Fallen Heroes

So I must address, up front, the elephant in the listening room, so to speak. I suppose that this new song qualifies as easy listening. When you submit a track to CD Baby for distribution to the streaming services, you have to indicate the genre. And I did indeed say it was easy listening. So sue me. I do love me a pretty melody and a bit of lushness, sometimes. But the subject matter is another thing altogether. This track is “playing against type”, one might say. (Click the image or here to hear the new track, What Do We Do.)

I don’t really have anything new or incisive to say about cancel culture; it’s been discussed and debated at length over the last few years. But there are a couple of things I muse about in the song that I will mention.

One is the vexing (for me) question of what to do about creative works that we love but that are created by folks with questionable (or worse) pasts.

 Can we still read them
Still watch them
Still hear them
Celebrate what they made yet shut them down

Michael Jackson, Harvey Weinstein, Miles Davis, Picasso, Woody Allen, Al Franken, Louis C.K. – the list goes on and on. (And almost all are men? J.K. Rowling? Hmmmm…..)

I admit that find it really hard to deny myself music or films or books or paintings that I love. I still love them. I LOVE them. What to do? Are we obligated to “vet” artists whose work engages us but about whom we don’t know very much, or enough, to make sure it’s okay to proceed? What’s your position on this? And as the song says, are some “failings” so egregious that we must shut out these people as well as all that they’ve created? And for others it’s ok? And where is the line between not so egregious and too egregious?

One other idea is that we maybe put folks whom we admire (or whose work moves us) onto a pedestal and idealize them. We, probably inappropriately, regard them as different from us, with the expectation that they are or should be better, above reproach, lacking “feet of clay”. When I was 14 years old I was enraptured by music created by people who were a scant 5 years older than I, yet I felt they were a different breed of person, possessed of powers and talent that I didn’t and wouldn’t ever have. I still harbor feelings of inadequacy in music, not to mention other things. Not helpful!

Have you solved all this? Let me know. An in the meantime, thanks for listening. EASY LISTENING, that is.