📚 Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma

I recently finished reading Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Dederer, a wonderful exploration of the question of ‘what do we do with great art by bad people?’

It’s a perennial topic. It comes up in conversation at our monthly Album Club all the time. Is there something about society — us — somehow weighing the quality of the work against the wrongdoing of the artist, reaching a verdict of whether the art can still be enjoyed?

The book explores different angles through a number of public figures: Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Michael Jackson, J. K. Rowling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wagner, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Vladimir Nabokov (wrote fiction about monsters, with no evidence that he actually was one), Carl Andre, Ana Mendieta (died after falling from her apartment window during an argument with her husband, the aforementioned Carl Andre), Doris Lessing, Joni Mitchell, Valerie Solanas, Sylvia Plath, Raymond Carver and Miles Davis.

As much as the book is about problematic characters, it is also about the audience and each person’s response to an artist’s work:

Consuming a piece of art is two biographies meeting: the biography of the artist that might disrupt the viewing of the art; the biography of the audience member that might shape the viewing of the art. This occurs in every case.

For me, wrestling with the question of whether you can separate the art from the artist has mainly been in the context of listening to music. Artists I’ve enjoyed, artists I’ve loved; when I read about something that they have done, hearing the music will never be the same experience again. Ryan Adams is someone whose work I had been enjoying exploring over a long period of time. His album Cold Roses contains an incredible set of songs which I had been playing a lot back in 2018. Around that time, according to Wikipedia:

…The New York Times reported that seven women (including Phoebe Bridgers and ex-wife Mandy Moore) said Adams offered to assist them with their music careers, then pursued the women romantically. They also claimed that Adams retaliated when they spurned his advances, hindering their careers and harassing them in text messages and on social media.

BBC News has a broader summary:

Several women have accused alternative rock star Ryan Adams of emotional and verbal abuse and offering career opportunities as a pretext for sex.

A report in the New York Times, external outlines a pattern of manipulative behaviour, including accusations of psychological abuse from his ex-wife, Mandy Moore.

Another woman said Adams sent explicit texts and exposed himself during a Skype call when she was a teenager.

The star, who rose to fame in the early 2000s, has denied the allegations.

I don’t think I’ve played that record since. I can’t hear the music without immediately thinking about the artist, and then about the stories surrounding him. I get annoyed that I can’t enjoy the music that I loved, but then feel guilty as I know that the pleasure that I’m denied is petty relative to the experience of the people that he has hurt and damaged.

A similar thing happened a little while later with accusations against Mark Morriss, lead singer of The Bluetones. The band’s music had been very important to me since my university days. My weeknotes tell me that I’d bought a box set of their first album in October 2021, a few months before these accusations appeared. I read the accusations with a sinking heart. Given how the scales of society are tipped, my instinct is to believe the woman’s side of the story. Morriss eventually posted a response. Who knows what actually happened? Again, I haven’t played their records since.

Despite not reaching for these albums, I find myself playing mind gymnastics with what would be ok. If I have a vinyl record and I play their music in my own house, just to myself, is that better than listening to them on Spotify where the play counts get registered and they receive a teeny bit of financial reward for my listen? Does it matter if my plays are recorded on last.fm for the world to see? What about records that they recorded at the start of their career, before the alleged offences?

Dederer’s book introduces the concept of ’the stain’, where something that someone has done at a point in their life colours to everything before and after it.

The stain begins with an act, a moment in time, but then it travels from that moment, like a tea bag steeping in water, coloring the entire life. It works its way forward and backward in time. The principle of retroactivity means that if you’ve done something sufficiently asshole-like, it follows that you were an asshole all along.

I loved the exploration of ‘the stain’ through a text message from the author’s friend:

These shortcomings of the word “monster” were clarified to me one day when I was messaging with a historian and music critic friend about the Michael Jackson problem. He wrote (in a telegraphic message-language that seemed elegant to me): i am currently trying to do the aesthetico-moral calculus thing re. MJ’s music, like, is the Jackson 5 stuff okay? oh but then in a different sense that also involved child abuse or exploitation too—michael himself. how about the ‘don’t stop til you get enough’, ‘rock with you’ era—surely he wasn’t at it then? but does the stain work its way backwards through time? I expect in practice it’ll be hard to resist the pull of the music when you hear it out and about.

Whether the stain seeps backwards and forwards in time through an artist’s work depends on the individual that is experiencing or interacting with it. Many people will hear Michael Jackson on the radio and not give it a second thought. Conversely, I’ve also been at an event where people have shouted to have his music turned off when it turned up on a playlist.

Jackson’s case fascinates me. From what I can make out, the release of the documentary film Leaving Neverland in the first week of March 2019, in which Jackson was accused of sexual abuse of two young boys, resulted many radio stations around the world removing his songs from their playlists. From Wikipedia:

Leaving Neverland led to a media backlash against Jackson. Commentators suggested Jackson’s music could fall from favor, similarly to the work of convicted child sexual abuser Gary Glitter. […] All Cogeco-owned radio stations in Canada pulled Jackson’s music from their playlists […] NH Radio in the Netherlands and MediaWorks New Zealand, New Zealand Media and Entertainment and Radio New Zealand also pulled Jackson’s music […] A 1991 episode of The Simpsons guest-starring Jackson, “Stark Raving Dad”, was pulled from circulation; the co-writer, Al Jean, said he believed Jackson had used the episode to groom boys for sexual abuse. A London concert produced by Jackson’s collaborator Quincy Jones removed Jackson’s name and album titles from its advertisements; the organizers said the modified artwork reflected the show’s inclusion of Jones’s repertoire unrelated to his work with Jackson. “Weird Al” Yankovic dropped his parodies of Jackson’s music from his Strings Attached Tour.

Lawsuits between the Jackson estate and HBO, the distributor of the documentary, followed throughout 2019 and into 2020. Putting aside whether the allegations of the film are true or not, I find it interesting that the popularity of Jackson’s work increased at the time of the film’s release. Wikipedia again:

Despite the negative publicity, Jackson’s honors were not rescinded, as had happened following sexual assault allegations made against Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, and there were no mass calls to stop playing his music, as had happened following allegations against Gary Glitter and R. Kelly. Jackson’s combined music sales, including his work with the Jackson 5, increased by 10%. Streams of his music and videos increased by 6%, rising from 18.7 million between February 24 and 26 to 19.7 million between March 3 and 5. His videos were viewed 22.1 million times, an increase of roughly 1.2 million from the week prior, and three of his albums re-entered the UK iTunes chart.

Is there something about the collective perception of the quality of the work that repels the stain? Can we ‘separate the art from the artist’ if the art is good enough to warrant it?

Dederer discusses how the public perception of someone — usually male — as a ‘genius’ is sometimes sufficient for them to have their stain diminished or ignored. Some of the acts described in the book, such as Picasso stubbing out a cigarette on his partner’s face, or the details of Hemingway being “a hitter, a beater-upper, an insulter”, are shocking to read. I had never heard about them before, perhaps because the stains had been sufficiently erased by the perceived weight of their respective works.

The author then spends time examining herself. She asks whether she is a monster, even in part, mainly for working while she has children. “This is what female monstrousness looks like: abandoning the kids. Always.” I read this part of the book in my hotel room when I was on a two-week business trip, having left my wife back in the UK to run the household. The circumstance was not lost on me.

My friend was intimating something about the continuum of abandonment. There’s a spectrum. Here are some ways to be judged an abandoner of children:

Shut the home office or studio door against the child

Depend on the other parent to do the lion’s share of the childcare

Let a grandparent or a nanny or a babysitter watch the child

Put the child in day care

Go away for work for days or weeks or months at a time

Get a divorce and let the other parent have majority custody

Give the child to your parents to raise

Flee the family home

And perhaps: give the child up for adoption at birth

Add your own! The thing is, each of us can draw a line across the page at any point on this list, and say: Here. Here is where abandonment begins. Where is that line for you? Day care? Surrendering custody? Flight? Why is that the line, for you? Is it an ethical thought, or a moral feeling?

Please note that none of these behaviors count as abandonment if practiced by men. This is extra-true if the men in question are artists. As Jenny Diski so rightly points out: men do this all the time.

There is definitely truth to this. Generally, I get to go to a room and work without being disturbed. This isn’t a luxury afforded to women in equal measure.

I love the author’s writing style, which made the book a joy to read and contemplate. It’s stuck with me since I finished it and sparked some interesting conversations with friends.

Although the book focuses on artists, similar questions can be raised of monsters in other fields. If you think Elon Musk is a monster, should you never buy or use one of his products? Will you never own a Tesla or use Starlink as your Internet service provider? Perhaps the choice is more clear-cut when there is a financial transaction involved. Buying another Bluetones or Ryan Adams album feels like a bigger step than listening to records that I already own.

It was interesting to hear my two favourite information security podcasts talk about Cloudflare. In March 2019, Risky Business had an episode that was literally called Stop giving Cloudflare Money, protesting that the company was continuing to help keep an awful website live that had been used to post links to the live stream of a mass shooting in New Zealand. Fellow antipodean Troy Hunt’s weekly podcast had mentioned Cloudflare many times; he had also written extensively about how he has used their technology to optimise his services in fascinating, clever ways. From memory, Hunt made no mention of the story on his podcast. I don’t know what the right answer is — drop the Cloudflare service and do things a different way or continue to use it — but I remember at the time being fascinated by the contrast between the two podcasts.

What about the people you work with who have done something terrible in their personal lives? What about family members? Dederer asks this question and answers it:

We’ve all loved terrible people. How do I know this? Because I know people, and people are terrible.

[…]

What do we do about the terrible people in our lives? Mostly we keep loving them.

Back to the point at the start of the book — it is always two biographies meeting, in every case. How we feel about a particular person and their work isn’t just about them alone, but about us as well.