Similar to the recent question about artists where you can successfully separate them from their art. Are there any artists who did something so horrible, so despicable, that it has instantly invalidated all art that they have had any part in?
Kanye. Piece of shit narcissist through and through.
It was always funny watching him talk about Jesus in his songs as though his lifestyle didn’t promote everything Christ went against.
And of course, the next generation sucked it up like a sponge.
Lost Prophets. Lead singer fucked babies.
I honestly believe that if you’re convicted of shit like this the band should be able to sue to have your rights to royalties and any songwriting/producing credits revoked. Even if they have to surrender any monetary outcome to the victims or their families.
I know I loved the band growing up and the band have tried to separate themselves from the singer, but how can you? The music is still good but it can’t avoid leaving a bad feeling knowing he used the fame generated by the shared music for such heinous thing
It would make it a bit easier for people who can if you knew that the scumbag wasnt getting royalty cheques anymore.
Ian Watkins is a fucking extreme example, but imagine putting in a dozen years of your life and career, your art and passion into a band and its catalogue only for the lead singer to make it absolutely radioactive.
Hmm not a lawyer but I wonder if there might be some old law about this. Kinda feel like there is one since it’s retroactive.
Omfg. I’m a big slippery slope, legal precedent, kind of guy. But this demands capital punishment if not castration/sterilization. Just make them laws for one day for this dude. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-25108439
I’m convinced he’s not all there. Dude was talking about what he’s going to do when he gets out of prison. He doesn’t seem to understand they’re going to wheel him out on a trolley.
whenever I see a meme with art from stonetoss (a neo-nazi) in it, I have a visceral response
Damn, source on the neo nazi thing? It’s usually just memes that I’ve seen with his content, now I’m wondering what he really draws about.
Hitler
That guy is literally Hitler.
Heard he killed Hitler though
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“DJ” Khalid. I’ve heard that he’s actually a very talented musician. I’ve never been shown proof that the claims are true.
I’ve heard he’s a crappy musician but he’s good at getting clashing personalities to work together.
He like Mozart^2
John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren & Stimpy. That man is a demon.
Didn’t know all this about him. Not surprised. It was so gross, God knows how it informed our development. It’s really uncomfortable to watch as an adult. And my goodness - did you watch the adult version when they brought it back years ago? Jfc
JK Rowling. Fuck Harry Potter.
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For anyone thinking about listening to this podcast, it still platforms a lot of her crazy ideas. The following excerpt is from near the end of this article.
March 2023: A new podcast, The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, produced by Bari Weiss’s The Free Press and hosted by prominent former Westboro Baptist Church member Megan Phelps-Roper, featured interviews with Rowling. In its fifth episode, Rowling begins discussing the modern trans rights movement, calling it “a cultural movement that was illiberal in its methods and questionable in its ideas” and insisting, “I believe, absolutely, that there is something dangerous about this movement and that it must be challenged.” She then compares the movement to Death Eaters — the villainous supremacists in her books, analogous to Nazis…
Bari Weiss is not someone to give your time to so thanks for posting that. Nearly everything she writes now is dishonest and she pretends to espouse liberal ideas while constantly taking conservative positions and then calling herself a “left-leaning centrist”. It’s hot garbage.
I listened to the podcast. The interviewer doesn’t challenge Rowling at all and simply lets her speak/answer with her incorrect assumptions. However it also shined a light on how badly thought out her ideas are and how informed she is, not by empathy, but by her own prejudice. After listening, I became even more confident in my opinion of Rowling.
I also think it’s worth a listen is you can swallow your bile for the first few episodes.
Ian Watkins, lead singer of the band Lostprophets. Never read the court transcripts of his crimes, they really are that horrible and will ruin you for some time.
Exactly who I thought of.
Why would I try to do so in the first place?
Imagine someone telling you “you have to separate the product from the corporation. Yes, they lobby to permit slave labour and are directly funding the genocide in Palestine, but they make one fine chicken sandwich - and if you don’t put down your silly objections to focus on that, you have failed as a human being”.
Fuck that, fuck everything about that.
Art is political. Fiction doubly so. You cannot and should not try to rip art free from its cultural context, because that context is the perspective that gives it meaning in the first place.
And extra-splintery fuck the idea that the onus is on the audience to sweep everything under the carpet for horrible people.
We’re in no danger of running out of art. We have an unlimited supply of artists just waiting for a break in the canopy to sprout up and grow into something new and exciting. If a handful of toxic assholes get canceled despite being popular, then so much the better.
Right except we can’t apply this evenly. You can go right now to any big museum, see elegant wood carvings from like 800 years ago, and we know nothing about the artist except his name. How do you know he wasn’t a murdering psychopath? You don’t. What you do know is Rowling said some shit on Twitter. We are holding more modern work to a higher standard compared to older work simply because we can document the lives of modern artists better. If you can’t enforce a moral principle with anything resembling consistent application I question how good it is.
Also comparing it to Chick-fil-A is bullshit.
A good moral principle is ‘don’t do things that needlessly harm people’, but unintended consequences are everywhere. By delaying a passerby two seconds while you give a homeless guy $5, you might end up causing them to get hit by a garbage truck that would otherwise have missed them.
You can’t enforce the principle consistently, but that doesn’t make it worthless; you give it a good-faith, best-effort go, and that’s all you can do. If your best efforts turn out to be disastrous, that’s shitty, but life’s unfair like that.
Also, whatever else was going on with the person 800 years ago, JK is right now causing ongoing harm in her relentless campaign of hatred for trans people. Waving her IP around is promoting her cause, and so harming more people, right now.
If nobody knows whether the 800-years-ago guy was a piece of shit or not, then promoting their work isn’t supporting some piece-of-shit cause and harming people.
As for chicken sandwiches - without explaining why you think my analogy was inapt, calling it bullshit is no more of a slam-dunk rebuttal than if I called you a poopoohead.
Entity X makes product Y and does shitty horrible thing Z. By being a product-Y fanboi and promoting Y all over the internet, you’re expressing approval for X and condoning Z (at least enough to cut them slack for it).
What difference does it make whether Y is a media IP or a food product?
Fine your analogy is in apt because you can get a fried chicken sandwich anywhere. It isnt exactly intellectual property.
Also you are muddling the difference between not being all knowing with not being consistent. Not the same thing at all.
Don’t muddy the water: you were talking specifically about chick-fil-A, even though I was using it as a generic example of a product people might get attached to. The ‘separate the art from the artist’ crowd would have you ignore any unpleasantness on the part of the producer, so long as the product is enjoyable in isolation - and hold it a moral failing not to do so.
And your entire point was that you couldn’t be consistent because you werne’t all-knowing; not knowing the character of your 800-year-old artist is no different in this instance from not knowing the future: to perfectly apply the principle would require full knowledge of every situation where it could possibly apply (which is of course impossible). This does not, I contend, render the principle, or attempts to apply it as consistently as your knowledge allows, worthless.
Do better, and try again.
Marlon Brando
After hearing from Maria Schneider, and confirmed by Bertolucci, how he and Brando treated her filming the rape scenes in Last Tango my Brando crush instantly withered on the vine. She was only 19.
I still listen to Michael Jackson but I won’t listen to R Kelly.
Well to be fair one was found guilty in a court of law and the other (I don’t believe but feel free to correct me) didn’t even have a criminal case brought against him.
Well, one’s alive and the other isn’t. As long as the inheritors of MJ’s estate are decent people, I think it’s fine at this point. Still skeeves me out to listen to his stuff, though. Two verses in and my brain is popping.
As far as I’m aware none of MJs accusers still say he did anything, and nearly all of them say their parents pressured them to say stuff he didn’t do for a settlement. He was definitely a weird guy but you look at his upbringing and it was trauma after trauma by adults exploiting him for money.
If it was one kid? I’d have doubts. Once it passed into double digits? Nope.
If there is one accusation still active, sure. But every single case I’ve heard of, the family withdrew and admitted they were looking for a cash settlement.
George W. Bush
What art had he done?
Underground bukkake performance stuff
Roman Polanski and by extension Jack Nicholson
Wait, what’s up with Jack Nicholson?
Polanski’s known crime happened AT Jack Nicholson’s home. Nicholson tooooootally didn’t know about any of it.
Ian Watkins. Leaf singer of Lost Prophets.
Convicted baby rapist.
