fuck everyone who's using his popularity to spread hate and violence against race, gender or sexual orientation.

I'd like to join you guys on that side of the moral fence but not if I have to give up listening to Ice Cube. He is/was a racist motherfucker. Always bashing the white devil. But if loving Ice Cube is wrong then I don't wanna be white.

Oops, I mean right.

Rotten Tanx wrote:I'd like to join you guys on that side of the moral fence but not if I have to give up listening to Ice Cube. He is/was a racist motherfucker. Always bashing the white devil. But if loving Ice Cube is wrong then I don't wanna be white.

Oops, I mean right.

well some of the reggae artists who i listed in the first place as being homophobic (sizzla, bounty killer) also have some negative things to say about white people. given what they have to say, i don't really have a problem with it (although i'm white). i mean, it's easy for some naive people to say that artists like sizzla and ice cube are being racist towards white people (along with the BS notion that "racism towards white people is no different than racism towards black people"). but you can't really argue with many of those lyrics... a lot of those lyrics just involve citing history and current events (citing them accurately, i might add).

however, unlike anti-white/anti-establishment lyrics, i wouldn't say any of the anti-homosexuality lyrics of reggae artists involve "citing history and current events". a lot of the time its just citing wacky biblical stuff and appealing to prejudice. but i stand by the fact that i enjoy their tunes.... yes, even some that include lyrics such as "burn out the chi chi" though out of decency i would never play those songs in front of my gay/lesbian friends. would you bring a black friend to see slayer perform their rendition of minor threat's "guilty of being white"... the one where they change "white" to "right"? which brings up an interesting point.... in their lyric choices, slayer kind of puts a filter on the demographics of their audience. if i ended up at a slayer concert and they broke into that song, and then i noticed i was in a room full of white people listening to a song titled "guilty of being white/right", i would immediately think "something is wrong with this picture".

hey, slayer might be fucked up in their thinking and insensitive on their lyrical content, but i do enjoy much of the music that slayer has made. btw, i should explain what i mentioned at first about taking issue with racist artists. slayer is just plain insensitive with some cheap lyrical-shock-value gimmicks; as far as i can see i don't think they hold racist beliefs. but phil anselmo from pantera had this whole anti-black rant on stage once. and eric clapton said that thing about keeping england from becoming a black colony. now, how can either of those dudes say that shit with a straight face, when they make music rooted in the art of many black people?

Careful about judging Eliot for his alleged anti-Semitism. I read a long chapter in a book by the literary critic James Wood which carefully combed through Eliot's life and concluded that such a conclusion was ill-founded. In other words, the jury's still out.

Great poet, though.

BClark wrote:phil anselmo from pantera had this whole anti-black rant on stage once. and eric clapton said that thing about keeping england from becoming a black colony. now, how can either of those dudes say that shit with a straight face, when they make music rooted in the art of many black people?

Pantera is rooted in the art of black people?

I don't see it myself although I only know the song with that chap shouting about being broken.

And isn't Clapton like the whitest guy ever?

I dunno, I'm just bored at work and replying because it gives me something to do for five minutes.

Here's a quote from another board that I use. It is an answer to a statement I made regarding the appreciation of aesthetics of something with questionable ethical / moral motives.

Aesthetical judgment( whether you like some piece of art or not) shouldn't have nothing to do with moral principles. If you talk about approving or disapproving art in an ethical way- you're not talking about art and aesthetics anymore.

sparky wrote:

Nina wrote:Joyce, it is said, loathed jews. Which wouldn't surprise me really. Bloom is hardly a character, as Lewis correctly points out, he is more a conglomeration of all the jewish stereotypes Joyce had floating through his mind.

I am almost certain that this is wrong. Have you a source for this? The literature on Joyce that I've seen asserts the opposite. The Cyclops chapter alone refutes this.

Yes, I could very well be wrong about Joyce. Although I liked Ulysses (at least, I found it pretty funny) more than Lewis, I am by no means a Joycean. I don't know where I got the idea that he loathed jews; perhaps it just occurred to me as a kind of guilt by association.
Out of those modernists, Pound is really the one who allowed his political beliefs/prejudices to destroy his art. It is very depressing to read parts of the Cantos, especially when the post-war sections (the Pisan Cantos? is that what they are called?) show that he was always able to write.
It is a different question with music, I think. Take Skrewdriver, for instance. Someone on here said something like "they have a few catchy melodies". But catchy melodies are everywhere. There is no shortage of catchy melodies. No one can say they listen to that band despite the politics. Like, "well, I know they are racist and everything, but no one else sounds like them". Why would someone who is not racist listen? Plus, the ultimate goal of the art form is different. Something like a novel is enjoyed alone. Reading cannot be a group activity. Music can be, and that is often an important requirement.
So lets take Augustus Pablo as our specimen. I really like his music. I know next to nothing about him as a man. The music of his that I have is all instrumental. From the pictures of him, the design of the album covers, the song titles and the music, I 'd say he is a rastafarian. Does that mean he hates gays? I don't know that much about rastafarians. If you told me that rastas are required to hate gays, that would change my appreciation of his music, but not nearly as much as picking up a new album and hearing him sing "burn down the homo-man". In the first instance, I would be disturbed, but I can easily imagine myself still listening, and wondering as I listened. In the second instance, I would not be able to continue listening. Even the instrumental music would bother me. HE would bother me. Could it be that, because of the public nature of music, listening implies a type of endorsement, while reading doesn't? Or is the force of the hateful message so much more direct in music that it raises an equally direct reaction?

My waffling approach is to take such artists and their art on all of the aspects I perceive, which will include anything that seems "outside" the art.

This is poor way of saying "case by case", or more simply "I don't know."

I agree with you on Pound: he is depressing. It is depressing to see a lot of beauty (in my eyes) sitting with such shittiness.

The earlier thread that EC linked (Emmanuelle! I have just realised that you share your initials with Eric Clapton. Ha! I am so sorry...) has some well-articulated thoughts on the subject.

NerblyBear wrote:Name me a great artist or writer or musician who was also a bad or stupid person.

Oh boy.

This is going in your bag of stoopid statements alongside - Hamlet was never meant to be performed.

Do you consider yourself an artist?
You certainly seem to consider yourself to be great.

If so then I'm just pointing out that you keep saying idiotic things.

No great artist was also a bad person?
Jesus wept.
What whacky definition of 'bad' are you working from?

Do murderers count?

Then how about Caravaggio?

sparky wrote:

Nina wrote:I don't think that it is possible to completely separate artist from their art - there's always a remnant of what they are in it - although this is certainly more a matter of faith in my case.

everyone can look at a Picasso painting and like it (or hate it)
without going "he treated women like shit".
who cares how he treated his wife?
maybe (MAYBE) knowing stuff about an artist's life, personal beliefs and opinions can help you have a better picture of where his art is coming from, but the core matter is if you like what they do or not.

let the artist be as fucked up as they like. it's his life!