This is all really part of larger discussion about how to separate art from politics though, right? And that's a question I've never personally been able to come up with an easy answer for.
I mean, it's easy for me to boycott the music of the odious Ted Nugent because I didn't listen to him anyway. And the racist comments of Jay Electronica or that young country singer who has been in the news don't really outrage me b/c I had never heard their names before their comments broke.
But how am I supposed to feel when I listen to GnR "Lies" and "One in a Million" comes on? In my dumber teenage years, I tried to convince myself that it was a perfectly realized vehicle for distilling the angry and disaffected feelings of a "small-town white boy," i.e. art. Now I realize Axl was just an ignorant bigot and it's no wonder Vernon Reid wanted to beat his ###. Is it OK to enjoy GnR? Should I skip "One in a Million," even in private?
What about when Professor Griff got booted from Public Enemy for a lot of the same stuff Jay Electronica espouses. Do I throw away my PE records now?
On the flip side, I can remember a lot of meathead fascists I worked with at various restaurants loving Rage Against the Machine. I could never quite process how one could profess to love a band whose politics were central to their existence yet abhor or their actual beliefs. Of course, maybe they were just idiots and never realized who "#### you I won't do what you tell me" was directed at.
Sorry to ramble - this was my poor attempt at channeling Rock...
No sweat about rambling. You channeled the issues better than you think. I can only hope I channel them like that.
Your distinction between what an artist says and what the work says is an important one. How to separate the artist from the art is an age-old question, one that was considered even in antiquity. But this is slightly different. It's close to along the lines of G N' R.
Electronica raps about being a Five Percenter, a Nation Of Islam member, and weaves Farrakhan audio clips into the album itself, much like G N'R espoused its beliefs three decades or so ago. They are not like G N' R in that the clips do not bait Jewish people, but using a person whose group is considered a "hate group," whatever that means, is suspect, especially if his voice winds up in the middle and in the introduction to your latest sound recording as an authoritative voice and role model.
It's tough. The OP reaches for
even more than that, though. We continue, in the media and in all walks of life, to give truck to Farrakhan because he speaks to the seemingly oppressed within our society. When a race and culture has been thoroughly degraded and denigrated like American blacks were due to slavery, any uplifting message is key and valued, and Farrakhan provides that in part of his teachings. Where he clearly runs afoul is the hateful rhetoric directed at Jews and whites. How do we separate that out? It proves more controversial and difficult, it seems, than separating out the artist from the art.
Do we need to separate that out? I don't necessarily know the answer. My answer to most things is "Yes, we do." I can separate out Thomas Jefferson's benevolence and greatness out from the fact that he was a slaveholder. I can do that intellectually and spiritually come away with good conscience. We learn from history. Yet Farrakhan has history at his disposal and the quotes being used by the artists, away from their recordings, are his most hateful. And they're creeping into their mainstream recordings, the hateful bits. Not overtly, but enough to get these ears perked up, and I'm not Jewish.
So what to do about that?
That's the question, and I don't think the media has dealt with it fairly. The complexity of the issue is whitewashed with the brush of that which seeks inoffensiveness. That is what I'm really getting at. An honest discussion is not to be had.
