Instances where you can't separate the art from the artist. vs. instances where you can.

i love that we're even using the word 'adultery' itt

for an artist that wrote 'catholic block' ffs

it's natural I think for big SY fans to feel a little stung by the whole thing. I just have a problem putting him on the same level of an R Kelly or Bill Cosby.

― soaring skrrrtpeggios (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Friday, September 25, 2020 1:56 PM (seven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

No, they're not really not in the same league at all, but I can understand the situation similarly affecting one's ability to separate art from artist nonetheless.

I'm not at all disturbed by the Moore-Gordon fracas because I didn't care about them as people and their iconicity anyway, and I love Sonic Youth.

You would get laughed out of the room in many a culture if adultery was a dealbreaker for you when considering which artists you follow or not. I find the Puritanism itt deeply unsettling tbh. Like I’ve stepped into a parallel universe or something.

― sock solipsist (pomenitul), Friday, September 25, 2020 2:06 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think you might be projecting the puritanism you're perceiving itt.

FWIW, the purview of the thread title on its own doesn't necessitate judgment at all.

like i personally believe cheating is wrong but i don't know the details of the personal relationship pact that was breached there (beyond zomg they were married) and i'm not really that interested in what that was / it's none of my business. cheating is imperfect behavior that deserves some privacy imo - abuse and misogyny on the other hand need to be made very public.

I consider the line to be a personal one, one that I personally have changed quite a bit in the past few years. There are shades and degrees. I get it.

That said, there are some things that I will honestly think less of you as a person if you support them (and before it is asked, if someone thinks less of me because I draw a line a particular place, I don't care - my days of wanting to please everyone are long gone - so it's perfectly fine if someone doesn't care about my feelings about them). I consider those things to be really obvious - if you are an enthusiastic supporter of Skrewdriver, proudly wear Burzum shirts, or rep for Ted Nugent's bufoonery, at best I think you're missing the plot; at worst you're just a piece of shit.

if you are an enthusiastic supporter of Skrewdriver, proudly wear Burzum shirts, or rep for Ted Nugent's bufoonery

have you ever met a real person who is one of these people you refer to?

2xp map otfm

FWIW, the SY sitch (and people's reactions to it) is a little more complex than simply 'OMG, can you believe a dude in a band cheated on his partner'.

cheating is imperfect behavior that deserves some privacy imo

I'm not an SY fan and none of it affects me - but Kim has made it public (I've read her accounting of the circumstances in an interview blurb or something); so if folks choose to weigh that in how they see Thurston, and you argue against that, you're sort of "taking his side" (no?)

Calling the SY grievances itt "puritanism" totally ignores the specific context OL succinctly clarified upthread.

Not American and Protestant enough to get it, sorry. Peace.

have you ever met a real person who is one of these people you refer to?

I do not share any of Ted Nugent's political beliefs, but I like the albums he made between 1975 and 1980 quite a bit.

ok fair points. i can't recall much about the kim / thurston thing other than there was some underhanded and deceptive behavior but it wasn't an abusive situation. is that a fair summary? xp

lol to unperson.

I actually think a lot of burzum stuff kicks ass but while I could listen to burzum when I was a 20 year old (a 20 year old communist who hated nazis for sure, but very callow) I can't bring myself to listen to him now. like I'm not giving him plays on fucking Spotify.

also won't be listening to red house painters again.

but for some reason was singing "rock with you" in the shower the other day ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

have you ever met a real person who is one of these people you refer to?

I just posted a link to a YouTube video in the Rolling Metal thread a few weeks ago of a professional critic for a not unknown metal website that featured a prominent Burzum wall hanging in the background. But yeah, I still spot Burzum t-shirts in the wild. Now, how "proud" or knowing the wearer might be, I can't speak to, but they are out there.

saw a Burzum shirt in the wild a couple weeks ago

in general, I think it's easier for instrumental music and gets harder the more prominent confessional, personal lyrics and vocals are for the music.

Not American and Protestant enough to get it, sorry. Peace.

What's funny is this is sort of a cousin of that creepy line you see sometimes - "Hey, let go of your Protestant, American, middle-class hang-ups... just do this..."

god triad is so barf

I know, but I'm gonna put on Crown of Creation right now... it cracks me up when Grace sings it.

Chris Brown is one I feel slightly guilty liking so much, though am only headlines-aware of his abuse, what, a decade ago? If I see a "feat Chris Brown" track on an album, that's consistently a favorite. His acting ("Takers") impressed me, too. Whereas, oddly, Ariana Grande licked a donut and has forever lost my respect. She seems to be doing just fine without it, though.

I think Rolf Harris is maybe a perfect example of someone who has totally destroyed their own image. I'm not a fan and never intended to check him out though.

What's funny is this is sort of a cousin of that creepy line you see sometimes - "Hey, let go of your Protestant, American, middle-class hang-ups... just do this..."

Slippery slope much?

Unless someone provides solid evidence that Thurston Moore abused Kim Gordon in some way (in her memoir, Kim accuses him of being a coward for not initiating the divorce himself, which is… utterly banal), 'adultery' is a backwards charge that smacks of, yes, puritanism of the worst tabloid variety. It's none of our fucking business.

kozelek has a few earlier albums that meant something to me, and i still listen to them, but i have zero interest in hearing anything new from him (meaning like the last decade-plus)

none of the other prime examples are particularly important to me -- i would absolutely never buy a nugent or r. kelly record or otherwise contribute money to them, but 'stranglehold' is a great song and if it comes on the radio i'm not gonna turn it off

the thurston stuff is distasteful -- lots of people cheat, but doing it for years on end is pretty damn rude -- but whatever, really. i do kinda wonder how jim o'rourke feels about the whole thing tho

pom, people have parasocial relationships with musicians, they feel hurt by the person's behavior as if it were someone they knew. I don't get that perspective but it's how some people's brains work

Fair enough. I guess I don't get it either – artists are as fallible as the rest of us, sometimes even more so. And as far as shitty rock star behaviour goes, this is bottom-tier material at best.

I try not to think about Al Green beating his pregnant wife with a boot when I listen to Al Green, because I like listening to Al Green. But it happened. Should I try less hard?

When I can remember who made the record or what it's called. Or where I left it

It helps that I only expected diminishing returns from Burzum, Morrissey and Kozelek, made it easy to give them up. But I generally don't stop buying things by bad people.

FTR, only Austin actually used the term "adultery" when discussing the Thurston/Kim thing.

aiui the complication with the Sonic Youth situation is that Thurston drove another bandmember out of the group by having an affair with his girlfriend, years before the bandmember to whom Moore was married found out about the still-continuing affair

xp now named ^

At the time the Cosby stuff started coming out, I had been following

When it started coming out, or when Hannibal Buress was pointing out onstage that googling "bill cosby rapist" would bring up years of news stories about accusations and settlements?

have a lot of thoughts about this

sometimes knowing an artist is a huge shitbag before anything concrete comes out helps me sit better with being able to "separate" things, even though i also think it's really impossible to totally separate the artist from their actions and that all art contains some reflection of its maker's heart, so this exercise is also real theoretical and conflicted from the jump. kozelek made a few records that were the soundtrack to some of the most treasured moments in my life. as far as i'm concerned, he can't have those, so i'll always be able to listen to early rhp and sun kil moon on that level. (note: i haven't even tried to listen to either since the most recent reports came out, so maybe i won't be able to after all!) it feels cynical and shitty to say this but i feel like something will come out about stephan jenkins of third eye blind eventually and this will probably not disturb my ability to listen to the first few 3eb records because on some level i've always weighed my enjoyment of those records against stephan jenkins' personality, which is like what if a wall street sociopath got into music

then again i was an absolutely devoted brand new fan and thought i could maybe maintain the distance if a few years passed but nope. too many lyrics i can read back and think "he was singing about what he was doing... the entire time..."

sorry this feels really scattered bc it's really complicated

I'll admit I am maybe disproportionately upset about the Derrick May accusations, but that may just be because this sorta thing has finally come home to roost for me with an artist I really love. I dgaf about Kozelek, Burzum, Chris Brown, etc. I really enjoy the work of Cosby, Sonic Youth, R Kelly, Woody Allen, Gira, etc (not sure Miles Davis fits here, but him too), but I could live without them if I had to. Like if the doctor said "give up Snickers bars or be dead in six months," I'd give up Snickers bars. But I've spent untold hours listening to Derrick May. It'd be more like the doctor saying "give up coffee or be dead in six months." But I guess we all have our thresholds, right? I don't know, maybe because it's so recent, but this one really sucks for me

It may be instructive for people who still aren't getting the SY sitch to note that no one itt has said anything like 'I can't abide the creative work of adulterers!' It's a weirdly myopic truncation of the situation, it isn't being applied as a blanket judgment of artists across the board, and the thread topic is inherently subjective and not meant to be an imposition of values on anyone else itt.

I think people keep going back to Thurston because a) he was the second musician listed by name in the original post, and b) because his is very much a marginal case when put up against people like R Kelly, Bill Cosby and Woody Allen, no matter what your feelings are on the band or his personal life.

I definitely think it's unfair to lump Thurston in with actual abusers and the like, but I also have a bit of a disappointed/instinctive "bleurgh" reaction when my mates go see him or sign to his record label or hang out with him or whatever. I think it's more like when your parents split up and you find out your dad had an affair - no, it's not unpardonable, but you were personally invested in that relationship and dad totally fucked it up, the bastard!

But yeah, I think for people who didn't grow up with Kim & Thurston being Cool Mum & Dad, it's difficult to understand how anyone would care so much.

In a way, the thread topic is implicitly about the disconnect between internal and external manifestations of morality, so it only makes sense that it would veer too far in one direction (having an adverse reaction to an artist who cheated on their partner even though we all likely know and have forgiven someone in that situation) as it would in the other (continuing to enjoy the work of an artist who is an inarguably-monstruous human being).

Answering the thread question: generally I can still enjoy the works of someone that I encountered and enjoyed before I found out they were shitty (in whatever big or small way that rankles me).

The Smiths and the first couple of Morrissey solo singles are still fine (I enjoyed the 2004ish comeback singles a bit at the time, but he started talking more and more given the opportunity). I'd disregarded R Kelly for 15 years after not liking She's Got That Vibe, got drawn in by ILM enthusiasm circa Trapped In The Closet episodes being YSIed off Chicago radio, still find lots his 2005-2007 run of "featuring" singles thrilling if I hear them, but cut off listening completely once I bothered to read up on his court cases and the accounts of people who'd stopped working for him. I could still read and marvel at Brendan McCarthy's 1980s comics with Peter Milligan if I was in the mood, and love Mad Max Fury Road, but will not reread his Doctor Strange comic or Vic Fluro collab.

It's also generally easier to separate the artist when the art isn't a deliberate communication of their attitudes.

Wait, what the fug has Brendan McCarthy done?!

I definitely think it's unfair to lump Thurston in with actual abusers and the like, but I also have a bit of a disappointed/instinctive "bleurgh" reaction when my mates go see him or sign to his record label or hang out with him or whatever. I think it's more like when your parents split up and you find out your dad had an affair - no, it's not unpardonable, but you were personally invested in that relationship and dad totally fucked it up, the bastard!

― emil.y, Friday, September 25, 2020 4:06 PM (thirty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm

OL, I assume this is what sic is referring to:

https://mindlessones.com/2013/11/09/flashback-to-fever-brendan-mccarthy-race-and-seeing-whats-in-front-of-your-face/

Hitchcock got weird and creepy toward actresses IRL late in his career, and women get treated weirdly and creepily more and more in his later films. It feels clammier to watch women being strangled in Frenzy than to see two specific characters suffering from the psychological obsession of the lead in Vertigo. But yr also more likely to rewatch the imperial period films because they're better, not just because you know the director was sending murdered toys of his leads to their daughters.

wish I shared this same ability to assign blame in the failed marriages of total strangers, it seems almost like a superpower

the thurston thing makes me think he's kind of a jerk and affects me to the extent that it makes me less interested in checking out any of his solo work, but on the other hand it doesn't really change my feelings about the work he did as a member of SY

successful marriage imo, they had decades together and made loads of great art during their partnership

The one that has hit me recently is Avi Buffalo. I really loved that first album in a way I've loved little else in the past decade and in a way that has pretty much ruled out continued listens, because I bought into the romance of it and now that's utterly sullied.

https://pitchfork.com/news/avi-buffalo-accused-of-rape-by-former-bandmate-music-pulled-by-sub-pop/

Sorry, that makes it sound like I'm the victim, not Rebecca Coleman, but you know what I mean.

"I basically agree about dworkin but she was just more complicated than her haters or fans usually admit"

she was a compelling writer. and a good one. whatever you think of her. i did learn from her. if anyone ever asks me where i learned to write i will say: oh i learned from the big three. hubert selby, jr - andrea dworkin - louis-ferdinand celine. haha! god help me. there is truth in it though. and i know how terrible celine was. i know i know. but that book did it hit me pretty hard when i was young and i know i must have stolen from it sub-consciously. and the other two as well. they are good role-models when you are uneducated. or an autodidact. or both.

I think figures like penny are important for demonstrating how artificial the punk vs hippie thing is (I know crass were called hippies at the time but it's more of a continuum than punks want to admit) however I feel like I've met a bunch of old posh hippies just like him and they often seem cool enough at first until you learn more about them and their views xp

I think of the Mentors sometimes, because there is an AVAIL VAPOR in a strip mall near my house, and the light up sign is such that it always reminded me of the lyrics that upset Tipper Gore so. It was so weird when the band with the weakest song on Mystic Sampler #1 was suddenly in the headlines.

the mentors. ugh.

― scott seward, Tuesday, May 14, 2024 12:54 PM (twelve minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

they have to be up there with the worst bands of all time, what a total pile of shit

Two days after being interviewed, Hoke died after being struck by a freight train while intoxicated. His death was alternately described as an accident and a suicide,[9] however, some conspiracy theorists have claimed there is evidence suggesting foul play.[10]

oh man the train was in on his death!

they still exist, apparently...I mistakenly thought Hoke's death was the end of it.

Table otm re dworkin … maybe it’s just being older, and remembering the AIDS epidemic (which set back sexual liberation, both queer and feminist) and older forms of conservatism at the time, the anti-sex attitudes of dworkin felt hella repressive at the time. I get where she’s coming from, but … horseshit

I am not a 100% hater … probably about on par with my AC sentiments… some of those song titles are pretty good. … Up there with my fave from 1000 Dying Rats “Free Jazz and Mumia”

Maybe rn there is a comedy hardcore band with a song called “Free Jazz and Palestine” idk

The thing with Dworkin is, she was insane. Granted, she was driven insane by some genuinely horrific incidents in her personal life, but...she was insane. So the good and valid points she made — and there were some — have to be gently and carefully fished out of the bubbling cauldron of crazy. That happens a lot.

Re Anal Cunt, their song titles making fun of other people in the metal and punk scenes were great. Their other song titles were...frequently less great.

And I agree with kate about GG — lotta photos and video out there of him letting other dudes suck his micropenis. (I saw him live; it looked like a pink bumblebee hovering in front of him as he ran around.)

I read yr HoF piece over the weekend fyi

No interest in listening to Anal Cunt ever, but it's nice that there was a band who released songs called "No We Don't Want to Do a Split 7 Inch With Your Stupid Fucking Band" and "I Got Athlete's Foot Showering at Mike's"

who was it who did the acoustic version of “I Kill Everything I Fuck”?

this was former ilxor joseph cotton, NYC musician iirc?

just in case there was a demand for an acoustic cover of "I Kill Everything I Fuck"

Being anti-pornography is being anti-woman, Dworkin sucks and is a reactionary

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

for me it's like, more complicated than that. a lot of heterosexual porn is genuinely fucking gross creepy shit. i am absolutely pro-porn, i am absolutely in favor of seeing trans women in porn because trans women are hot, and... ok i am bad at image embeds but i'm going to try it again

https://i.imgflip.com/8q1xjm.jpg

if that doesn't work you can try this:

https://imgflip.com/i/8q1xjm

i mean trans porn is _still_, like... i mean incredibly transphobic. the worst transphobia i've seen is trans porn. and occasionally i run across something that _isn't_ that and it's the hottest shit imaginable.

so no i'm anti-porn, i just don't think porn should get a free pass for shit that would be unacceptable anywhere else for reasons _other_ than explicit sexual content.

-

the mentors. ugh.

― scott seward

i mean perfect example el duce starts saying all this horseshit about courtney love killing kurt cobain and what the fuck? why? why is anybody listening to this shitstain of a human being?

-

The thing with Dworkin is, she was insane. Granted, she was driven insane by some genuinely horrific incidents in her personal life, but...she was insane. So the good and valid points she made — and there were some — have to be gently and carefully fished out of the bubbling cauldron of crazy. That happens a lot.

― Instead of create and send out, it pull back and consume (unperson)

well i mean again i think that's overly reductive, because like. you know, a lot of marginalized people suffer from trauma and sometimes that manifests as serious mental illness. so for instance dworkin was really influenced by shulamith firestone, and shulamith was, i mean, schizophrenic. me personally, i have also dealt in my life with serious mental illness, i've got some problems. i've seen some shit. and i take responsibility for, like, everything i say and do.

because there are people who want to dismiss that about me because, you know, transphobes will say that if you're autistic, you don't know what you're talking about, you can't be Really Trans. and i'm autistic, and a lot of us are autistic, and a lot of autistic people can act like kind of weird assholes sometimes, and when people act like weird assholes, whatever the reason, they're responsible for their behavior, and it doesn't, like, mean that we shouldn't be listened to or taken seriously.

so i'd rather hear someone saying that "dworkin sucks and is a reactionary" than that she was a "bubbling cauldron of crazy". saying she's a reactionary who sucks, to me, that's more respectful to her. i personally think it's more complicated than that, but for the most part, yeah, i think it's fair to say that she was a reactionary who sucked.

so no i'm anti-porn, i just don't think porn should get a free pass for shit that would be unacceptable anywhere else for reasons _other_ than explicit sexual content.

i'm _not_ anti-porn, i hate my habit of leaving out words that completely reverse the meaning of the sentence

lol @ porn jpg

kate, I freely admit that when I refer to porn, I refer to gay and queer porn almost exclusively. Other than some of the classics of the genre, I have never watched straight porn, and would never want to. I'm not against it, tho.

I was the editor of a porn magazine for five years in the early 2000s. At one point the bosses wanted to include more mainstream-ish editorial content, believing for some reason that they could grab some "lad mag" readers if they offered entertainment and lifestyle-ish features. So I interviewed Lemmy and Abel Ferrara (not at the same time, unfortunately), and hired Jim Goad to write a couple of articles — one was about his time in prison, and I forget what the other one was about. The idea was short-lived, but the interviews were a lot of fun.

We brought a photographer and two models to the Lemmy interview, which took place at a Times Square club owned by the WWF; when the women started taking their clothes off and crawling into Lemmy's lap, the WWF publicist in attendance lost her shit. I had to go into a nearby office with her and promise that no WWF logos would appear in any of the shots, and that we would just say we'd met up with Lemmy "in NYC" and not identify the venue. Seven years later, I was interviewing him again, live onstage at SXSW, and backstage beforehand I mentioned, "Hey, I don't know if you remember this, but I interviewed you one other time in New York, with two girls..." and he laughed and said, "Oh, I remember."

(Also: after the interview was over, the models hung around with the band while the photographer and I headed into the venue to watch the show. About an hour later, one of them called the photographer and said, "You need to come get us — they're doing crystal meth back here.")

instances where you can't separate the artist from their crystal meth vs. instances where you can

Wrestling or Wildlife?

Wrestling. I think the panda people would have been fine with everything that went on.

When I interviewed Abel Ferrara, I met him at his apartment/office, but he wanted to do it at a bodega down the block for some reason, so we — me, him, and a very mobbed-up looking dude he introduced as his financier — went there, and as soon as we walked in the owner started screaming at him; apparently, Ferrara had been 86'd from the bodega the previous week for reasons I couldn't get clarification on. But I explained that we were just there to have a conversation, and we would be good, and we sat at a tiny table in the back and Ferrara drank three 40 oz. bottles of Budweiser in a half hour while I asked him questions.

I would greatly enjoy a thread consisting only of these types of stories from you and any other person who has similar.

Wait the wrestling people weren’t cool with hot naked chicks in a dude’s lap??? I could see the panda people being not ok

Wait the wrestling people weren’t cool with hot naked chicks in a dude’s lap??? I could see the panda people being not ok

That was a surprise to me, too. If it had been two oily dudes in posing pouches and boots, we might have been OK...

corpsefucker was one of the sweetest, kindest, most compassionate men i've ever known.

that's not a bit. that's not me being ironic. i mean that completely literally. he genuinely was.

he was a guy who posted on usenet back in the day, i don't know. he had a couple characters he did, corpsefucker was one of them. i never met him, but i did get to know the guy who made those posts on a personal level, and he was just, i don't know, a fantastic human being, the biggest heart.

the thing i remember about the posts he made - and maybe the memory cheats - but there were a lot of people back in those days, and on the early days of ilx too, saying some vicious, cruel stuff. i said a lot of vicious, cruel stuff. i was miserable, i hated myself, and i took it out on other people. the thing about corpsefucker is that, for all the shit he said, he was never _cruel_. this is what inspired me most about him, is that he was a _genuinely happy person_.

he was a happy person despite having been through some pretty fucked up shit. this isn't a secret, this is something he was open about - he was a CSA victim. and that doesn't... i mean that isn't an _explanation_ for any of this "corpsefucker" stuff in the way that people might think of it, like, oh, ok, somebody did something bad to him so he does "bad things". for me the whole point, what i took from it at least, is that you can say and do stuff outside the "norm" and not be a miserable person who treats other people like shit. he encouraged me to explore stuff that i'd been afraid to explore, stuff that was outside of the norm in ways that were, i don't know, personal, vulnerable. i don't let my regrets define my life, but i do have a lot of them, and one of them was that corpsefucker wasn't around when i came out. he would have been _so fucking happy_ for me.

idk. i guess what i'm saying is that i don't feel like i _need_ to separate the man i knew from "corpsefucker", that i can _call_ him "corpsefucker". that i can say in all honesty that corpsefucker was one of the sweetest, kindest, most compassionate men i've ever known. i miss him.