Michael Jackson is "evil"

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

^^^ half his age plus seven when it was written

Chantilly Lace sounds so psycho now

that witch wanted to eat hansel and gretel i mean holy shit

it's unfortunate, but classic rock is tainted forever for me -- with a few exceptions, it sounds like angry gross pervy old man music. the commercials they play on the station confirm this. i recently heard one with a man screaming about a "truck show" boasting the following treats: memorabilia from Smokey and the Bandit, "gorgeous fashion models" /vom

i doubt we are going to get any sort of "reckoning" for men in music in a world where spade cooley, brutal wife murderer and child abuser, is pardoned for the brutal murder of his wife by US president ronald reagan. the current president counts, i think, 5 pedophiles among his associates? i mean. i'm not shrugging it off but i don't have energy to get riled up about it and also go about my life.

Knew nothing about this stuff, but the first paragraph in wiki:

While the general age of consent is now set between 16 and 18 in all U.S. states, the age of consent has widely varied across the country in the past. In 1880, the age of consent was set at 10 or 12 in most states, with the exception of Delaware where it was 7. The ages of consent were raised across the U.S. during the late 19th century and the early 20th century. By 1920 ages of consent generally rose to 16–18 and small adjustments to these laws occurred after 1920. The final state to raise its age of general consent was Hawaii, which changed it from 14 to 16 in 2001.

7 in Deleware in 1880! 14 in Hawaii until 2001!

count yourself fortunate for not knowing that. i knew that. i remember asking my mom about what the age of consent is.
child marriage with the consent of only one parent is still legal in several states

Iggy Pop?

I don't know anything about Iggy and teenage girls. What's the story?

More like "Iggy and anything that moves."

14 in Canada until 2008 iirc

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

You don't have to "separate" to laugh at jokes, not always.

re turning icky, check out some of the lines in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (1972, third film directed) sometime.

I don't know anything about Iggy and teenage girls. What's the story?

https://genius.com/amp/Iggy-pop-look-away-lyrics

https://goo.gl/images/xiAQbu

has iggy ever addressed the terrible racism of this song?
https://genius.com/Iggy-pop-african-man-lyrics

most people are horrible to one degree or another, i don't have this desire to eliminate their art from my life because they are horrible. seems like a dead end. horrible people are capable of art worth appreciating. not complicated.

but i don't have any desire, either, to police what people chose to read or listen to or whatever.

Is the 'parents should have known better' the new 'she shouldn't wear a sexy dress' ? I have not seen the documentary, don't know if I can't stomach it, so I have no idea how Reed treats the parental situation of the two victims. Regardless, I'm seeing so much shit thrown at them and I don't know how this is not a form victim blaming.

what about the art is so troublesome to people that they don't want to think about it? is the idea of what they did just too horrible to contemplate? that stuff goes on every day. it's in the news every day. compared to that it isn't hard (for me) to listen to billie jean w/o thinking of MJ fucking little kids. and if i read hunger and think, wow, knut hamsun became a nazi, so what? i get out of the book what i get out of it. his becoming a nazi is a piece of that.

xpost, sorry van horn!

(and i agree w/ you)

Gummy OTM + the ethics of consuming a living person's art without supporting them seem dicier to me than the ethics of supporting them.

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?

― closed beta (NotEnough), Wednesday, March 6, 2019 5:53 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I have two major problems with that notion. What happened in the 70s has an impact on people living today. Really one of the hope around the #metoo discussion is to break cycles of abuse that can trap families or other types of groups over generations. Jackson being a chief example of that. Perhaps if Jackson could have healed from his abuse we wouldn't be in this situation, which is an obvious thought.

I think to understand the peculiar microcosm of 60s/70s celebrity culture can only gives us clue as to better prevent predatory behavior. Considering how that kind of culture seeped deep into our consciousness, any fight against awful patriarchy has to take stock of what happened in that era, among other things like the church's behavior or more silent environments. Plus, for the healing of trauma, abuse or not, going in back in time is healthy.

Second, I will always have some sort of bad taste in the mouth when radio cancels R. Kelly and Jackson and the deification of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones continues unabated.

What did the Stones do?

lotsa sex with lotsa groupies, surely many of them underage

Meh. The Jimmy Page / Lori Mattix story is far more disturbing as far as I'm concerned.

i think a part of it (more a symptom than anything) is how male rock stars and the stories they had to tell were treated very seriously, and even up until recently female artists turning more introspective in their music was often treated as something to eyeroll at. Not that there were exceptions on both sides but still. i read a wayback machine review in NME recently:

And how would you like your emotion? Raw? Naked? Intense? Brrr. It's a chilly domain in which the multimillion-selling ice queens of self-indulgent Ally McBeal-themed cosmetic angst operate, but you have to hand it to the kooky crew of Tori, Alanis and the troubled Ms Apple - they know their market. Although probably not quite as well as their market knows them.

For these ladies, and LA-based 24-year-old Apple is no exception, leave no emotional stone unturned in their cathartic quest for neo-hippy feminist-lite 'meaning' in their, like, totally crazy lives. And for her second album of Amos-aping MTV-branded Lilith Fair fodder, the barmiest, prettiest pretender to Tori's throne of corporate crackpot chic deals unashamedly in that tired and trusted heavyweight heart-tugging currency: relationships.

So it's been a frantic four years for Fiona since her debut, 'Tidal', poured its bruised musings over a generation of sensitive saps, half of which appear to have been spent writing this record's staggering 75-word-long title (it's poetry, dontcha know), the other half spent playing with the dark might of glossy trip-hop. And surging power ballads. And opaque Plath-U-like platitudes bereft of mirth. Still, that's Fiona Apple. Fruit by name, fruitcake by nature. 5/10

Piers Martin

then think about a lot of the subjects all three of these artists are covering in their music! what each of them went through in their lives! i'm pretty sure this critic is still "respected" afaik.

Is the 'parents should have known better' the new 'she shouldn't wear a sexy dress' ? I have not seen the documentary, don't know if I can't stomach it, so I have no idea how Reed treats the parental situation of the two victims. Regardless, I'm seeing so much shit thrown at them and I don't know how this is not a form victim blaming.

― Van Horn Street,

One of the few subtleties the documentary gets right is showing how even the most compassionate parent can also get so overcome by access and opulence that their early warning systems atrophy.

Idk if the groupie culture of that time was as abusive as some of the things it's being compared to but why is the Page/Maddox story more disturbing than the Bill Wyman/Mandy Smith story?

holy shit at that review, eat shit "Piers Martin"

irta piers morgan at first

also, I'm not really sure this is music-exclusive so much as a kind of dissolution of a person's bad deeds into the neutral air of history, across all fields. alice in wonderland hasn't disappeared from cultural memory either

why is the Page/Maddox story more disturbing than the Bill Wyman/Mandy Smith story?

It isn't. I wasn't aware of the latter until I read your post.

That story is still a jaw dropper. How the fuck did he get away with it?

It was 1983, a time when none of us were even born yet…

it's insane. pretty sure they met when she had just turned 13, they started dating in 1983.

also later her mom married Wyman's son (she was 46, he was 30 i think?)

Someone could make the observation that Bill Wyman probably didn't suddenly find 13 year old girls attractive all of a sudden when he turned 47, if they felt like getting sued.

suddenly and all of sudden in the same sentence, apologies

also later her mom married Wyman's son (she was 46, he was 30 i think?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgpsGmGyG0Q

Mandy Smith was born in July 1970, that's half a year after the release of Sticky Fingers, fucking hell.

Hey, remember when Jerry Lee Lewis's fourth and fifth wives just...died?

Move over, Kelsey Grammer (based on the top photo in that JLL story).