me that Americans love shows that skewer the rich, whereas the Brits love shows that enshrine that lifestyle (like Downton Abbey, a highly entertaining and over-the-top advertisement for the landed gentry if ever there was one). We're old enough to see that these things reflect values that are being fed to the viewers, whereas the kids may not see the cultural programming and buy right into it.
White guys seem to have been a target for a while now. In my experience, it's not just sexually abusive ones, as young people were accusing white males of micro-aggressions in my last workplace. Several senior males with valuable experience lost their jobs for behavior that had occurred much earlier and on the basis of claims without any evidence as far as I could see. I think the institution saw it as a way to get rid of senior males more cheaply and appear to take DEI seriously so they took advantage of it. But the salary disparities favoring males continued!
I’m somewhere between #2 and #3! But it varies by artist. And by that I mean, I didn’t know Prince became a Jehovah’s Witness later, and now I’m like… Do I have to stop listening to some of my favorite music? I know I should, but as we’ve talked about before, moral purity in one’s mind doesn’t always translate to their actions
The “should” for me is that it feels humiliating to listen to an artist who joined a community that’s against mine. But we also don’t know, as far as I’m aware, whether Prince actually latched onto the homophobia. My listening or not listening minimally, if at all, changes or harms anything, but in this case, it doesn’t feel like virtue signaling. And I’ll ultimately probably keep listening, it’s not like Prince is Azealia Banks. I hope this all makes sense!
I'm very much about situational context as far as these types of things.
Miles Davis was an abusive sonofabitch, and he's also dead, and he was a Mt Rushmore level transformational figure in music. I don't lose any sleep still listening to him.
OTOH I was never a huge Kanye fan anyway and I don't lose any sleep ignoring him now.
I agree that everyone has to determine their own level of involvement with an artist and their work and encourage everyone to do so.
But I also think there's a degree of hypocrisy on the part of the audience in cases where it's obvious from the jump that the artist in question is a damaged person. Nobody encouraged Kanye or Ryan Adams to get help, instead they said "Keep going," bought their albums and went to their shows. The fact that they're damaged was fine for the audience so long as it amounted to the artist creating stuff the audience liked, but when negative side effects of the same damage they encouraged popped up, all the sudden it was a problem. Which isn't to say we should cosign people doing bad things just because they're damaged or because they make great art or not hold them responsible, but the audience has a degree of culpability in encouraging these people not to change too much.
You just reminded me of this video I saw of people at a Chris Brown show learning in the moment about what he did to Rihanna and justifying to themselves on camera why they were there. They dismissed it outright, essentially. I don't think we have to immediately take action (the tickets were already purchased, right?) but man, self reflect JUST a touch.
I think I saw that clip, but I mean, what else can you really expect from people already in line with tickets in hand? It would have been more interesting to me if they'd been able to somehow intercept people as they were buying the tickets and see if that revelation influenced them one way or another.
I guess I didn't realize how popular Chris Brown was and continues to be. To me he always seemed like a mid-card singer who was lucky enough to have a few hits, but he has just shy of 60 MILLION listeners on Spotify and is able to sell out large venues (that second part really surprised me.) I thought that the whole incident with Rihanna was basically the end of his career, but boy was my finger not on the pulse of humanity on that one lol
You are speaking my language! But in a more elevated, articulate way. As you do. And you'll be happy to know that IF I were to ever listen to music again (besides my usual 3 go-to's), it would be new music. XX
someone in the Discord pointed out there's a more extreme approach that should have been on the scale - #0: hatred/active campaigning against the artist
I guess I'm mostly in the Hierarchical Judgment camp - I tend not to listen to Red House Painters because Mark Kozelek is a full on creeper (though I keep the CDs in my collection), but I will listen to The Stone Roses as Ian Brown's pivot right is some how less bad. Though, for all of it, Financial Disengagement is essential. Haven't bought anything from those guys since the early 00's (or pretty much anyone that I've seen named in the articles and comments).
I guess I am at a 5. I don't see being able to make blanket judgments like 0-1 or 8. It certainly helps when they are dead and cannot profit from it anymore (Love the "fighting corpses" line!). However, I am absolutely guilty of just putting my head in the sand for some people. I don't even want to read about what Bowie got up to, and that Iggy was probably/allegedly right there with him. I regret digging further into Albini's skeletons after he died (some of what I read still haunts me).
I guess I have no clear point here, other than it is case-by-case. Excellent article though.
I’ve been having this discussion ever since the Michael Jackson documentary done by the two victims. I just can’t listen to him without thinking of the things he was accused of.
I think I’m of the mindset that there’s certain things I can look past and others I can’t.
You cheat on your spouse-not nice but legal.
You rape women or hurt children-you’re dead to me.
I’m a Gen X girl who danced a lot to Marilyn Manson and loved his music-but after everything came out I simply can’t hear his voice. Especially when his music represents what he is accused of-he basically told us what he was capable of when we thought he was just being edgy to shock.
I love that you brought this up. I have found this so troubling at times. Your article is terrific. I will restack and save. This is the kind of discussion that makes me love Substack.
PS I didn’t know about Prince 🤯
it's interesting, isn't it? i'm VERY much against "cancel culture." even setting aside the epidemic of misinformation, i think it's anathema to the idea that humans are, you know, human. fallible and capable of both terrific harms and terrific good. we must allow grace and apology and repair. but at the same time we all have our own limits and don't really owe anyone anything, least of all strangers, and what we do with the information we learn is our own business (short of turning around and doing harm to others, i suppose). all that to say... you're valid for this. and you also don't need to necessarily do anything now that you know about prince, either. this shit ain't easy.
I'm squarely in the "artist isn't art" category, and even that's nuanced. Were Michael Jackson still alive, I wouldn't pick up any of his records, nor feature/review them. His actions were abhorrent. But that doesn't mean Thriller is any less of a record that brought incredible joy to millions. Both can be true w/o being intellectually dishonest. I associate R. Kelly's "She's Got That Vibe" with a very narrow time/place in my life. That doesn't mean he ever deserves to see sunlight again (he doesn't).
Everyone's redline will be different, and that's fine too.
Also: Nourished By Time's The Passionate Ones is a great pick, and I hope a lot of people see that and check it out!
This is superb - going to use this with my Human Flourishing class 2nd semester, if you're OK with it. Starting the course (HS, 2nd semester seniors) built with a very self-reflective, music immersive class or two, inside and outside the classroom. Your look here offers some meaningful steps into discussions I've wanted to have about art, commerce, community, and daily life. TY!
go nuts! it's a community-informed assessment, so while i'm tempted to ask you to give me credit, ultimately i'm indebted to all my readers for the enormous insight into the issue and for allowing me the opportunity to synthesize the information
How about this - most of the Human Flourishing class is about listening and speaking first and second, then reading, last writing. Intentionally flipped.
If this appeals to you, would you be willing to talk to one of my classes via Meet or Zoom, about running this Substack and your life and connection to music? You'd be a great voice mixed in with everyone else - there's a bit more about this class on pg 6 of the PDF attached. It's been a fun ride and I'm happy to keep centering music in the middle of it! https://grable.org/publications/both-and/
Financial disengagement. I think this conversation stems from a music worldview of streaming and social media. All my music is offline on my personal NAS and I don't have social media. Using Kanye as the easy reference point, I am not buying concerts or albums, but there's no logical reason I would need to delete MBDTF -mp3s I have had for like twenty years- off my hard drive.
The endless consumption model of the algorithm and the endless scroll create a feeling (or reality) of many/endless micro decisions. When you opt out of all of that, it becomes much more simple. Do I buy the new Kanye West album or not? No? OK then let's move on.
honestly the new music angle is a great addition to this particular stance, too. when there's finite money to go around and (practically speaking) infinite new talent in search of financial support, why not spend your hard earned $$ on some new talent instead? Kanye got his, anyway.
Thanks for coming up with that scale, Gabbie. I think it's really helpful in terms of helping the music consumer to see where they fall and maybe exploring why.
As someone who reads a lot of rock biographies and autobiographies, I've found that you'd have to throw out just about every artist for one form of bad behavior or another. Having sex with minors is a common theme to the present day, as is drug and alcohol abuse and the impact of that on people around the artist. A lot of musicians (and actors), given that they're on the road for long periods of time, have been neglectful parents whose kids are messed up as a result. That characterizes both male and female artists.
People also forget about era and context. Successful artists (and powerful people) are not living in the same world as the rest of us in terms of what's considered moral and ethical. And what they have on offer in terms of temptations and 'rewards' can be absolutely mind-boggling. Witness the huge number of artists caught up in the Epstein and P. Diddy scandals, as well as the many who patronized the Playboy mansions. The history of Hollywood, a center for film and music, is quite a sordid one in terms of abuse, rape, murder, you name it. Should we stop watching Hollywood films?
I do agree with another commenter (echoing you) who has identified her own persomal hard line. I think that's what we each have to do as we all have own personal moral and ethical code. But it does beg the question of whether there are some things that should be considered completely beyond the pale. I'm just not sure that we would ever reach agreement on that.
this is very well stated and reasoned, thank you for the thoughtful response.
have you come across the increasingly popular notion that era/context is not an excuse? I find that gaining traction with Gen Z and younger and I'm trying very hard to square with it but it's quite hard for me. It's what makes people less culturally literate, in my view (the most famous recent example is people refusing to read Nabokov because they find Lolita abhorrent, but that also extends out to other tangentially related criticisms, so maybe not the greatest point for me to raise!)
Regardless, I do agree that this isn't something we can ever hope for consensus on.
My generation found the Lolita story repulsive too, but we were required to read and discuss it. We identified the bad behavior with the older generation. If only we'd known what rock stars were up to!!!
What I would say as a psychologist is that people at that stage in life-- where Gen Z is now-- tend to have black and white views no matter the era. Teens and young adults in the 60s when I was growing up were very judgmental and rejecting of the older generation and its values. We called them 'squares' and 'drags' and 'The Establishment,' and they were just not 'cool' or right like we were. I remember being annoyingly opinionated at that age. Now we boomers are the bad guys -- ha!
So I expect once the Gen Z-ers have some more experience with life, they'll start to come up against all the shades of gray and get into situations where they become the bad guys and have to justify themselves (because we're all human!).
In the meantime, we'll just have to have fun challenging their thinking and scrambling their brains (like you have in this post!).
I hope you're right! It's not that we (elder millennial here) didn't find Lolita repulsive but I don't remember anyone having a problem separating the story from the author or feeling outraged by the hero to the point of refusing to read it. Deplorable characters don't speak for their creators. But yeah of course we thought our parents were cringy! Teenagers are teenagers and are always right no matter what 🤷🏻♀️
It's interesting too, that modern tv/movies/etc. are so often centered around main characters that behave terribly, or the whole thing is just rich people behaving badly...(think Succession, All Her Fault, The Studio). Point being, that the generation isn't against bad behavior per se when it's for their own enjoyment.
While they might be quick to judge (as we were at that age), I think they pick and choose based on whether the medium speaks to them. Hell, Kanye still has 69M monthly listeners on Spotify. Lolita doesn't have the connection with them to cause ambivalence.
So, I guess I'm saying I agree with you that youth brings absolutes in way that older, wiser humans have mostly grown out of. In addition, it think bad behavior in general is a source of entertainment, as a feature not a bug. Plus, the absolutes are a lot easier to throw at sexually abusive white men (for them), than say, holding antisemitic behavior accountable in this time when the Israeli government's behavior is worse in their eyes.
Wow. Long winded response!
Good points! I think people get up in arms about things that threaten their own identity or belief system, whereas they are able to keep a sense of distance and maintain interest or humor in something that isn't personally threatening or offensive. (I used to get so up in arms about sexism, but now I make fun of it and lampoon it in my fiction.)
Someone pointed out to me that Americans love shows that skewer the rich, whereas the Brits love shows that enshrine that lifestyle (like Downton Abbey, a highly entertaining and over-the-top advertisement for the landed gentry if ever there was one). We're old enough to see that these things reflect values that are being fed to the viewers, whereas the kids may not see the cultural programming and buy right into it.
White guys seem to have been a target for a while now. In my experience, it's not just sexually abusive ones, as young people were accusing white males of micro-aggressions in my last workplace. Several senior males with valuable experience lost their jobs for behavior that had occurred much earlier and on the basis of claims without any evidence as far as I could see. I think the institution saw it as a way to get rid of senior males more cheaply and appear to take DEI seriously so they took advantage of it. But the salary disparities favoring males continued!
This is very well said
The discourse has a life of it's own, but the look forward instead of back is the perfect takeaway.
Also, shout out to the Thus Love rec, one of my favorites from last year.
I feel that is a tough takeaway to get upset about, other personal opinions notwithstanding!
Love, love, love!!!! I hadn’t really thought of The Velvet Hands and Thus Love as analogues for the Smiths but it totally works.
you're the reason i know about the velvet hands, lou!!
Tbh I’ve always thought of them as the love child of The Jam and The Vaccines, but The Smiths fits too.
they can be more than one thing ;)
Indeed! Anyway, I’m very happy to have been able to return the favour and share something with you for once.
I’m somewhere between #2 and #3! But it varies by artist. And by that I mean, I didn’t know Prince became a Jehovah’s Witness later, and now I’m like… Do I have to stop listening to some of my favorite music? I know I should, but as we’ve talked about before, moral purity in one’s mind doesn’t always translate to their actions
eh, I mean. should you? what does it change? who is it helping? at what point are you just virtue signaling? genuinely, not asked with judgment.
The “should” for me is that it feels humiliating to listen to an artist who joined a community that’s against mine. But we also don’t know, as far as I’m aware, whether Prince actually latched onto the homophobia. My listening or not listening minimally, if at all, changes or harms anything, but in this case, it doesn’t feel like virtue signaling. And I’ll ultimately probably keep listening, it’s not like Prince is Azealia Banks. I hope this all makes sense!
it certainly does and I love the discussion
I'm very much about situational context as far as these types of things.
Miles Davis was an abusive sonofabitch, and he's also dead, and he was a Mt Rushmore level transformational figure in music. I don't lose any sleep still listening to him.
OTOH I was never a huge Kanye fan anyway and I don't lose any sleep ignoring him now.
I agree that everyone has to determine their own level of involvement with an artist and their work and encourage everyone to do so.
But I also think there's a degree of hypocrisy on the part of the audience in cases where it's obvious from the jump that the artist in question is a damaged person. Nobody encouraged Kanye or Ryan Adams to get help, instead they said "Keep going," bought their albums and went to their shows. The fact that they're damaged was fine for the audience so long as it amounted to the artist creating stuff the audience liked, but when negative side effects of the same damage they encouraged popped up, all the sudden it was a problem. Which isn't to say we should cosign people doing bad things just because they're damaged or because they make great art or not hold them responsible, but the audience has a degree of culpability in encouraging these people not to change too much.
You just reminded me of this video I saw of people at a Chris Brown show learning in the moment about what he did to Rihanna and justifying to themselves on camera why they were there. They dismissed it outright, essentially. I don't think we have to immediately take action (the tickets were already purchased, right?) but man, self reflect JUST a touch.
I think I saw that clip, but I mean, what else can you really expect from people already in line with tickets in hand? It would have been more interesting to me if they'd been able to somehow intercept people as they were buying the tickets and see if that revelation influenced them one way or another.
I guess I didn't realize how popular Chris Brown was and continues to be. To me he always seemed like a mid-card singer who was lucky enough to have a few hits, but he has just shy of 60 MILLION listeners on Spotify and is able to sell out large venues (that second part really surprised me.) I thought that the whole incident with Rihanna was basically the end of his career, but boy was my finger not on the pulse of humanity on that one lol
agree on all points!
You are speaking my language! But in a more elevated, articulate way. As you do. And you'll be happy to know that IF I were to ever listen to music again (besides my usual 3 go-to's), it would be new music. XX
new music is terrible. just like old music. I only listen to newspapers and children screaming
someone in the Discord pointed out there's a more extreme approach that should have been on the scale - #0: hatred/active campaigning against the artist
I guess I'm mostly in the Hierarchical Judgment camp - I tend not to listen to Red House Painters because Mark Kozelek is a full on creeper (though I keep the CDs in my collection), but I will listen to The Stone Roses as Ian Brown's pivot right is some how less bad. Though, for all of it, Financial Disengagement is essential. Haven't bought anything from those guys since the early 00's (or pretty much anyone that I've seen named in the articles and comments).
I guess I am at a 5. I don't see being able to make blanket judgments like 0-1 or 8. It certainly helps when they are dead and cannot profit from it anymore (Love the "fighting corpses" line!). However, I am absolutely guilty of just putting my head in the sand for some people. I don't even want to read about what Bowie got up to, and that Iggy was probably/allegedly right there with him. I regret digging further into Albini's skeletons after he died (some of what I read still haunts me).
I guess I have no clear point here, other than it is case-by-case. Excellent article though.