Ryan Adams

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

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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.)

― Chuck_Tatum, Saturday, February 16, 2019 8:33 AM (yesterday)

My small involvement with the music industry in my late teens/early 20s showed me that you constantly have to navigate lots of terrible people who wield power in all sorts of supremely fucked up ways. It made me realize that I never wanted to pursue music as a profession ever again.

This was my anecdotal observation whilst hanging around indie rock dudes. In other, non-rock, styles of music, my data supports the conclusion that, while you certainly can and will encounter such types, it is nowhere near as obligatory.

This x1000. Jazz has its problems, but the real pieces of shit are much fewer and further between.

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

There was some similar discussion on here about art vs artist and on the xxxtentacion thread.

and many other threads

Tied in with the Ryan Adams business a little bit, Lydia Loveless and her issues w/Adams’ old label Bloodshot:

Thread for Lydia Loveless, Country-Rock Lady I Enjoy

Most musicians are OK, it's the people around then who tend to be terrible. IME.

This x1000. Jazz has its problems, but the real pieces of shit are much fewer and further between.

are we talking all jazz musicians or just the "famous" ones ... I mean, if we're talking about a less remunerative and popular genre, it is likely to attract fewer pieces of shit, because there are fewer opportunities for a payoff idk

it's almost like saying, it's really amazing how many rapey, misogynistic, all-around awful men there are in politics vs. say, pension fund management?

Let's not blame an industry or a culture for the reprehensible behaviour of shitty shitty men

Not quite the same. In fact, lots of jazz players can eke out a modest living between gigging and teaching.
(xp)

Can't we blame all of the above?

xp

i'm quite familiar with the specifics and details of those modest livings tbh

though they make less than your average pension fund manager

and on the flipside there is also this:
http://wearewijo.org/about/about-us/

Yeah, there definitely is a problem there, don’t want to seem to be making light of it. Still going to more leery of the random average (indie) rock dude I might meet versus the rank and file jazz musician.

Can't we blame all of the above?

xp

https://pitchfork.com/news/mandy-moore-opens-up-about-ryan-adams-relationship-on-wtf-listen/

Consequence of a Sound covered my music before other people did. They wrote about me often, and super generously. I also remember Ryan bragging about how he got them to delete part of an interview I did with them where I called him an asshole after it had already been published. https://t.co/hWhk1CQLQq

— millennial falcon (@phoebe_bridgers) February 21, 2019

The last La Sera album's blandness - curious how much of that was due to Ryan Adams as producer and how much was due to Goodman giving her husband a larger role. The prior album had a great vibe that I was surprised she abandoned.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/ryan-adams-abuse-me-too-songs-lyrics-796686/amp/

”You’ve got that good girl faith thing, ass so tight,” he sang, sexualizing Swift’s provocation and subbing “ass” for “skirt.” (At the time of the song’s release, listeners debated whether or not Adams sang the word “ass” or “it’s, and it remains unclear to many.)
“We should have known,” my coworker remarked.

Is this a parody?

Having read about Adams' past actions in that NY scene book I recently finished, the whole Taylor Swift cover album project takes on a different tone -- although if I'd listened to it, I guess it may have been evident. My assumption was that he was an indie type who thought it'd be amusing, if misguided, to cover some pop music he genuinely appreciated.

After reading about what an abusive dickhead he is and how he devalued the pop music of his ex-wife, and my extension, her worth as a person... I'd guess that he'd previously paid some attention to Swift as a songwriter that was previously, if not in the same space as him, working in a parallel space more on the pop end of the spectrum and the cover album project was an attention-seeking move taken completely out of spite

what a shithead

xp yeah I'm all for burning RA at the stake but couldn't this sort of unpacking be retrospectively applied to the work of pretty much every male or female songwriter in any genre since the dawn of time?

"Ryan Adams’ Behavior Was Hiding in Plain Sight in His Songs"

i FUCKING HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE DO THIS