To what degree will you support musicians who (openly, possibly or jokingly) include racist, sexist, homophobic, or bigoted messages in their music, or who privately hold such beliefs?

The art is better than the artist.

Which reminds me of what George Steiner said in a BBC profile of Wagner in 1997, which handily is transcribed online:

Narrator

In the last year of Wagner's life his racist views became more extreme. The only way to redeem "the lower races" as he called them was by an infusion of the pure blood of Christ whom he believed was not Jewish but Aryan. Cosima's diaries show that he was increasingly preoccupied by what he regarded as "the Jewish problem". While he was composing Parsifal, he read that 400 Jews had died in a fire in a Viennese synagogue. Wagner made the drastic joke to Cosima that perhaps all Jews should be burned.

Professor George Steiner

You can go at that in a number of ways. My own conviction is people like ourselves—ordinary people—cannot grasp what is going on in the mind of a titanically complex creator who can create Parsifal and then say absolutely barbaric inhumanities. So I say that the man who has given us what he has, musically, lies outside my range of understanding. That doesn't mean it doesn't make me bitterly disturbed, ill at ease, but that—to put it very vulgarly if I may—that's my problem and not his.

Narrator

Richard Wagner died in Venice on the 13th of February, 1883. He was nearly 70. Wagner's legacy has been immeasurable. His music stands at the threshold of modern Western classical music and his influence on such composers as Mahler, Schoenberg and Debussy was immense.

Robin Holloway

Wagner has influenced virtually every composer since, with some exceptions like Stravinsky, who were very anti-Wagner. But the violence of their hatred is a form of tribute—a form of being Wagnerian by default, by opposite.

Roger Norrington

I find it difficult to see this man writing music. I can see him running a country, or at least an airline, or probably owning a few. But I can't see him writing music.

Magic Fire Music

Professor George Steiner

How can you have among the highest achievements of beauty or speculative elegance and audacity of the human mind and conscience and guts and viscera on the one hand, and the awfulness on the ohter? Wagner's music, as they say it in court, is Exhibit A.

Judaism in Music is available online. How can people interested in racism / prejudice in music not read this?

"The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew's production of the voice-sounds, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle (15) : add thereto an employment of words in a sense quite foreign to our nation's tongue, and an arbitrary twisting of the structure of our phrases—and this mode of speaking acquires at once the character of an intolerably jumbled blabber (eines unertraglich verwirrten Geplappers); so that when we hear this Jewish talk, our attention dwells involuntarily on its repulsive how, rather than on any meaning of its intrinsic what. "

"Again, hating Jews (and basically all things non-European) in 1880 was about as common among Europeans as insisting the earth was flat was in 1450."

Pretty sure that not everyone was openly advocating for the genocide of Jews in 1880.
--Fig On A Plate Cart (Alex in SF)

Nor for that matter were there really that many flat-earthers by 1450.

Aristarchus, wasn't it? With his pole in the ground? Worked out the curvature of the earth in whatever BC. Font of knowledge me. Sure it was a couple of religious outliers who propagated the flat earth thing in the late medieval period and were more or less mocked/ignored.

Appropriately enough "Geir" is like something from German folkolre

Geir is a male name common in Iceland and Norway, rare in Sweden, and very rare in Denmark. It is an ancient Nordic name meaning "spear" or spear of God, as in the lightning bolt of Oden, and is one of the original nordic runes[1][2]

In Norway, its popularity peaked in the late 60's and early 70's. Nowadays it is an uncommon name among newborns in Norway but still holds its place in Iceland.

I didn't mean the name, I meant that ridiculous comical creature "Geir" known to inhabit this message board

Geir if you would only read the thread before making assertions.

lol dude geirbot is not programmed to process information

My own conviction is people like ourselves—ordinary people—cannot grasp what is going on in the mind of a titanically complex creator who can create Parsifal and then say absolutely barbaric inhumanities.

Lord, these are the types of statements I was being confused about upthread. Maybe I am insufficiently in touch with the incomprehensible divinity of Wagner's musical output, but it will just never strike me as all that ungraspable or mysterious that someone creates magnificent things while being small-minded and barbaric. It's true of a massive number of people who create magnificent things! I'm seriously tempted to say that it might help some people create something magnificent if they're limited in this way, insofar as they wind up with a very fixed and dramatic view of the world to assert.

^I agree wholeheartedly with this

yeah me too

I get it coming from Steiner - he's one of the few crits still standing from mid-20th High Seriousness, & that tends to involve giving art some hefty work to do - revelation of truth of ourselves, the human condition, quiddity of being, finding forms answerable to the enormities of the century, language going beyond language, hard lines between high art and mass culture etc; so that involves some serious agonising when someone who is incontestably a master of the music tradition is a piece of shit vile anti-semite - & all magnified because Steiner's Jewish. He came back to the problem in the TLS recently w/r/t Celine & seemed to get stuck again.

Feel pretty far from his position myself; never quite been the High Serious type. I mean this:

I'm seriously tempted to say that it might help some people create something magnificent if they're limited in this way, insofar as they wind up with a very fixed and dramatic view of the world to assert.

Makes literary sense to me - destructive visionary force of the Modernists who flirt with (or marry) fascism is very powerful; Celine's sense of the fuckedness of the world is at the heart of him (BUT along with a kind of tenderness for those being destroyed by life that's harder to reconcile to evil opinions). I dunno.

It sounds like he's talking about God in the Old Testament.

That's Steuner for you

Steiner, even

i can buy that people who succumb to the small-minded assholery of their day are capable of remarkable achievements in a variety of fields, but I think art is an arena where such small-minded assholery is a good indication that your art is infantile, easily-replaceable pedestrian junk as well.

Wagner does seem to be full-on bonkers though, rather than casual douchebag, but I guess being one doesn't preclude being the other.

It sounds like he's talking about God in the Old Testament.

― oɔsıqɐu (nabisco), Thursday, 24 March 2011 17:20 (1 hour ago)

Apposite! Both create the world in their respective texts, both were hateful raging assholes who inspired their followers to a religion..

The amount of focus and ambition and effort required to achieve those monumental works of art is not necessarily going to come from someone who is well-adjusted. I think that a basic knowledge of human frailties sooner or later was destined to undermine the High Seriousness school of thought.

ayo old testament god is a bro, he always had the dankest manna

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

thank fuck we'll finally know how many ilxors enjoy the Macc Lads

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

now you know, noodle vague

wow way to go ilx, you amoral beast

OK, let's bite the elephant..

It's understandable how Wagner's 'beliefs' can run alongside his need to create beautiful/masterful works, rather than informing them directly.

Whereas Gary Glitter's works quite often (OK, more than once) have examples of how his predilections form a part of his.

(check the lyrics of this one, for instance)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcmWtE5u41s

Glitter Band >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Gary Glitter anyway

At least 10 Eric Clapton and/or Elvis Costello fans who voted. Two of the more racist musicians of the rock era.

XXX-Post At least he didn't do a cover of "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen"...

I guess I abstractly understand the impulse to not stifle art that led so many people to vote the way they did but really this just reinforces to me the difference between feeling like you have the luxury to overlook or academify beliegs that run counter to your own and feeling like you do not.

One reason why I do my best not to support people whose views I find inimical is because success implies acceptance/approval. I do not want to give racists the mistaken impression that I am okay with their beliefs by giving them money; ditto homophobes and sexists, but there I have the luxury of being able to sometimes abstract my feelings from the sentiments being expressed because I am not their target.

This is also a case where falling into a side career of classical music via performance and connections rather than formal study is awesome/troubling, because while I knew a lot of the shit discussed upthread I'd never really gotten too in depth with it; I would have had much more of a problem doing "Der Meistersaenger" had I known all of this in this detail (although I bagged out of that concert anyway for a paying gig, lol).

XXX-Post At least he didn't do a cover of "Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen"...

The song involves being in bed with a girl, and waiting until midnight on the eve of her birthday, at which she becomes of legal age, and he enters her.

so.. !

Confess to being on firmer ground discussing Gary Glitter's oeuvre than Mad Richie Wagner's

I find lately that I am more susceptible to this, simply because there is so much great music that isn't problematic in the ways described in this thread, that it feels weird to feel like I *have* to listen to this band with problematic imagery/ideas.

take Destroyer666, I liked their new album a lot, and then the more I learned about KK Warslut being a misogynist, racist shitbag, I haven't felt compelled to return to it. I think though when you actually see examples of this behavior on your doorstep in everyday life and the ugliness it entails, it's harder to handwave away.

and yet obviously there is this contradiction because I still listen to hip-hop which is rife with misogyny, so it's hard to figure out where I draw the line. Yet homophobia, in hip hop (and well any genre) tends to be the thing that's non-negotiable for me now.

Even a few years ago, when I saw Dave Chappelle, there was a large part of his set due to homosexuality and transexualism. It was uncomfortable because Dave asked the audience to give it up for the gay community, and like 15% of the audience cheered while the rest of the crowd leered with deadpan stares, either because they were afraid to admit they were ok with homosexuality or because they probably actually weren't. And although Dave himself is pretty laissez-faire about the community, his bit on the transgender community was problematic because he worked in a bit for LOLs about "ok it's fine that you want to be transgender but why do *I* have to change my pronoun game for you" (uhh, because it's what that person wants and is a show of respect) and LOLing that someone who identified as a woman still had a dick and that shit was getting raucous laughter and it almost brought what had been a fun show to a halt for me before he went back into innocuous territory.

not going to front like I have a consistent means of determining what I will and won't listen to but definitely as I've aged it's been easier to stop listening to problematic voices.