Albums you own or used to own from artists that turned out to be awful people.

I interviewed Tom Waits and he called back the next night because he wanted to talk more about how much of an equal songwriting partner his wife Kathleen Brennan was. https://t.co/cxD4dAHVb9

— burning ambulance (listen to the podcast!) (@burn_amb) November 11, 2017

yeah it's not an excuse per se, I'm just not inclined to be as upset with him as I would be someone like Myrkur xp

Eminem has said some harsh thing about our President, so I don't think I'm going to download his new album

Jesse Hughes kind of just says whatever without thinking much? Iirc he is a trump supporter but when he came to Mexico last time he was saying fuck trump’s wall.

His muslim comments don’t seem particularly hateful just heavily misinformed and made the same week after the attack, he was probably paranoid as fuck.

I mean what happened was devastating and atrocious and unimaginable and life altering, but you can't hand out free passes to people who witnessed that to hate, just because they went through it.

xp to Simon: yeah, gotcha

Unless I’m missing further islamophobic comments he has made?

*they went "through it" already not clear enough, as terror in the name of Islam isn't the same as Islam practised by billions of muslims.

I feel like we've already had 10 iterations of this thread

@Moka: He’s pro-gun, pro-Trump, and pro-life. He recognizes that Islam is the problem and political correctness is literally killing us.

He's a traumatised person who probably shouldn't have done so many interviews/shouldn't have been triggered to spill his guts, so early after it happened tbrh

DJP, a friend of mine just interviewed ol Glenn D. and said he was not only amazingly nice, but he stayed a lot longer than he had to and the only time he took a break was to go home to feed his cats, and also turn on the lights for them in the house since it was getting dark.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/20/french-festivals-ditch-eagles-of-death-metal-over-singers-comments-jesse-hughes

Are these the comments made? It just reads to me like paranoid crazy talk.

For what it counts article says he later apologized and said it was ‘trauma’ talk. But yeah wouldn’t surprise me if deep down this guy hates muslims.

i used to get Eagles of Death Metal mixed up w/DFA 1979 because there was something about their aesthetic that seemed similar, plus they each had a Jesse. Now they each have an anti-Islam Jesse.

It’s a shame I don’t really like Danzig’s music at all because everything I’ve heard of him makes it seem like he is a class dude.

xpost A long time ago I saw Danzig in a small club and he played pool with me and my friends while the opening act played. Nice dude.

Wait DFA 1979 also have an anti-islam jesse?

Jesse has always been seriously right-wing. Not just after the attacks. I think I saw something in an interview with him in which he talked about his absent father being a liberal.

Jesse Hughes, I mean. Not DFA guy.

I'm aware of the most infamous of these stories, but generally I don't play this game. There's no end to it, and I can choose to make Artist X's unproven "crimes" as much of a nonfactor as fans of the Stones, Bowie, Page et al make their pretty well-chronicled underage-groupie histories.

the narrative about Jesse in that EODM documentary is that he found his true self by shedding a dad/husband mask and discovering his inner "rock star" after his wife cheated on him, but he now seems trapped in this alter ego that we are supposed to take as not at all ironic. but he is kinda a shithead if it's not ironic.

Ironically being a jackass means you are being a jackass.

yeah, the subtext is that Homme is genuinely looking out for the guy and likes to play drums in a band sometimes. and this is way EODM exists.

Morbz otm

xp

xp to Morbs: I don't usually spend too much time thinking about this kind of stuff either. I couldn't just stop loving a piece of music all because of something the artist did in their life.

I am trying to think of anyone I have kept in my music collection knowing they are a gigantic racist; the only person coming to mind is Morrissey and that is only for pre-Strangeways Smiths songs. I also almost never listen to The Smiths anymore.

I wouldn't own any records at all if I applied the same rules to musicians I did to, say, friends and family members who want to come round my house. From where I'm sitting now I can see LPs by Notorious BIG, Miles Davis, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Johny Cash, The Fall, Fela Kuti, Siouxsie, Swans, Mayhem, Nico, Public Enemy, Afrika Bambaataa and my eyesight's not so good. If I actually got up and went over to the shelves...

I try not to listen to anyone who uses their fame and influence as a platform to push abhorrent views or to promote their own abhorrent behaviour as being fine. Even so I'd admit to a certain amount of hypocrisy. Shamefully, I did a good enough job of ignoring the problems with Morrissey for a long time (but haven't listened to him at home or gone to see him live for about a decade I think). I don't want to diminish the experiences of any of the victims of men mentioned higher up in this thread but it's the proactively evangelical I simply can't take any more. Morrissey is a cancerous presence in popular culture and my observations are that racists flock to him and are energised by him. See also to a lesser extent: Death In June, Burzum etc. What Gary Glitter did was unforgivable (to pick an example) but I don't see his music as being likely to promote pedophilia or sex tourism or him acting as a totemic figure for nonces to draw succour from. (Although I don't have any evidence for this and this is such a serious subject I would happily - happily - change my position if someone were to point out why I was wrong.) I wouldn't buy any of Glitter's records new because of the financial implications but I'll still listen to them on YouTube, buy them from a second hand record shop or download them for free. As was mentioned upthread though - he's clearly just part of the 'tip of the iceberg' when it comes to musicians from the 70s and before who were straight up sex criminals. There's a chilling bit in Simon Reynolds' glam book where he quotes from Glitter's (pre-disgrace) autobiography talking about how Keith Moon switched him on to sleeping with teenage groupies - something he claims he'd always resisted beforehand. The subtext was clear: Moon was telling him 'We're all at it - you're an idiot for not joining in.' I don't see anyone attacking The Who - because they're classic rock cannon and not some 'fake' glam shit. It's always easier to take a stand against uncool musicians you don't like. I'm probably as guilty of this as anyone - I lost a lot more hair fretting over Swans than I did over Ariel Pink. Although I've pretty much stopped listening to Swans as well.

There's obviously a big grey area here as well though - artists who transmit coded messages about their behaviour.

That Swans/Ariel Pink comparison is somewhat unbalanced. Apologies. But the wider point still remains.

I've been skeezed by the Who since Townshend's involvement with child pr0n was revealed.

The queens of the stone age guy belongs on this list just for creating a band as awful as the eagles of death metal in the first place. He's worse than Wagner just for that alone. At least Wagner had tunes!

"for nonces to draw succour from"

my fave Mayhem EP by the way...

V. guilty LOL.

John Lennon said the Beatles were bigger than Jesus so I burned all their albums

xp no guilt, no shame in that LOL

My position on Gira/Swans is basically "Wait - the guy who wrote a song called 'Raping A Slave' is a piece of shit? You're kidding!" Also, he laughed out loud when I called him a moralist while interviewing him. The evidence was there, is what I'm saying.

idk i used a lot of the swans songs about abuse as a way of processing my own experiences of abuse and i experienced that whole thing as a deep, personal betrayal, but i guess the evidence was there all along

a friend of mine just interviewed ol Glenn D. and said he was not only amazingly nice, but he stayed a lot longer than he had to and the only time he took a break was to go home to feed his cats, and also turn on the lights for them in the house since it was getting dark.

meanwhile this is just the best

the Waits story is so nice

i still don't know the whole story about gira but it did make me lot want to listen to swans. i don't really listen to them much anymore anyway.

NOT want to....

if i get "shaman" vibes off of a frontman i usually steer clear

the Gira story seems to have just vanished after the initial fallout, enough that I think Swans "final" tour just went off without anyone bringing it up? I even know people who went who seemed to have forgotten the whole thing.

i mean i LOVED swans. let's be clear. mostly for the early 90s awesomeness though i was certainly a fan in the 80s as well. but i listened to that stuff SO much and swans are dead tour was a great end to a cool band and it was kind of nice to move on in my own life.

though i did join jarboe's swans e-mail list a long time ago when i first got a computer. just to see what that was like.

there was definitely a palpable dip in enthusiasm for The Glowing Man (imo it was alos just not that exciting an album, which did not help). can't speak to whether the shows were more sparsely attended or not, though.

*also

the Gira story seems to have just vanished after the initial fallout, enough that I think Swans "final" tour just went off without anyone bringing it up? I even know people who went who seemed to have forgotten the whole thing.

― akm, Monday, November 13, 2017 3:47 PM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

people worldwide stopped mentioning it because they were afraid ilxor what's his name would drop in and pester them

the guy who can't get over glenn mcdonald being a spotify employee. him.

I've been skeezed by the Who since Townshend's involvement with child pr0n was revealed.

― droit au butt (Euler), Monday, November 13, 2017 2:54 PM (forty-six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What actually happened was this: after a close friend of Townshend's, who had been abused as a child, committed suicide, Townshend posted an essay he'd written called "A Different Bomb," to his website. This was a year before his arrest. Included in this essay was Townshend decrying the ease with which one could view child porn -- unwisely (to say the least), he used his credit card to access such a site to prove his point. He also alerted at least one UK-based child protection agency, who brushed him off (after his arrest, they loudly denounced him, then had to backtrack once it was pointed out they'd ignored him a year prior). He contemplated going to the cops, but his lawyer advised against it.

No images were found on Townshend's computers and hard drives, and he was cleared. There's no evidence that he did anything other than something really fucking stupid in order to prove a point.

the guy who can't get over glenn mcdonald being a spotify employee. him.

― harbinger of failure (Jon not Jon), Monday, November 13, 2017 12:57 PM (five minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that guy is mentally ill i think

idk. i kind of think that when an artist puts their art into the world, it becomes part of the world, they have to surrender it to an extent. some of that swans music (or miles, or lennon) -- it's mine, now, you know? it has meaning to me and resonance in my life that is independent from the asshole who made it. sometimes the art's connection to the artist as a person is too stark for me to get beyond that, and certainly the artist's life as the art's creator has inherent interest and value to me, but with some art that i engage with a deeper level, i can kind of claim it as my own, it's not theirs anymore. i remember larkin grimm saying something like "i don't care if you throw out your swans records or not, art is higher than morality" and i generally agree with that even if it's not always the case.