rolling #metoo thread for sexual harassment in the music industry so no one misses out when artists we don't give a fuck about like Tim Westwood and Bassnectar get caught

Nona Gaye was 18 when they started dating (allegedly started)

A woman I know knows a lot of people from Prince world, an R&B singer told her the story that Prince was producing her debut solo album in the early 80s

She had done vox on the Lipps Inc project and other things

Anyway

Prince demanded a blow job in the studio, she refused, he walked out, end of her solo career

re: Doomtree, this is 100% shallow but my reaction to them after their set at the first Eaux Claires festival was “these people are terrible and I wish them all nothing but ill fortune”; I’m just sorry that their implosion is built on so much abuse and suffering.

I'd prefer to keep Bowie, James Brown and Prince out of this not because they're too beloved, just cause they're dead that seems like a different category of queasiness. unless someone here is a necromancer-for-cancellation? surely we already have a "separating the art from the artist?" thread already

but obv I'm not gonna make an actual effort to thread-police

I hear that Gesualdo guy was an asshole.

and yet he's still being played every hour, on the hour, on classic rock radio, sickening

'Moro, lasso, al mio duolo' is an undeniable jam, though.

Do these kids walking about with his face on their t-shirts even know though?

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.786988743.1102/ra,unisex_tshirt,x1860,101010:01c5ca27c6,front-c,336,366,600,600-bg,f8f8f8.jpg

Part of it is living in the middle of Minneapolis' Prince Industrial Complex and the endless hagiography gets old

Gesualdo is obviously cancelled in my book

didn't actually know any of the bad Prince stories, surprised i didn't see anyone make a lot of noise about them when he died

we all know rock n roll was partly built on this but it would be nice if we didn’t have to wait for the people to die, then wait for the mourning to die down, before any kind of minor reckoning with them. even nicer if it was their peers calling them out but that’s not happening & who else wants to deal with the threats

obv this is still going on in every genre/industry & statistically some of the ppl I like now are going to be creeps. which is shit but I’d rather know about it. lot more stuff is surely coming out soon, whether it will change anything idk. kids still love certain soundcloud dudes we knew about already. I hope they grow out of it

Worth noting that Rodney P and Ty (R.I.P) relentlessly told us of Tim Westwood’s predatory nature...no one listened. #SurvivingTimWestwood pic.twitter.com/FWGxLABWMQ

— Michael Morgan (@mikewhoatv) June 22, 2020

I'd been wondering how Westwood managed to stay so protected - from the viewpoint of 2020 it feels weird to think of the extent to which he was the biggest and pretty much only gatekeeper for any British MC (and the only person playing most rap music in the UK full stop). We're talking about a 20-30 year period of dominance here.

The even grimmer conclusion is that because he was primarily targeting young black girls, no one really cared.

I'm surprised there isn't more concerted anger directed against him from some of the bigger grime stars (unless I've missed it) because he needs dragging down, what he gets away with is outrageous.

mind you as a much as a joke character as he he seems, he still obv wields a lot of power and influence

seeming like a joke character seems to help many people who wield a lot of power & influence

Prime Ministers, for instance.

The Prince stories, while unsurprising, are really bumming me out.

yeah it's depressing
I did watch Purple Rain for the first time in probably 20 years on Netflix and that whole movie is a real grab bag of red flags though, yikes I was kinda shocked at how horrible The Kid came off

to your Doomtree post, I think those guys (except Dessa, I think she was in a different lane) were super hard drug abusers

I always felt like The Kid was supposed to look half horrible and not a model for behavior recommended by prince

but purple rain aside, djp otm. He was one of the few figures i would call a personal hero

its hard to process when a huge part, maybe the hugest part, of an artist's project is how sexuality fits into the universe they constructed

Yeah, my reading of Purple Rain was that The Kid was well on his way to becoming a piece of shit in the same vein as his father but music and Appolonia opened his eyes to his mistakes and gave him the strength to set his feet on a different path.

Also I don't mean to keep harping on this in the context of this thread but the Doomtree set was SO BAD, like half a step removed from Edina-Christian-youth-group-rapping-for-Jesus levels of bad

its hard to process when a huge part, maybe the hugest part, of an artist's project is how sexuality fits into the universe they constructed

I wouldn't say it's hard, rather that my take on it was that he was projecting a stage persona most of the time and I hoped/assumed he turned it off when it wasn't appropriate (which is of course naive when actually considered but still).

i'm starting to think that being a sexual predator / sexual power dynamics are like the quiet part of what being a successful pop star is or has always been about - the open secret. some people really seemed to relish it / some people were reluctant participants but obviously that doesn't change the end result - the pain of countless women (and queers) who suffered abuse.

'pop star' but also music industry exec etc.

this is a little out-of-bounds of this thread but i have my theories about why sexual abuse is so commonly done by people in these positions of power. part of it is the alienation of being an industrial exploiter in an exploitative capitalist framework - that very easily translates into sexual exploitation.

imo. anyway.. bassnectar sucks

I would like to think there's a clear line between "sexual power dynamics" and "sexual predator" that is defined by consent but... humanity seems hellbent on making that impossible

In the Bassnectar thread, I mentioned some half-remembered accusations toward some guy who was on the business side of things. I think he was a promoter or something in Brooklyn? Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

I would like to think there's a clear line between "sexual power dynamics" and "sexual predator" that is defined by consent

for sure

i'm starting to think that being a sexual predator / sexual power dynamics are like the quiet part of what being a successful pop star is or has always been about

― carin' (map)

i hate to sound like a second-wave feminist but i do feel like there is inherently a sexual component to the paradigm of masculine power

yeah i mean i guess what i was trying to say is that abuse in the culture industry is like a reflection of the fact that the culture industry abuses people for product. it sees people as objects for consumption so treating people as sexual objects is in line with that, especially for people who are really invested in that model. and more predatory kinds of behaviors are like an enhanced version of that. not trying to discount the elements of patriarchy that play into this but imo it's not just men behaving like pigs, it's a larger complex of alienation that brings in capitalism and sometimes weird quasi-religious cultism (after all music is pretty magical/spiritual).

i don't want to minimize the awfulness of the phenomenon and how prevalent it is.

i mean, i'd argue that it's not just "culture", i'd argue that anywhere you see powerful men, in for instance circumstances of political power, those situations are very conducive to abuse.

I assume the abuse is functional as part of the power & how it’s maintained/reproduced

I wouldn't say it's hard, rather that my take on it was that he was projecting a stage persona most of the time and I hoped/assumed he turned it off when it wasn't appropriate (which is of course naive when actually considered but still).

remember that Sinead O'Connor physically fled from her one personal meeting with Prince after she'd had an international #1 record with a song he wrote. one presumes that he was worse with women who weren't ostensibly rich and powerful, although also that he had an eye for targets who were already susceptible to abuse due to past victimhood.

oh, I'd always assumed that she fled due to him being a sex creep; apparently last year she revealed that he had weird control issues over her having a hit without being one of his intentional proteges, wanted her to submit to being his protege and agree to only speak publicly in a manner he approved of, and physically attacked her when she declined. And, while her reportage these days isn't always reliable, that a female emplyee of his was hospitalised with broken ribs from a beating at the time.

this thread is super depressing but this made me lol irl

I hear that Gesualdo guy was an asshole.

― pomenitul, Thursday, July 9, 2020 7:36 PM (yesterday)bookmarkflaglink

and yet he's still being played every hour, on the hour, on classic rock radio, sickening

― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, July 9, 2020 7:38 PM (yesterday)

we all know rock n roll was partly built on this but it would be nice if we didn’t have to wait for the people to die, then wait for the mourning to die down, before any kind of minor reckoning with them. even nicer if it was their peers calling them out but that’s not happening & who else wants to deal with the threats

I can't believe Jimmy Page has spent the last 40 years living the life of luxury instead of serving a hefty prison sentence. Gary Glitter must look at that guy and conclude that his own biggest mistake was failing to grease the right palms.

I think it's more about failing to be in Led Zeppelin and being Gary Glitter instead.

fans were openly talking about child rape like it was supposed to be hilarious/awesome/badass until v recently, it was apparently a selling point

in the UK after jimmy savile there was a brief moment when more ppl actually seemed to want to deal with this shit, interest seemed to die down a lot after the behaviour of actual cool people started being questioned

In my city there are a lot of disturbing allegations coming to light on the music 'scene' right now

Stranger still is people with a reputation for being dodgy themselves being very publicly vocal in the pile-on against those who have abusive tendencies, almost as if they have something to hide

Funny that

Different world here of course

a coke dealer who is at after hours venues here often that is an acquaintance of mine posted a notes app apology for his toxic behavior in his Insta story recently. weird world we're in

Weird that he apologized, not weird whatsoever that local scenes are crawling w creeps??

yeah, it was the apology with the language and format of a public figure or artist that was incongruous. after hours drug dealer definitely not a surprising person to be a creep

I think it’s good that this nobody loser creep apologized publicly. If that happened more often maybe fewer people would have to endure being harassed and assaulted.

the booker at a significant venue here has been publically accused of some really grim stuff, and the way it has snowballed has been horrible to watch. It's been an open secret for nearly a decade that this man has been violent, aggressive and abusive to other men in the local music scene, and a number of women have come out in the past few weeks explaining that their relationships with him have been characterised by domestic abuse. But because he's managed to position himself as someone with influence and power within the local scene, very few people have felt able to speak out about this stuff. It's the classic story of how these guys manage to get away with it and for so long: manouvre into a situation where they have power, then abuse that power to allow shitty behaviour to go unchallenged.

Unless I’m mistaken, it should be emphasized that the girl who was found in that car would be 15 now, more likely 14 when she disappeared, and from some things I’m seeing online he started talking to her when she was a couple years younger than that.

Jesus Christ

https://www.reddit.com/r/d4vd/comments/1nl8bo1/wearing_her_bracelets/

If this guy is the killer he's either excruciatingly dumb or asking to be caught

I’m scared to look into this further as it sounds dangerously close to the d**th dr**e thread and that is legit still haunting me.

yeah I def don't need to know more here

I think what’s worse is this was all in plain sight. There’s no need to really get beyond this level and go deep deeper. Except to say this is a kid who was failed by everyone in her life.

xp
I read the wiki on this guy and that was enough

I think what’s worse is this was all in plain sight.

― omar little, Friday, September 19, 2025 2:28 PM (three minutes ago)

i think i know what you mean insofar as people are digging up evidence of them two having been together, her family was in some way aware of the situation etc. but my takeaway is somewhat different -- culture is so siloed via fandoms that you have things like this happening "in plain sight" except nobody outside the fandom is aware of what's going on because it's playing out on discord, twitch, reddit etc places that basically exist to create millions of little bubbles. from the outside you can look inside these bubbles and see people moving around in familiar ways but unless you're inside the bubble you can't possibly know the full story of what's happening in there. d4vd's backstory is that he started making music on his own so that he could soundtrack his fortnite highlight montages w/o using copyrighted music, his whole life has basically played out in the online netherworld of "community" where everything is both technically public and still largely unseen by outside eyes. he's a perfect avatar for a certain kinda modern celebrity, he got popular enough inside his bubble to be able to tour the world and even tho some of his work bled slightly into mainstream culture he is still almost completely unknown to the average person

I have never heard of him at all

yeah actually j0rdan i was going to say something about how within the community, it seems like so many people were completely aware of the backstory of this, without knowing it would ultimately be a backstory to *this* kind of thing, but with the world of modern music fandom you can have these massive stars who are somehow completely anonymous. you said it better than i was going to however.

Definitely explains how I feel when I see a lot of headliners coming through town at the bigger theater venues. A whole lot of 'never even HEARD of this person,' and it's not just age and my expectations at play there.

this person is only 20 years old -- how to be so morally curdled at 20?!?!?

because the internet

urgh

what now?

i'm assuming this is not just A Music War?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/oct/09/former-bbc-radio-1-dj-tim-westwood-charged-rape-sexual-assault

I thought this might have been a response to Craig Jenkins' paean to Chris Brown.

Never heard of Electric Frankenstein, but their bass player just got caught.

https://www.punknews.org/article/86827/bass-player-of-electric-frankenstein-charged-with-sexual-assault-of-11-year-old

terrible

they are (were?) a pretty big garage rock revival band

Accusation against jazz pianist Jacky Terrasson (article in French):

https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/l-info-de-france-culture/le-jazzman-jacky-terrasson-accuse-d-un-viol-en-2015-sur-une-enfant-de-six-ans-5881228

Ça me dégoûte.

Scott Mills sacked by the BBC - apparently serious sexual offences against a teenage in the late 90s, investigated under caution in 2018, dropped through lack of evidence. (Reported as such in the red tops, no speculation by me)

*teenage boy* that should be

The frontman of Timber Timbre recently died, they’re briefly mentioned way upthread. I heard about it through a instagram post from a former partner of his, which is included on this thread, along with some pretty grim accounts of his behavior: https://www.reddit.com/r/indieheads/s/Vj9TUoWCbn

wow, awful

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/11/patrick-bruel-charged-rape-sexual-assault