Ryan Adams

<3 I’ve been there too, when I was very young. Only I wasn’t talented, just vulnerable. This whole thing has me feeling low.

I thought you said god

i read an interview last night (and now i can't find it) w/Whiskeytown's former manager, who wrote a book about his time w/the band. He goes on about how Adams is a genius and probably has an off-the-charts IQ, and he also seems to buy into the whole "asshole as careerist rock star move" stuff in a positive way. He mentioned his "charisma" a couple times in an admiring manner too, and tbh one thing that makes me a bit ...maybe not "suspicious" per se, but it makes me take a step back...is when someone is getting by on their charisma. they *seem* very impressive, but what are they really saying and doing and what are they getting away with?

I heard Carol Burnett’s daughter Jodi Hamilton talking about how RA ghosted her sister while she was dying of cancer then went out to get sympathy in the press after her death

I bought the first Whiskeytown album based on the hype, found it in Asheville NC but couldn’t find it in Texas, was 1995 or 6 I guess. I was disappointed, it was a weak Uncle Tupelo rip. But the hype continued. I never understood it but maybe I’m starting to.

could do without any further "why does everyone only care about the 14 year old" posts

Whiskeytown meant a lot to me as a drunk saddo 22-year old white guy but I'm comfortable that I won't miss out on anything never listening to any of it again.

idk that i have anything much to add.
i am angry about all of it & his garbage reactions so far & the damage done to these women on so many levels and/or their creative aspirations ....

but also wrestling w selfish feels bc of enjoying his music in the past & that makes me angry too

i have a great friendship with someone that started out as a mutual enjoyment of his music & it all just feels gross & hollow to think on that now

again, selfish feels mixed in but mostly SO grossed out by him in general. i just...UGH

it was a weak Uncle Tupelo rip.

This has always been my view of his music. It also didn't help that the guy has always seemed like a humorless dick trafficking in tortured artist tropes.

I just wanna say a lot of you are being hard on yourselves! It's perfectly understandable to be sad if his music meant something to you or was tied to memories of certain times in your life, being sad about that doesn't mean you don't have empathy for the victims, it's not a zero sum game..... No one did anything wrong except Ryan Adams

I'll never regret quitting music journalism, because almost every musician I interviewed was an asshole or a clown, or an asshole pretending to be a clown. (Exceptions, obviously - but not many.)

i don't think it's necessarily selfish or demeaning to the victims for people to deal with the personal impact adams' music had had on their lives. particularly since so often the alternative is for fans to defend or excuse the actions of the person in question - that sort of blanket denial and unwillingness to even deal with these painful questions is what's, imo, truly selfish and demeaning.

The music (and enjoyment thereif)/=agreeing/loving the musician/person behind it. What he put in is not the same as what you take out of it.

Eh I mean ppl say that but I think esp the kind of heartfelt singer songwriter thing he did makes it harder, especially when he made it clear that he was often singing about himself...

certainly easier for me to divide, say, In a Silent Way from who Miles was as a person, plus you could argue those records also belong to Zawinul or Wayne Shorter or Teo Macero or Chick Corea etc...where the type of stuff Adam's did you're kind of buying into their persona

True. But I still find there's no need to feel guilty.

I didn't mean anyone should feel guilty, just seems like it poisons it more because of the type of music

The prominence of the NYT article (Apple News notification) and Snapes piece makes me wonder if the “Toxic Beta Male”—who uses his vulnerability to prey on women—is about to become the latest development in #MeToo.

If so, good.

The prominence of the NYT article (Apple News notification) and Snapes piece makes me wonder if the “Toxic Beta Male”—who uses his vulnerability to prey on women—is about to become the latest development in #MeToo.

If so, good.

― Naive Teen Idol

wasn't this basically david foster wallace?

That poisoning of his fans’ relationship w his music is yet another thing he singlehandedly ruined. It’s not selfish at all to have a subjective reaction to his music or anyone’s. Def harder to separate when the music is very personal. Tbrr one of my best friends was a huge fan, like the fannest fan who has fanned, and she’s experiencing real grief at the loss of someone she thought was a troubled jerk but not a pedophile. I feel sad for her on top of the rest of this mess.
Is he on suicide watch?

for me i wondered if i could separate it bc i was never very interested in ryan adams as a personality, never thought his songs were good bc of anything that had to do with him, just the themes that appeared and reappeared in his songs (mostly generalized melancholy and longing about relationships) resonated with me deeply at a time when i was just beginning to encounter these feelings. what i got out of his songs was mostly what i projected onto them, like... sylvia plath was my favorite poet in high school, so of course "sylvia plath" was my favorite ryan adams song even though its sentiment ("i wish i were dating someone who is SO DEPRESSED so we could be depressed and depressing together") is p fuckin heinous to me at this point in my life. but when i listened to that song i felt like i was sylvia plath not ryan adams etc.

anyway i thought about it some more and decided i don't need this dude's music in my life and i'm never gonna be able to listen to it and get over my disgust or repair my relationship toward his music to what it was before, and now i am an adult who has heard the replacements and the smiths, so good riddance

the other side of that coin is i actually don't know whether or not i'll ever be able to listen to brand new again, that one is murkier, i have an intense and way more recent personal connection to that music and it's sooo fucking poisoned and feels so bad but also feels like an inextricable part of my history

and part of me is like, "well fuck these guys, why should they get to ruin the music i loved"

and part of me is like," well fuck these guys i hope i never hear another note they produced ever again"

incidentally that describes my feelings on....the smiths

The goodness of Marr offsets the badness of Morrissey, so I can still rationalize listening to The Smiths. I couldn't tell you the last time I fired up some solo Moz of my own volition, though.

Seeing Marr live and realizing he has a perfectly fine singing voice for the Smiths songs he does has been my out there.

I have all this guy's 2005-2007 stuff (my early 20's) and it's going in the recycle bin.

It strikes me as more personal work than something like Michael Jackson.. but I guess I'll watch this new documentary someday and .. I dunno

bleh!

I have absolutely zero interest in Ryan Adams as an artist but I find this stuff so difficult to navigate. I dont know where you draw the line with an artist's personal life and how it affects your relationship with them. I think if you only listened to artists whose personal opinions and beliefs aligned with yours, you would miss out on a lot and you would drive yourself crazy checking it. But at the same time I have had to abandon my R Kelly random because, I just can't dismiss it the way I could eg overlook Kate Bush being a fan of Theresa May. I dont think there can be a wholly right or wrong answer - the relationship of the listener to the work is always gonna vary and the severity of the crimes will have an impact too.

I dont think there can be a wholly right or wrong answer - the relationship of the listener to the work is always gonna vary and the severity of the crimes will have an impact too.

no, let's keep litigating it in every thread

Hope we're all workin pro bono

I dont think there can be a wholly right or wrong answer - the relationship of the listener to the work is always gonna vary and the severity of the crimes will have an impact too.

― boxedjoy

i don't think there's a _universally_ right answer, but i can't imagine a circumstance where "i like this person's work so i'm going to deny they did anything wrong" would be anything less than wrong. outside of that i think it does vary from person to person and i think it's a good and positive thing for people to accept their own emotional reactions.

which isn't "litigation", it's coming to terms with things and anybody who doesn't like that can fuck off

Kate Bush being a fan of Theresa May.

wait what??

I think the only one of these cases in which I’ve sort of been “tested” personally (as a “fan”) has been with Louis (...and even there, I had heard the rumors already, so I was sort of already “navigating” it already, in the time before it all became public).

Plus, I guess, I grew up liking Bill Cosby like every other American....

Anyway, I certainly wouldn’t judge how anyone reacts in a situation like this; fandom is so personal and individual.

(^do u think i wrote “already” enuff times)

Some ambiguous comments she later clarified, emphasizing that she was not a tory or brexit supporter. But yeah, definitely a similar offense to a documented pattern if emotional abuse and the sexual exploitation of a minor.

xp

This conversation is always weird. I don’t think people who are just jerks or maybe conservatives should get mixed up with people who are abusers.

Someone on Twitter asked who to recommend for substitute "whiskey-soaked emotionally resonant artists" and I realized other contemporary ones (Isbell, Josh Ritter, Matthew Ryan, etc.) weren't as...intimate in a way that was using that hurt as a come-on or something. I mean, Kris Kristofferson did it in a similar way, where he could be sexy guy and/or sack-of-shit and you wouldn't know until you found out, I guess.

self-reflective post, tl:dr etc

I found the feeding frenzy very isolating this time around

it seemed like on fb & twitter (or my timelines at least) everyone jumped on the news in a massive dogpile of “I’ve NEVER liked his music” x 1000

i just saw this time around how little room there is anymore for a fan to digest something like this, it’s so immediate & the response can be so bizarrely greedy idk. it’s like i just had to back up quietly into a corner & watch it all play out in horror

this is my only argument for a return to a slow news cycle. just getting a little time to take in the awfulness without having to SAY something right away

idk

xxposts I am a huge Jason Isbell fan but imo he comes ~nowhere~ close to being a substitute for RA/“whiskey-soaked emotionally resonant artsist”.
It’s not just the writing, it was his voice.
It’s not 1 for 1

Yeah, I agree! Only one I could think of to recommend was Matthew Ryan's Concussion (weirdly not streaming anywhere but mostly on YouTube).

vg i agree with you about news’s metabolic cycle. it’s exhausting

a good Ryan Adams-ish "whiskey-soaked emotionally resonant artist" to recommend to people is Ruston Kelly, whose DYING STAR was one of the best 5 to 10 albums of 2018, imo. he sounds quite a bit like RA in some places. (he is also married to Kacey Musgraves, as many know, but not everyone certainly.)

you can non-Spotify stream the whole album here: https://www.stereogum.com/2011971/ruston-kelly-dying-star/music/album-stream/

I mean i don't wish to equate being an abuser with being a Tory, the point I was getting at is that for a lot of issues and a lot of fandom the lines are ambiguous. I wouldn't judge anyone for holding on to the music that means a lot to them in the aftermath of someone being a reprehensible monster. It's not like people got into Ryan Adams because he was a beast or Brand New because the guy was a paedo - the significance that music has played in your life doesn't suddenly become invalid because the person turned out to be an utter failure of a human. I've been very lucky as a fan - nobody I've adored has ever really let me down in such a major and abhorrent way as this - but I wouldn't be able to say I could easily erase my tastes if someone important to me did.

I mean this man is scum clearly but he must have meant something to a lot of people for it to be a big deal and much as i wouldn't want to se him supported anew with people spending money on releases and shows, I would understand the mental hoops people would jump through to justify not throwing away his catalogue from their collection.

And I'm glad all his sponsors etc are dropping him too because it's good to see parts of the industry take this stuff seriously, unlike Chris Brown who continues to get away with it again and again

This conversation is always weird. I don’t think people who are just jerks or maybe conservatives should get mixed up with people who are abusers.

And boxedjoy: you are so otm. Sorry if I offended anyone in how to deal with this. :-(

Liz Phair and Karen Elson weigh in:

https://pitchfork.com/news/liz-phair-and-karen-elson-share-statements-about-ryan-adams-amid-abuse-allegations/

Phair: "If I do, I’ll write about it. But I think you can extrapolate. My experience was nowhere near as personally involving, but yes the record ended and the similarities are upsetting."

hey so pic.twitter.com/P911Dvnfq3

— millennial falcon (@phoebe_bridgers) February 17, 2019