Michael Jackson is "evil"

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.

michael jackson was a horrible person, people. even if he hadn't raped a bunch of kids, which he did.

All hail Conrad the Beastslayer! #LeavingNeverland pic.twitter.com/8gKr7WRPJh

— Autobiography out NOW (@DaftLimmy) March 6, 2019

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?

As jed says above, Part 1 of Leaving Neverland aired on Channel 4 in the UK last night. Part 2 airs tonight (and I'm DJ-ing again tomorrow night). So the issue is at its peak in the UK right now.

Also, regardless of how you feel personally, I'd think it's best not to play them in public for the time being.

I agree. The music I play in public on Friday nights is almost wholly joyful in nature (I barely even play a sad lyric, no Tears On The Dance Floor here), and I'd rather choose records that don't stir up thoughts of child abuse. Not playing records with MJ vocals, of any era, doesn't equate to pronouncing on his guilt - it's more about removing triggers. You don't know people's stories. Choosing to listen to MJ vocals in private is a different matter.

So it is a perception thing - your dancers will have disbelieved the accusers over the last quarter century, but you expected that transmission of these specific claims would change that. Is this because the climate of believing survivors has shifted in the last couple of years, or it’s been long enough since Jackson’s death that the defensiveness of nostalgia has faded, or?

(I’m not remonstrating or setting you up for a sneering! just genuinely curious about the shift in attitude.)

Or the documentary is pretty damning and broadcast on national television, would be my guess.

Previous accounts would not have been restricted to local television or kept out of newspapers, I’d expect. (I know the Bashir doco refrained from specifically claiming that Jackson was molesting the children that shared his bed.)

Right, and this one doesn't.

Also of course you're right that context is a factor - pre-Saville, there was a narrative that this couldn't really be happening because someone would have spoken up (and if someone spoke up, that they're less believable because no-one else spoke up, etc). That's really not the case now, I think.

True but this is a UK thing only, maybe Cosby or Weinstein has had a similar effect in the US now, but guess paedophiles are a different category of baddie?

I suppose that up to now, it's been possible for many people (myself included) to compartmentalise, but not any more. That's to do with the documentary, which makes its case with heightened visibility and more unsparing force than before, and also the rapidly shifting climate into which it has emerged.

Right, and this one doesn't.

I don't know if the Jordan Chandler accusations / settlement / investigators corroborating the drawings of Jackson's penile vitiligo weren't reported on national news programmes - the matter was never sub judice, even if Santa Barbara had jurisdiction over the BBC - but Genome has this ten-years-later BBC doco airing 12 times on BBC3 and once on BBC1. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(ie the year after Bashir)

Did nobody watch this then?

for what it's worth literally a month ago I had a conversation about the R. Kelly documentary in which I'd said something along the lines of "it didn't hurt Michael Jackson's reputation permanently" and their response was "oh, that's not the same, it wasn't proven that it happened and so on and so forth." this was before the documentary was out, but the timing was strange

this post from some british journo is going around which made me think twice for a second and then i got my head on straight and am back in the fuck mj camp
https://www.facebook.com/CharlesThomsonJournalist/posts/10156642832831998

fwiw, I'd love to go to a mike t-diva dance party.

re: that dude's FB post -- i dunno, it seems plausible to me that MJ did it and that his victims might not have told consistent stories over the years. like, "these guys have changed their stories!" is a good lawyer's defense but in the real world ppl forget stuff and don't remember dates or get details wrong, and that's especially true when you're talking about things that happened when you were a kid.

When you’re talking about extremely confusing and traumatising things that happened when you’re a kid, at a time when you have carefully been removed from normal life including regular markers of the passage of time

jed otm btw

I watched and I believe those boys/now men/still boys. I'll miss the music, I'll miss "I can't help it", but I'm canceling it either indefinitely or forever.

I play at a place, monthly not weekly as Mike does (and not the club, sic, just a bar gig) and I presently cannot imagine playing MJ. As Mike said you don't know people's triggers but also I think you would, frankly, get an angry reaction from some punters and who wants to deal with that for the sake of playing these tracks?

I mentioned sic there because he knows the club. He came to it once and didn't tell me he was there and it's a major regret of mine that I didn't know!

https://www.wsj.com/articles/simpsons-episode-featuring-michael-jacksons-voice-to-be-pulled-11552007802

just realized that's behind the WSJ firewall, but this covers it too:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/simpsons-episode-guest-starring-michael-jackson-pulled-circulation-1193215

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.

I mean... Bad and Dangerous were both worldwide #1, multiplatinum albums and the premiere of the "Black and White" video was the most-viewed ever at that time. The amount of hype it generated still stands out in my mind.

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.

Afaik, the band are famously critical of, and claim there are plenty of fabrications in, both Hammer of the Gods and Stairway to Heaven; the former seems like it almost definitely has to contain a good portion of bullshit. (P sure the 'mud shark story' has been debunked, for a start.)

Interesting...

Corey Feldman Changes Stance On Michael Jackson Doc ‘Leaving Neverland’ https://t.co/vChYtUf8CO pic.twitter.com/c4buBbMqVC

— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) March 8, 2019

(P sure the 'mud shark story' has been debunked, for a start.)

yes, it was debunked to being a red snapper, not a mud shark

(I share this regret jed but did not know in advance I was going to be able to make it!)

i never heard anything other than "red snapper" because "lol she was a redhead and the carpet matched the drapes"

“I’m going to put this red snapper into your red snapper” was Cole’s quote of himself iirc

”...Let’s see how your red snapper likes this red snapper!” That was it. It was the nose of the fish, and that girl must have come 20 times. But it was nothing malicious or harmful, no way! No one was ever hurt.

As Mike said you don't know people's triggers but also I think you would, frankly, get an angry reaction from some punters and who wants to deal with that for the sake of playing these tracks?

Absolutely, I should have mentioned that too - I've been visualising a good mood turning sour, and who wants that indeed?

Sic, first, even if you take that quote as definitive proof of anything (which uh), it comes from Richard Cole, not from a band member. The story in Hammer of the Gods, which is what I was commenting on, was that the members of the band were responsible and the acts it describes go further than what Cole describes himself doing (and would have probably resulted in injury). Second, Carmine Appice has also claimed that he was the one responsible. Afaik, no women have ever come forward to say they were involved.

I've said before on ilx that I do consider what the band did to Ellen Sander horrifying and defensible, and much worse than any of these groupie stories. (Obv doesn't affect my appreciation of the music.)

that's probably why I said Cole

Why did they have a fish in the hotel room?

*indefensible xps

OK, but, then, even Cole was debunking something more than just the type of marine creature involved.

relative to the story in HOTG

Why did they have a fish in the hotel room?

― Trϵϵship, Friday, March 8, 2019 1:05 PM (ten minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You could fish from your balcony.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Edgewater

I guess it's not really an ironclad debunking as much as that a story that always sounded like bs has multiple competing versions with afaik no one still defending the original version and no evidence in its favour.

the grossest thing about that was how giddy it made Frank Zappa, who immediately wrote a terrible song about it

Sure, but he did that all the time about everything.