Rock music is cancelled.
From Sublime to the ridonculous — Ministry of Thought edit history by cancellation — and so they should because history is awful
Another day another wave of RSI in my thumb scrolling numb and dumbly through the all too ubiquitous website that people hilariously call “Faceache”* while injecting it into their eyeballs, when all of a sudden I come across an article accusing white reggae/ska enthusiasts from yesteryear “Sublime” of cultural appropriation in retrospect.
*ha bloody ha
Now I’ve had two days to think about this, and can’t find the post again, but after some web based research, read this divisive article on the the forty five blog that drew admiring agreement and cajoles to lighten up in equal measure in the comments section. Not much in between.
What it says basically is they used to love Sublime but now they find the songs with themes that many would find triggering at best a little cringe and at worst totally misjudged and offensively unlistenable/unlistenably offensive. I’m in two minds whether even to refer to the songs let alone quote them here, either you know or you don’t. Sublime aren’t the only band with dodgy lyrics some of us liked as teenagers. Diamond (that’s more than platinum — shifting in excess of 10 000 000 units) selling album Nevermind has a song called Polly in which abject cruelty is fictionally acted out and described via, regretfully, a first person narrator. Now Cobain was a huge fan of Patrick Suskind’s transgressive novel Perfume in which an odourless perfumier with hypersensitive olfactory perception murders prostitutes to bottle their scent. He may have been a crusader for equal rights and all that but he was no posterboy for political correctness. Saying that, despite their edginess, Nirvana’s literary and collagist lyrical output doesn’t veer into bad taste nearly as much as Sublime apparently did.
So should we not listen to Sublime or other bands whose lyrics seem distasteful in the uproarious ‘20’s? Well probably it’s up to you. I wouldn’t listen to them just cos they sound a bit shit now, but that’s a whole other article (and one that doesn’t need to be written). Lyrical content is a slightly different thing than the kind of “cancelling” that happens when a once loved rock/pop star (usually from the 1970s but not necessarily) is outed as having behaved abhorrently/illegally/outrageously/all-of-the-above. I mean, the people trying to advertise “separating the art from the life” of artists such as Trump-loving indiepop surrealist Aerial Pink have a hard enough time, never mind anyone continuing to bury their head in the sand with a Lostprophets poster on their bedsit wall. (Admittedly there are likely to be few people still advertising their love of this particular nu-metal molester or even his shitty music).
Extreme examples aside, while many instances of pop stars being less than well behaved abound, often to shocking and disheartening extremes, and even allegations against well-loved living room saints of rock n roll; dare I site this article in tube rag Metro which claims latter day hero to everyone and their mum slept with a fourteen year old in the late sixties — but they’re not cancelling Bowie surely? Do we burn his back catalogue in a metal bin in the garden? At the same time, is it right to explain it away as rock n roll high jinks and of its time? He certainly wasn’t alone in tasting some “green banana” groupies in more permissive/amoral days. Does that allow him even a partial reprieve? But if we demand total moral perfection from our creative idols, then examples might, I would suggest, be thin on the ground. Bowie’s music is great, and if he made some errors in judgement in a drug-fuelled backstage room, not quite so what, but maybe it is what it is, or some shit. He’s certainly not stooped to the unforgivable levels of depravity of that Lostprophets cunt. IDK what do you think?
