Michael Jackson is "evil"

my friend's 11 year old has been a huge MJ fan for years.

I should note that I was exposed to essentially no popular music of any era by my boomer parents so I may just be weird.

Or, alternately, they are.

I've had a 7yo and 12yo ask to learn to play MJ songs in the last few months.

Probably not diehards tbf

someone must have exposed them to michael jackson

phrasing

"I should note that I was exposed to essentially no popular music of any era by my boomer parents so I may just be weird"

wait, how old are you? I'm 47 and had boomer parents. MJ was completely ubiquitous in my childhood in the 80's.

I’m 30

(I'm all for separating Nirvana's music from Kurt Cobain as a person btw.)

you may be misclassifying the generation of your parents (unless they were very old when they had you)

Or at the least don't favour conflating them.xp

I mean my parents were born in 1950 and 1951, they are canonically baby boomers

38 isn’t very old

I was born in '81, the only MJ songs I remember hearing as a kid were "Thriller" and "Billie Jean" on the radio every so often. By the time I was 10-11 he seemed like an uncool weirdo, no one at school cared, I didn't care.

michael jackson was popular

in your opinion

my grandpappy never heard of him

I wonder if this conflating with artist and his/her art is more of an issue in music than in other art forms. I mean you don't hear people saying that they'll never read Knut Hamsun's Hunger because the guy turned out to be a Nazi. In fact, so many writers I like had very nasty streaks, but it never occurs to me to avoid their works because of it.

MJ not really a problem for me as I was never invested in him. Don't Stop Til You Get Enough is sublime, as is some of the Jackson 5 stuff, but 80s and 90s Jackson really isn't my cup of tea.

I mean you don't hear people saying that they'll never read Knut Hamsun's Hunger because the guy turned out to be a Nazi.

Maybe people have more of a problem with paedophiles than Nazis?

I dunno, I still enjoy Allen's earlier movies.

I assume this is literally the early funny stuff, as soon as he starts making serious films, things turn pretty icky pretty quickly.

maybe nobody ever heard of knut hamsun

gogol was just as much an anti-Semite, albeit the 19th century model of one, but hamsun was an unapologetic hitler apologist - which makes him as beyond the pale as gary glitter. rules are rules!

The only MJ song I really rate is "Dirty Diana" but surely we can all agree on one thing: pederasty is bad (as it were)

I read Hamsun, listen to Gary Glitter and, worst of all, voted for Jeremy Corbyn in the last General Election. I Am Monster.

as long as you don't listen to gary glinner - you'll get away with it!

My general rules are
1. If the abuser / bad guy is alive then giving financial and moral support to their work isn't on
2. If they are dead then much of their work (like MJ's weird raunchy stuff in the 90s) may become tainted, your choice to consume or not but there's a red flag about sharing with people.
3. If the work isn't tainted ('Hunger' is a work of genius without a hint of hitler, 'Take The Money & Run'* is still one of the funniest things I've ever seen, have you heard the demo version of 'Don't Stop Til You Get Enough'?) then it's your choice if you want to watch/listen/read & nobody should be judged for choosing to/not to.
*I know he isn't dead, but anyway

I can't imagine someone really loving Woody Allen's films without finding the "Woody Allen" character/persona likeable/charming to some extent, given that he's the centre-point of almost all those films, a thinly-veiled Woody analogue if not Woody himself (cf that joke from the simpsons - "I like Woody Allen movies, except for that nervous fella who's always in 'em") (maybe the pre-Annie Hall stuff just in terms of the number of quick-fire gags?) I guess it's possible to separate the "Woody Allen" character from Woody Allen the actual real-world human being, but it seems like it would be difficult

I play disco on vinyl every Friday night at the bar up the road, to a crowd whose regulars range (rather wonderfully) from late teens to mid-sixties; the small dancefloor mostly skews to early twenties. Since the first night, just over a year ago, most sets have featured at least one MJ vocal: solo or with his brothers, mostly from 1978 to 1981, but with the occasional Thriller track too. Three weeks ago, it was "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough". Two weeks ago, it was "Walk Right Now", with that fantastic instrumental section towards the end that lifts the whole track; I was planning to playlist it more regularly. Last week, I held off, but kept the records in my boxes. This week, I suppose I might as well remove them altogether.

I'll miss the Thriller tracks the least; they've never fully fitted the remit of the night, but you get the odd request. This now seems a lot less likely. But, oh God, "Rock With You", a transcendentally beautiful piece of music, which I've loved for nearly forty years; can it never work its magic again in a public space? That thought hasn't yet fully landed.

But then, there are still three Rick James records in my boxes. I've been hammering "Big Time" for weeks. Hmmm.

assume this is literally the early funny stuff, as soon as he starts making serious films, things turn pretty icky pretty quickly.

Father Andre: I have lived for 87 years, and the best thing in the World is... Blonde 12 year-old girls!

Sonja: Father!

Father Andre: Two of them, whenever possible.

I'm finding the trickiest thing to deal with is all the classic rock from the '60s and '70s. There hasn't been a high-profile documentary about rock groups making their way through classrooms of 14yo groupies, but that happened, a lot. So does my ignorance of the details allow my conscience to allow me to still listen to Zepplin without feeling vommy? Do I have a duty to inform myself of the details?

Or is it (as WA quote above demonstrates, and I can recall a similar joke in Annie Hall) that actually, awful patriarchy was more of a thing over 20 years ago, and cultural items, outside of the context they were made, shouldn't really be parsed in the same way?

so you're saying..... don't stop?

I mean, there is Allen's standup and writing, which is some of the funniest stuff I've ever seen/read, and there is "I will make a serious film about a 42-year-old man fucking a 17-year-old, drawing on my life experience as a 41-year-old man fucking a 16-year-old" - there seems to be a pretty clear line there, the vast majority of his films from then on are either "Allen stand-in scores younger girls", "Allen stand-in is creatively frustrated and then some stuff happens and he can create again, and that's what's important" pre-defences, or both.

xp yeah there are creepy jokes, but they don't seem the point in the same way as afterward

Getting into the work of Mexican director Emilio Fernandez, found a book chapter on him filled with screenshots, and they are so amazingly good looking, and then I get to the story of his decline, and the guy straight up murdered two people as he turned into an angry alcoholic.

I'm finding the trickiest thing to deal with is all the classic rock from the '60s and '70s. There hasn't been a high-profile documentary about rock groups making their way through classrooms of 14yo groupies, but that happened, a lot. So does my ignorance of the details allow my conscience to allow me to still listen to Zepplin without feeling vommy? Do I have a duty to inform myself of the details?

I am still wondering why the music industry hasn't blown up more. I've read quite a few rock star autobiographies in which the authors openly admit to banging high school girls. Nikki Sixx and Anthony Keidis, off the top of my head - both of whom actually have songs about banging high school girls as well.

i'm all for the cancellation of Keidis.

there was a blow up about the guy from Tool last year, I can't remember where it surfaced; Reddit maybe. But it didn't seem to hold.

the hamsun analogy itt thread is so weird. wagner is right there

wagner wouldn't illustrate the point abt the difference in how bad characters are treated in lit vs music tho

ah ok i missed the point!

I just read the story of Jerry Lee Lewis all but certainly murdering his wife in the early '80s. And "The Killer" is still loose.

Yes well Hamsun's work wasn't a cultural cornerstone beloved by tens of millions of people, including children, and used as a means to get access to them.

This would be more like finding out that Roald Dahl was a paedophile. Although his having been a bully, misogynist and raging antisemite doesn't seem to have put his work beyond the pale.

really good article about producer Mark Leander and the Glitter Band

as it turns out Gary Glitter had very little to do with the making of those records

https://thequietus.com/articles/00709-rock-roll-part-3-stepping-out-of-gary-glitter-s-shadow

lit and classical music = "high art", more intellectual, discerning readers/listeners can separate the art from the artist
popular music = "low art", more emotional, no way of disentangling art and artist

Bowie is even more revered now than ever (maybe). Iggy Pop? Spectre's stuff is still played all the time.

Ha, "Spector"

I posted a bunch of well documented stuff about Prince and everyone acted like it was invisible

I mean you don't hear people saying that they'll never read Knut Hamsun's Hunger because the guy turned out to be a Nazi.

you absolutely do hear this

I’d be surprised if we ever see a full Me Too era reckoning with the sexual misconduct in the early rock era. Fully half of the inaugural class in the RnRHOF has at one point or another been accused of sexually assaulting minors, domestic abuse, or both. So many “classic” rock and roll songs of the 50s and 60s are just completely about adult men sexualizing teenage girls, too - a theme that didn’t totally disappear from rock lyrics until like the mid nineties or maybe even later. Where do you even begin? OTOH a reckoning is already underway in a lot of respects - even old school rock critics like Christgau felt compelled to address Chuck Berry’s predations in their obits, and that was 2017. It’d be interesting to see what a wholesale re-evaluation might look like. Are there any extensive rock histories written from a feminist perspective that are already out there? I’m embarrassed that I don’t know.

tootin my horn here - i commissioned this show, which is p relevant to this thread's interests!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0605sx6

Well she was just 17, you know what I mean