Why are we still celebrating Michael Jackson?

[Conniebygaslight]

Just that really…this man shared his bed with children but it was excused as him being ‘childlike’
I know his music is iconic but seriously, there are so many live tribute shows to celebrate him and his music is played everywhere. It feels wrong on so many levels.
Surely we can’t just pick & choose who we accept predatory behaviour from…?!

With all the revelations left, right and centre, it seems the whole music industry (and Hollywood) is rife with abuse.
The list of who we shouldn't listen to is getting bigger and bigger.

He's dead now - of course. However, when he was very much alive and sleeping with young boys he made the music that is still broadcast today. If the legal system had done its job properly then he'd have gone the same way as Jimmy Saville and Gary Glitter. Unless of course you still think JS's charity work and contribution to the entertainment business is so worthy that you can look past the rest.

What about everything he tried to expose Tommy matola for and now years down the line his names creeping out with the diddy case etc. I don't think it's that straight cut and I'm not one for a conspiracy theory

A lot of people either don’t believe the allegations or don’t care. In non-English speaking countries a lot of people simply don’t know (see also the persistence of Gary Glitter outside the U.K.).

'A Christmas Gift For You from Phil Spector' is still the soundtrack of my Christmas!

I wonder if there's some kind of internal, even subconscious, analysis taking place with any of these artists?

What was the alleged crime?
How certain are we that the crimes took place?
How much did I like the artist in the first place?
What's my likelihood of still enjoying the work having thought about the above?

For example, I think Gary Glitter is a terrible artist, nasty person and his crimes are pretty abhorrent, so I have no problem 'denying' myself listening to his work.

Michael Jackson - not a massive fan but do love a lot of his songs, not going to go and shout from the rooftops that he was framed (because he probably did do the alleged crimes) and probably won't go and buy an album, but very happy to listen to his music.

Phil Spector - shrugs I'm not listening to him sing, he produced some brilliant music, his behaviour does not impact my enjoyment of any of his work.

Rolf Harris - yeah, not listening to any of his stuff again, despite many songs being the soundtrack of my childhood.

I don't really see how denying myself the pleasure of listening to/watching an artist I enjoy is anything other than virtue signalling, unless of course the enjoyment has been lost because of the negative connotations.

I have never really been a fan of his music
Although I appreciate he had huge talent and had many many fans world wide
He was quite frankly a weird odd ball and if he didn't physically or sexually abuse grandchildren ( and I think he did)
He certainly emotionally abused them lavishing them with money and attention until puberty and then dropping then.

I think a key difference with Michael Jackson is that his music was actually good, and still sounds good today.

It's much easier to cancel people who were more mediocre to start off with- no-one misses Gary Glitter or Jim'll Fix It or dodgy renditions of Walzting Matilda/"Can you guess what it is yet?"

Jackson is different because he's so influential and so significant in music/cultural terms that he's really difficult to obliterate from the history books.

For me I find his music slightly uncomfortable and wonder whether I should be listening but fundamentally I do love it a lot, so I haven't stopped listening. Plus as others have said, if we dig deeply over many years, we'd have a LOT of cancelling to do...

You seem to be saying that there's a creativity line - if you're deemed to be influential in the music or entertainment industry then it's acceptable for your music to be broadcast and understandable that fans choose to ignore the paedophilia? Apologies if I've misunderstood though.

I'm quite happy to avoid listening to him. I think he's a very 'lucky' man who happened to commit the crimes he did before social media exploded and therefore got away with what he did. He's had people covering for him or looking the other way for years because $$$$$$. It's revolting really.

To be fair, lines do need to be drawn. I absolutely refuse to listen to Gary Glitter or watch Jim'll Fix It. But that's because they were both shite!

(Thankfully I notice that the builder analogy has now been dropped.)

So you only refuse to listen to them because they were shite (in your opinion) - not because of their appalling actions?

I suppose it comes down to separating the artist from the artwork. The best artists seem to be weirdos, cancelling Micheal would be removing a huge chunck of music history. I think in years to come we will only be permitted to listen to Taylor swift on repeat.

It’s not a terrible analogy at all, I know no adult males who would either want to or get away with sharing the bed of someone else’s children, but because he was a celebrity it’s all ‘oh he’s eccentric’, ‘he was childlike himself’, ‘he’s just caring’, change MJ for the local milkman who has no money and we are in very different territory, but why?

Also let’s address Michael’s little boy voice, it was put on, there is a YouTube video showing him in montage format with his normal deep voice, he was creepy and I believe what has been said about him.

Nonce behaviour aside, the whole world witnessed him dangling a baby out of a window. Absolute prick. I will never listen to his music - it’s just the sound of an abuser. Too many idiot people willing to let their starry eyes cloud what was in plain sight for all to see.

I think I would feel differently if he was still alive and benefitting from my listening to the music he is dead and his children get the rewards I'm sort of ok with singing along

It will happen again. It will happen because people get 'star struck' and fixated on their idols. The parents of those children deserved prosecution themselves. What decent parent hands over their child - to any 'star'? Pathetic.

If we stopped putting actors/musicians on pedestals and stopped accepting abhorrent behaviour we wouldn't be in this position.

The 'cancel culture' though, can do one.

In reality that line is absolutely there- whether it should be or not is most definitely another matter, but I think there's a degree of pragmatism which is applied in reality over whether someone is cancelled or not.

It's the only explanation really for why Michael Jackson hasn't been cancelled- although folk on here are claiming to switch off, the fact that he's even still on radio playlists shows that there's a general acceptance that it's OK to listen to his music. Radio stations would have their advertisers withdrawing if he was broadly seen as not acceptable.

Going back in time there are likely to be a lot of people who are acknowledged today as being influential who are problematic. Elvis met Prescilla when she was 14. Bob Dylan and David Bowie are alleged to have slept with underage girls.

More broadly, Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl are known for rascist and/or antisemitic views which you'd hope would get them cancelled if they were alive these days, yet their work is still being made into films/TV today. Should I boycott Degas because he had underage girls pose for him? How about Salvador Dali who was known to have Nazi persuasions?

In reality, there is definitely a line which means that mediocre performers can be cancelled and no-one really misses them and every feels virtuous but the real mega-stars over the years get different treatment.

That's right - I'm pretty sure Jackson was up to no good, but I still listen (and as others have pointed out, there's a list of abusers through history whose work I read if I like the work).

Because the person as a character is separate from the work they have produced. As I always say, Caravaggio was a murderer but we still go and look at his paintings, because they are fantastic. Plus the passage of a few hundred years means that people tend to forget.
But if you study films/music/books/art from the last 50 years, you'll probably come across some creators of those works of whom you disapprove - that's just how it is.

Sorry, these really are terrible analogies!

After the paedophile milkman is dead I'm not buying his milk because it's no longer for sale. The builder was better, but it disproves the point you're trying to make. Most of us would still use the loft extension after the builder is dead, even if he was a convicted paedophile.

If you’re willing to line the pockets of a paedophile’s estate and can look past the abuse of children (who are now adults living with the trauma) then you - and others who do likewise - are complicit in his crimes.

Oh, and it wasn’t ‘no good’ - it was illegal and abhorrent.

I will live with your judgement.

What about the contemporary artists we enjoy who have done equally bad things - but they’ve just not come to light yet?

Is it ok to enjoy the art and music as long as we are ignorant of any wrongdoing the artist got up to? Or should we only enjoy music etc from artists who we are sure have a clean record?

Genuine ethical question! FWIW I still
enjoy MJ’s songs but only when they come on the radio. I wouldn’t play them myself and wouldn’t purchase anything by or about him.

He was innocent. His murderer was jailed.

THEY ARE NOT TERRIBLE, what I’m saying is you are willing to overlook a weirdo and abuser because he is the famous Michael Jackson and sang some pretty songs and was rich. Change the context to a builder or milkman and there is no way anyone would say, but it’s ok, they were just a creative eccentric or whatever.

You can separate the artist from the art though, it’s naive to suggest otherwise.

Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris had two-bit shows and didn’t really have any talent. Yes JS raised a lot of money for Charity but that was also part of his MO.

It’s easy to cancel them out because tbh people don’t tend to listen to Rolf Harris or watch reruns of Jim’ll fix it anyway, so they’re not actively avoiding, they wouldn’t have been watching anyway, so can virtue signal around how they wouldn’t ever watch these programmes again. Of course they wouldn’t. They weren’t going to in the first place.

But there are a lot of questionable artists who still had talent. That talent doesn’t become irrelevant because of what people think of them as people.

MJ may or may not be guilty. Fact is he was found not guilty and one of the lads even admitted to lying, so as much as people say they’re certain, they really can’t be. And even if he was guilty, the music is a separate entity from that.

He’s dead. Playing his music isn’t abusing people.