Yeah. My parents learned a couple of years ago that as you age you become more vulnerable to persuasion and being taken advantage of. They sequestered a few things to make sure no one else got their hands on it. My dad passed last year. Thankfully my mom has thus far not gone down any rabbit holes she wasn’t already occupying.
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Bah, what an idiot! Doesn’t he know that you need to get the vaccine in order to receive 5G signal nowadays?
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If Wynton can forgive him for that, so can I.
But the vaccine stuff, that’s current. Yikes. And van the man too. I guess you can be a good musician and still be a moron.
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“Slowhand” was Clapton’s nickname, not an insult some “15-year-old” just made up.
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That’s a bit of an assumption, and not the only one you’ve made in your comment.
Welcome to Boing Boing, btw.
Um…
One Black person individually “forgiving” a bigot for their racism is highly irrelevant, as Black people are NOT a freaking monolith.
Now that I know Clapton is one of those aforementioned bigots, he can kick rocks barefoot as far as I am concerned.
ETA:
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Layla also stands out for the beautiful coda, and the origin of that is really sad, although in that case it is not Eric Clapton but Jim Gorgon responsible. He stole it from Rita Coolidge, who had been his girlfriend until he assaulted her. Edit: The song it was originally for is Time.
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I remember from one of those documentaries, VH1 or something, where someone called Clapton and said he’d seen Steve Winwood singing in a bar. He said something like “Hey, I just saw this white kid that sounds just like Ray Charles”.
It kinda summed up the thinking of music business types at the time, I think.
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Great, thanks. I hope it rains this weekend, because guess what I’m going to be doing?
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Most of the people who would come to the defence of Clapton tend to go silent when Gary Glitter is brought up in the same conversation.
The BBC described Glitter’s fall from grace as “dramatic” and “spectacular”.[9] The late 1990s saw his image become irreparably tarnished, following his 1997 arrest and 1999 conviction in the United Kingdom for downloading thousands of items of child pornography.[10] He was also charged at the same time, but acquitted, of sexual activity with an underage girl in the 1970s. Later, Glitter faced criminal charges and deportation from several countries in connection with actual and suspected child sexual abuse. He was deported from Cambodia on suspected child sexual abuse charges in 2002. After he settled in Vietnam, a Vietnamese court found him guilty of obscene acts with minors in 2006.[11] After serving his sentence, Glitter was deported back to the UK where he was placed on the Sex Offenders’ Register for life. In October 2012, he was arrested again as part of Operation Yewtree.[12] He was released on bail, but was eventually charged, in June 2014, with historical child sex offences. On 5 February 2015, he was found guilty of attempted rape, four counts of indecent assault, and one of having sex with a girl under the age of 13 between 1975 and 1980.[13] On 27 February 2015, he was sentenced to a total of 16 years in prison.[14]
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It takes a special kind of abhorrent muthafucka to defend child porn and people who get off on raping kids…
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It does show that there is a point where “cancel culture” is almost universal. No one would even think about defending Gary Glitter now. We just have higher standards than the people who would defend Eric Clapton even when they are shown the evidence he is an arsehole.
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I mean it’s not like people en masse defended Glitter though. While “the leader of the gang” did have a significant support, he was also pretty hated in the UK, to the point that Channel 4 aired a “trial balloon” movie called “The Execution Of Gary Glitter” where they literally put him on trial and hanged him and then asked the public what they thought about bringing back the death penalty for him.
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I’m never using that phrase, not even ironically or sarcastically.
Like Levar Burton told McCain’s spawn, it’s just that there’s now some negative consequences for people who have never before been held accountable for their bad behavior.
One would hope that’s the case, anyway.
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People, a lot of people, knew about Cosby, Savile, Glitter, and Bowie for a long time without speaking out. Many people turned on Clapton back in the 70s – Enoch Powell and all that; many others turned a blind eye.
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That’s the point. Hardly anyone did.
Something changed in the last 25 years that means that it doesn’t matter how awful someone is, there will always be a brigade defending them.
Agreed
Or was it that those who spoke out were silenced and blackballed? Especially with someone like Savile, who had the support of the Conservative party in the 1980s. There was no equivalent to Rock Against Racism to stand up for the victims.
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This stuff is silly. I’m not a massive Clapton fan, but he was a phenomenal guitarist (obviously).
It really ruins valid points about bad behavior, when people suddenly pretend the bad actor’s legendary work is terrible (see also, Woody Allen and Roman Polanski).
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There was always a brigade defending them.
Now that brigade can get on facebook, twitter, instagram, pintrest, and whatever else, and alogrithms intent on “increasing engagement” will drop those people in front of you in confrontational means, because that means you “increase engagement.” And then 24/7 news channels, devoid of real news to fill the time, reports on outrage to … ready? Increase engagement.
These people were always there. They’ve always been there. That’s what’s happened in the last 25 years, people found out how to make money off them.
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Gary Glitter would have been one of the first stories on BBC News 24 when it started.
As for the outrage cycle, as a member of one of the regular target groups (transgender people) I know all about it. You did miss out the DARVO, where the victims become the offenders and the offenders become the victims.
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it was more than half a century ago, before most people alive today were born
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