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

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.

Only similar case for me is Crystal Castles but the fact Alice Glass is the singer makes them not so hard to carry on listening to (not that I do very often).

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'.

Not by much imo

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

I'm probably a bad person for this thread, though, because I can't think of any instances where I am unable to separate the art from the artist.

Spirit Counsel was really good btw.

Lotta willful obtuseness goin on itt wrt the purview as stated in the thread title.

xposts

More like Marriage Counsel, amirite.

Anyway, I've talked about this so much elsewhere (in relation to metal, primarily) that I'd rather not shit up this thread with my Opinion, but I will say that explicitly white supremacist lyrics are a dealbreaker for me. Otherwise, I find it quite easy to distinguish between the two.

2xp

I responded to the question raised by the thread title!

explicitly white supremacist lyrics are a dealbreaker for me

But lyrics are part of the art, not the artist.

Sure, but they explicitly de-artify the art by using it as a vehicle for heinous propaganda.

Whenever that happens, the implication always seems to be: 'listen to what *I*, enlightened citizen X, have to say about this pressing political matter'.

Which isn't to say that the work of art vanishes in the process, it just becomes more difficult to separate the artist from their art than it might be otherwise.

I agree but what I mean is that being unable to listen to something because of the lyrics does not reflect an inability to separate the art from the artist. It is rejecting the art because of one aspect of the artwork itself.

Unless you mean that it makes you unable to listen to anything else by the artist, even if it is instrumental or has non-racist lyrics.

I don't listen to "One in a Million" but the racist lyrics on that song don't get in the way of listening to "Sweet Child o' Mine".

I see what you're saying, but I suppose I view that aspect of the artwork as the artist's non-artistic message, which is bound up with whoever the artist happens to be (as a public figure, at least).

2xp and no, it doesn't have a bearing on whether I'm able to listen to their other works.

Terrific stuff, Sund4r and pom. This is exactly what I alluded to earlier when I said that *I personally* would understand why anyone would just stop listening to an act if they made the political or agenda into their entire art. Am I able to say, "Hey these lyrics about hating Black people are just words in a song and this has a solid groove, so whatevs"? No, I'm not able to personally do that.

Sorry. Work has been busy today. Just wanted to pop back in with a few more things. . .

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.

― OrificeMax (Old Lunch), Friday, September 25, 2020 1:02 PM

Thank you for this. And I'd like to add that my initial post drew the comparison with Thurston and Miles because of the obvious contradiction in my thoughts about those two people. Miles was much more prolific and violent in his abuse than Thurston was (in his relatively harmless by comparison) cheating on his wife. And yet: I give Miles' music the pass — WHY? <-this was my whole thought on starting a topic like this. I don't have the answer, I just wantd to discuss with you fine folks in the hopes that maybe someone could relate. So, thank you all.

(also, idk why "adultery" it's not like that's a favorite vocabulary word or anything; it's just the word I used at that moment, no extra thought behind it)

(and no, I was not raised in an especially strict or religious family — but there was rampant infidelity on both sides with my parents in their various dealings)

And, finally:

Which fulltone is it? ;)

― 📺👁️ (peace, man), Friday, September 25, 2020 11:51 AM

lol the Supa Trem Jr. It's such a killer tremolo and that's an effect I use all the time. I wanted to be all badass when that stuff first came out and smash it with a sledgehammer. . . but dammit, that's a solid trem! Like I said, I know I could get a similar one from somebody else, but I've had it for about two years now and I just vibe with it, so it's hard to think of parting with it. Besides, I had an Earthquaker Devices sticker that was the perfect size to cover it up, so I think that's funny enough to merit its' keeping by itself lol.

Thanks for expanding on that, Austin, and apologies if I came across as aggressive (likewise to OL). I guess you could say that I've always taken 'Kill Yr. Idols' to heart, so I expect nothing from artists other than quality art – I'd almost invariably come out disappointed otherwise.

Or shunning him.

Liberal thread

Shut the fuck up

well that's us told

Liberal thread

― CerebralCaustic, Saturday, February 18, 2023 5:52 AM

OP here. am very relieved you made this clear because i was starting to worry folks might think i was becoming a fascist. PHEW — glad that's sorted!

altrenately—

Liberal thread

― CerebralCaustic, Saturday, February 18, 2023 5:52 AM

found chris brown's sock ya'll

"altrenately" is an alternate spelling kind of like color vs colour y'know.

we liberals are poor typists =(

xpost to beato/youtubers you dig:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnivNajzZ1E
fd signifier - "when you can't separate the art from the artist" (video essay, 2024)

(fd doesn't exclusively do music topics, but is excruciatingly otm when he does)

#onethread

sry that opening phrase should have been a link to here.