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

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1117-heres-every-battle-prince-waged-against-the-internet-and-the-music-industry/

The Tim Westwood thread shows that a whole lot of ILXors really did give a fuck about him.

idk if it's a specific one thing, or just the general consensus that he was a humongous asshole, often abusive. but i'll let ums confirm

― I hear that sometimes Satan wants to defund police (Neanderthal), Thursday, July 9, 2020 5:45 PM (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

No I mean grooming underage women

In 1990, 16-year-old Garcia met Prince backstage in Barcelona after he saw a tape of her dancing. After she graduated high school in Germany at the age of 17, Prince became her legal guardian.[14][4] Upon moving to Minneapolis, Prince and members of his team helped set her up with her own apartment. "At first, I stayed at the Sofitel, then they moved me to a nice little prairie house at the Country Suites, but I couldn't even make a cup of tea there, so they got me an apartment and rented furniture," she said.[15] At the age of 19, Prince instructed her to get on birth control thus beginning their sexual relationship.[4] After a four-year courtship, they married on February 14, 1996.[16]

After she graduated high school in Germany at the age of 17, Prince became her legal guardian.

Ted Nugent pulled this same trick.

Oh, well...that part I didn't know. fuck!

xpost

xps to Tom

he is like funk flex yes, but singular and glorious in a way only england can be
― bob zemko (bob), Monday, 14 October 2002 07:27 (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

just imagine how singular and glorious funkmaster flex could have been if he was an upper middle class white English pedo still "doing it" at 62!

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

probably mostly him having been (somehow) an inexhaustible meme - the youtube channel extends on it massively - peppered, or 'validated', by secondary appreciation of the hazy push-button cloud rap thing. i've seen people talk about the early music as if it was somehow quite radical. and it isn't?? but i guess in light of lil b, study beats and so on coming later i can guess why someone might assume that idk.

*frogsb spending three hours browsing a /mu/ page where they use words like "dindu" and "goyslop"*

"always wondered what the fans of this guy were actually fans of"

what do those words mean Whiney I've never heard them before

now I wish I hadn't looked them up, yuck

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dindu
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Goyslop

a certain music vlogger had better not have covered this fucker I swear to god

can we not spread the chanslime around even if it's just to marvel at how gross it is? at least the cucking stuff was useful for explaining right wing psychology everything else is just fascist noise

potty g. kettlegarten

xpost: sorry

sorry I didn't mean you specifically

i remember seeing stories about him being a creep nearly a decade ago but this is well beyond even that, pretty horrific

like none of the stuff on the RapperViperVEVO channel I think is actually made by him

i think he just gave the channel owner a bunch of videos of him rapping in front of a green screen and let them do whatever with it. i don't think his stupid meme fandom even pretended to care about any music he made since they found out about him but i think some of them did convince themselves that some of his early albums were actually good idk

i don't know this guy but the news report on him is completely fucking insane but I also don't understand: the cops came in april, saw the victim and didn't do anything? then came back now and she's nowhere to be found?

She was pregnant when she was kidnapped. I wonder what happened to the baby.

yeah that story has a lot of details and leaves a lot of questions

dont think he's gonna see the light of day again I'm guessing it's even worse than what you see in the article

https://pitchfork.com/news/russell-simmons-sued-by-drew-dixon-for-alleging-sexual-assault-accusers-have-thirst-for-fame/#intcid=_pitchfork-bottom-recirc-v2_2e838be8-d67d-4bed-a582-14bd1843e8ab_similar2-3_fallback_cral-top2-2

I wish they didn't always have to publicise these people's talking points which are always the same anyway and give the worst people in the world ammunition

he has a point though, think about all those big names who got famous accusing people of sexual assault, there's...

uhm....

uhh, well there's...

uhh....

errr.....

hmm

Monica Lewinsky … but the thing is, the amount of ridicule and shame that it entails…

One of my students last semester did a research project about the scorn/shame/ridicule endured by ML after her sexual relations (choice of words intended) with Clinton. It was very well done. It was new info for most of the class. They didn’t know much (anything?) about the reasons it went down the way it did.

Also the idea that someone is “clout chasing” is almost always completely absurd and a last resort excuse.

xpost and nowadays, hundreds to thousands of death threats

yeah the way you chase clout is claiming you know somebody famous that you don't really know. not claiming they raped/assaulted you.

i think simmons might end up being a weinstein level monster by the time this is all done

did i miss ILX discussion on diddy being like an epstein of rap

yeah it's getting really really bad

The online discourse about is fucking terrible though. Basically a bunch people calling on various rappers mentioned in lawsuits to commit murders to prove they aren’t gay.

yep it suck all around, akademiks is involved now so will only get worse

they think gay people can't murder? apparently they've never seen the works of producer Ryan Murphy

I think the idea is that a false accusation of gayness is supposed to send a straight person into a homicidal rage, and if it doesn’t then the accusation is not false.

where do they think the term “slay, queen” originated smdh

I’m just surprised Rick Rubin hasn’t been brought in yet

Mo Troper

https://www.stereogum.com/2256147/mo-troper-dropped-by-management-following-abuse-allegations-from-ex-partner/news/

if they’re not that bad ooh they picked a really bad title

Uh...

https://variety.com/2024/music/news/sean-diddy-combs-homes-raided-sex-trafficking-investigation-1235951601/

“Holy shit” doesn’t quite cover it

(Though, given the recent news …)