Michael Jackson is "evil"

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).

Jerry Lee Lewis also accidentally (?) killed his bass player!

Jerry Lee Lewis also accidentally (?) killed his bass player!

According to the link, the guy lived (and sued).

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

what the fuck

"If Bill and Mandy had remained married, Stephen would have been his father’s father-in-law and his own grandpa."

brothers and sisters i have none
but my sons grandmother is boning my son

This week, I suppose I might as well remove them altogether.

Mike, do you mean that you think the recent American documentary will have affected the perceptions of your local audience, or that the internet discussion has now brought you around to believing the accusations, or something else?

autobiographies in which the authors openly admit to banging high school girls. Nikki Sixx and Anthony Keidis, off the top of my head

Sixx came out yesterday, in press for the Netflix adaptation of Crue autobiog The Dirt, to say that one anecdote he tells in there about comically arranging Tommy Lee's swap-in-the-dark rape of a groupie (who was then violently raped by a stranger on her way home, to Sixx's relief) didn't actually happen and idk maybe he exagerrated because he was on heroin and erm actually the author of The Dirt made up loads of stuff, nothing to do with me. (Neil Strauss was contacted for comment, but is contractually not allowed to.)

People definitely thought the Wyman/Smith thing unpleasant at the time. A dirty old man I think Steve Jones called him, no wait that someone else.

Yes, it's not like those were different times, everyone accepted it.

Mike, do you mean that you think the recent American documentary will have affected the perceptions of your local audience, or that the internet discussion has now brought you around to believing the accusations, or something else?

It's on UK Tv tonight and tomorrow (it was a co-production with channel 4) and half an hour ago I heard two middle-aged men on the bus discussing the allegations and wondering whether they had the stomach to watch the documentary. Also, regardless of how you feel personally, I'd think it's best not to play them in public for the time being.

and maybe not ever again, depending on what happens.

UK Tv tonight and tomorrow

ah, ta

i think one problem with talking about this stuff in regard to artists of the 60s and 70s is that it can be hard to find reliable reporting on a lot of it. like i assume that led zeppelin did lots of terrible things even besides the awful story already mentioned here, but i don't know how accurate or fair any of the books on them are supposed to be. or the bowie thing, iirc the only info we have on that is that lori maddox mentioned it in an interview.

I mean this is the Mail obv. so I get your point but I'm pretty sure no-one who knows/knew Bowie has ever denied any of it.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6684325/Two-women-reveal-flings-David-Bowie-aged-15.html

The difference these days is the possibility of people notifying each other instantly of their shockhorror and publicly stating their cancelling of a career and that they will no more forever pay for their entertainment content (while continuing to pay only delivery systems). I don't think people are more or less bothered -- I think less change is actually happening than it appears. I heard Man in the Mirror on the canned supermarket pa today.

I almost bought this cool Dennis Wilson shirt, but then I remembered he married his cousin's teenage daughter and impregnated her just to spite him.

https://www.instagram.com/kyledunnigan1/p/BurnNLHjlnZ

hm no thanks

Watched the first half of the documentary tonight. One thing that struck me was how the whole Bad era is precisely what 8-year-old boys think is cool, or what they thought was cool in the late 80s anyway, And I was one at the time, I went to the cinema to see Moonwalker and thought it was the greatest thing ever made, now it seems like kind of driftnet grooming.

The ‘Jew me, sue me’ thing doesn’t get mentioned much nowadays

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/jew-me-sue-me-everybody-do-me-we-are-a-long-way-from-thriller-giles-smith-on-the-new-michael-jackson-1586653.html?amp

seem to recall he argued that he was unaware that "jew" in that context had negative connotations

the "kick me/kike me/don't you black or white me" follow up lyric was the one that kinda scuttled that approach

seem to recall he argued that he was unaware that "jew" in that context had negative connotations

people gave him a pass on things like this because people genuinely believed he was some kind of naïf. i think that was true of a lot of stuff he did.