I mean Elvis was in the Korean War in 1960, but basically the rest of the early rockers were playing “Black blues music”. What do you think Rock and Roll is? The fact that Clapton somehow managed to convince people that he was the first white guy to be stealing from African Americans is hardly a point in his favor. The British Invasion was successful largely because it was a way to sell “Black blues music” to a racist American public. The fact that Clapton was able to take advantage of this is still not a point in his favor.
He wasn’t and didn’t. As a member of the Yardbirds and Bluesbreakers he was a “junior” member of the bands. Perhaps if you were looking for the first non-Black British blues player you could look at Alexis Korner.
Agreed. I think it makes us comfortable to throw the entire person/persona out, because we can compartmentalize again. “This is a bad person, everything they did was bad, and that’s why they’re bad”. But I think it actually lets them off the hook, and allows their fans to say “Well, you’re just an obvious hater, so your accusations about their character are just as dishonest”.
It reminds me of when my sister said “I can’t believe you still listen to Led Zeppelin, when you know Jimmy Page had a 14 year-old girlfriend”. I responded “Yeah, that’s definitely not good. You know who her first rock star boyfriend was, a year prior, right? David Bowie.”
She suddenly got very quiet. And I get it. Somebody who was your hero is now, maybe, also a douchebag. I think we just have to let the uncomfortability sit in us, maybe feel it as a companion to the art, and remember that our brains crave “heroes” and “villains”, even if it’s not good for us.
We can like or dislike whatever artists we want to for whatever reasons. That’s literally how art works.
I think it’s interesting how these discussions about separating the artist from the art never seem to come up when the artist is being denigrated for being a woman or the girlfriend of the guitarist. Only when it’s a white man who fucks ten year olds or is an out and out racist or like beats his wife. Then we suddenly need to see all art as something that exists entirely separate from the artist… but only then.
Hmmmmmmmm… So strange how that pattern feels familiar.
Raped a child. That is indeed child rape… but hey, what’s that compared to ZZZZZZEPPPPPLIN MMMMMAAAAAANNNNN… /s
Sometimes, it’s okay to admit that people did really, REALLY shitty things. Playing a guitar well is NOT an excuse to rape a child. Period.
Maybe it’s time we start holding people accountable for their actions, as opposed to letting them slide because they do something we enjoy, and we find the individuals they hurt to be disposable to that art. No one needs to rape a child to make great art. Not a single god damn person. No one is worth less than a great album. Not a single god damn person.
Like what you like, but don’t pretend that someone making something you enjoy should be free from consequences because of it.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll always say it again: Remove race and left are less obvious differences over which to clash, such as ethnicity, language, nationality, religion, and so forth down that politics-of-scale we (including Eric Clapton) tumble. Therefore, what humankind may need to suffer in order to survive the long term from ourselves is an even greater nemesis (perhaps a multi-tentacled extraterrestrial) than our own politics and perceptions of differences, against which we could all unite, attack and defeat — all during which we’d be forced to work closely side-by-side together and witness just how humanly similar we are to each other. For however long that purely human allegiance lasts.
Still, maybe some five or more decades later when all traces of the nightmarish ET invasion are gone, we’ll inevitably revert to the same typical politics of scale to which we humans seem so collectively hopelessly prone; including that of the intercontinental, international, national, provincial or state, regional and municipal. Then again, hypothetically reduce our species to just a few city blocks of residents who are superficially similar in every way, and there will be some form of bitter inter-neighborhood quarreling or another, before long.
Albeit no Stanley Milgram, I believe that if the U.S. and Canada, for example, were to hypothetically revert back to a primarily-white populace, if not some whites-only utopia, the stereotypically brown-eyed Eastern Europeans with a Slavic accent would inevitably again become the main target of the dominant Euro-Canadian ethnicity.
Could Clapton’s public display of his racist/bigoted beliefs be attributed to aging-male anger? Unless I’m mistaken, cerebral biology indicates that, generally, as everyone ages, women (to their credit) tend to think more progressively and compassionately; meanwhile, we men contrarily tend to be increasingly reactive, if not angrier to boot.
I witnessed the latter in a local lowly-dressed man who’s vocally adamantly opposed to any liberal entity forming government; so much so that on a couple occasions he became so narrow-mindedly enraged that he, with his tightened fist trembling before him, uttered to me, “I’d vote for the devil himself if that’s what it took to keep those Godless socialists out of office!”
I think that’s a radical oversimplification based on what wolf you feed, so to speak.
I live in Portland, Oregon, and the wolf a lot of these people feed HERE are the progressive wolves. So the end is you get these 75-80 year old battlegrandpas coming to anti-facist rallies.
But seriously. Human beings have worked to improve itself from the start. If we were unable to do better we would not have a counternarrative to ills such as racism, misogyny, homophobia, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, transphobia, etc, and so on, that actually has materially improved lives and changed modes of thinking.
Let’s not be so lazy in our thinking about social problems we all face. We can improve and have done so before. Pretending like we can’t is ignoring an awful lot of history and struggle. On the part of some, there is a lack of political will to do so, but the fact that there have been improvements shows that there CAN be improvements.
Regards the aging-male anger bit. It’s true that he is now aged but what the people who have decided he is an odious creature are failing to note is that this racist rant dates back to a concert he performed while drunk 45 years ago.
