Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2021/01/18/bbc-apologizes-for-its-headline-about-phil-spectors-death.html
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Bingo.
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I would have made a joke about the British penchant for understatement, but the first impulse every MSM outlet in the West had was to downplay his violent and homicidal misogyny.
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The BBC can burn in hell, right alongside Spector.
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Perhaps “Famous murderer dies in prison after enjoying a lifetime of privilege”?
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That picture is the human incarnation of The Cryptkeeper!
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The phrasing of the BBC’s article – and others like it – were “a reflection of how a man’s ‘genius’ is often viewed as more important than a woman’s humanity,” said columnist Arwa Mahdawi.
Yeah, but, I think BBC would have used the same phrasing if Spector’s victim had been male.
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How NY Times music critic Harold Schonberg described Wagner: “Amoral, hedonistic, selfish, virulently racist, arrogant, filled with gospels of the superman … and the superiority of the German race, he stands for all that is unpleasant in human character,”
How Leonard Bernstein explained his love for Wagner: “I hate Wagner — on my knees.”
Art can be so infuriating.
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Apparently assholes can and do create art. And many (or at least some) who create memorable art are not assholes. Can we recognize the achievement without regarding its creator?
The more germane question is should we.
For instance, at one time I loved the Usual Suspects staring Kevin Spacey. Now I have no interest in seeing his smarmy, predatory face or any “art” associated with it.
Far too many abusers (almost always men) are given free license because they are too “valuable” to art, commerce, sport, governance or society in some other way to punish or restrain. I think seeking to recognize achievements without regarding the creators is a way to retroactively enshrine that injustice.
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My local paper ran the Associated Press headline (and story, which puts the murder in the first sentence) without change.
I think this description is…dead on.
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In general we do too much whitewashing of dead people. If someone dies as the victim of crime their obituary always makes them out to be a saint who was just on the verge of curing cancer.
Or alternatively if they are a victim of the police then the thin blue line posers will dig up every skeleton in their closet to justify their delusions.
How about just honoring who they actually were.
Our reluctance to think of Spector’s music as a kind of torture porn gets at the problem with the moral leeway we allow when we anoint artistic geniuses. The abuse, when it occurs, becomes inseparable from the art; indeed, the art serves to redeem the abuse, often even among the abused.
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OMG, I’d never heard of the song mentioned in the NYT article, “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)”, that he produced in 1962. Just disgusting.
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Sadly, casual misogyny in popular music was par for the course then as it is now.
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Even You’ve lost that loving feeling takes on a threatening tone.
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“Wall of Sound Meets Lake of Fire” would have saved them some column inches.
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I wanted to see if that was true, but it seems that ‘genius’ men who kill people kill women.
The closest I could find was Aaron Hernandez, but his death was while there was still lots in the current news cycle about murder charges, and even so, the article was more about his violence that his abilities.
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I found this one for Jeffrey Epstein
Again, it’s the job rather than the underage human trafficking.
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Right, where the victims are girls and women.
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