Cancelled?
a cultural criticism/personal essay
Written in Feb. 2021
At a party I hosted in college one of my friends asked me to change the song. I went to the guy who was DJing and told him “we can’t play this.” The song: “The Way You Make Me Feel,” the time: about two weeks after Leaving Neverland dropped on HBO. This was the start of a great debate amongst my friends; when does it become ok to separate the art from the artist? Is it a statute of limitations type thing? A matter of believing who makes the loudest argument, accuser or accused? How do we as a society handle the treatment of creative predators, racists and other bigots?
I don’t believe in censorship under any circumstances. Anyone who wants access to information/media/art should be able to have it. The key is to engage with the materials critically, something most people struggle to do. Do I think everyone should stop listening to Michael Jackson? No. Do I think people should not play music by known sexual predators in public settings? Kind of. Listening to an artist who did or said something harmful isn’t the same thing as defending them but to publicly align yourself with someone who’s been “outed” sends a strong message, especially if that outing is currently happening, especially when that outing has to do with sexual assault. You just never know who’s in the room.
The Netflix original Big Mouth actually summed up the appropriate response to the Me Too movement really well, saying “It’s one long, uncomfortable conversation that we all have to keep having.” Nothing finite will suffice. The solution to rape culture is to change the culture and there is no one and done way to do that. An ongoing, conscious shift in every aspect of our society is needed.
When it comes to separating the art from the artist you can’t and shouldn’t do it. Who the artist is informs the art. The Harry Potter fandom has used J.K. Rowling’s transphobic comments as a new lense to view the story with, revealing undercover bigotry across the series from greedy, shifty, big-nosed goblins controlling the money to a black character named Kingsley Shacklebolt. Separating the art, in this case the Harry Potter series, from its author removes a level of essential information about what the books are really saying. I’m not saying that you should interpret “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough” literally. Sometimes the contents of the art is not directly impacted by who the artist is/what they believe but the impact that art has on its audience absolutely is. My friend asked me to change that song out of concern for the people in the room who we didn’t know. People who might have experienced abuse as children and who were already exhausted from hearing people debate the validity of the allegations against Michael Jackson all week.
What we need now is not “cancel culture.” It’s not ousting a “problematic” few. Cancel culture is a pitiful phrase used by racists and predators to discredit the people they have hurt, a desperate attempt to make themselves the victim. Cancel culture does not exist. Neither does “problematic”, it is a word used to censor the real damage that a person has done. Tik Tok stars who say the n-word are not “problematic” they are racist, musicians who have sex with children are not “problematic” they are rapists. Instead of getting cancelled, an ambiguous process with no physical/long term impacts, these people should be de-platformed and in the cases where it applies, prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. They should absolutely be made examples of. Our society is undereducated and oversaturated with violence. We need deep change on every level and that can’t happen when a large part of the population refuses to see the problem.
Several colleagues and I got into a debate when the allegations against Aziz Ansari went public. After a heated argument over how Ansari’s career should be impacted one of my male colleagues felt compelled to say “But if a career is something you deserve then what if I don’t deserve a career.”
If you’re asking this, then the answer is probably that you don’t, but you’re also missing the point, being famous isn’t a career and it’s not something anyone deserves, it just happens, quite frequently to the wrong people.
I mostly stand by this but less carceral I think. I don’t believe you can hold any one individual responsible for the sins of an entire culture, as tempting as it sometimes might be.
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