By now, everyone has heard about Ian Watkins’s abominable sex crimes against children as young as 11 month-old. As Helen wrote, it is difficult to imagine such perversity, but some human beings have a really sick mind, and these things happen. The British retailer HMV has made no secret that they would no longer sell Lostprophets’ music. According to NME, the staff has been instructed to remove all Lostprophets albums, singles and EPs from their shelves, and they also plan to stop the online sales of the band’s music.
However, as the Guardian notices, the music of other monsters such as Charles Manson, Gary Glitter (another pedophile), Burzum (the Norwegian black metal guy who burnt at least 4 churches and he was charged with the murder of another musician) is still on sale in the store…. So is it double standard? Certainly, I don’t see any other possibility.
Why are we ready to ‘forgive’ some people and not others? It is hard to comprehend, but there are several factors: Watkins’ crimes are very fresh in the news, we haven’t digested them, and his music will probably be back in the HMV store in a few years. Manson’s crimes are old, he is getting old and even though reading pages like these ones can give you the creeps, it happened a long time ago and we have seen and heard so much since…
Also the value we attribute to the art of the said criminal weighs a lot. As I am not a fan of Lostprophets the art factor doesn’t even enter into consideration, but I suppose it could be a bit different for a die-hard fan,… in a few years, when the story gets old too. People are not going to like this comparison but look at Michael Jackson, I know he never admitted doing anything wrong with children, but he did admit sleeping in the same bed than boys as young as 12, saying there was nothing sexual…. But how can you honestly believe this when the guy was in his 40s? If the trials hurt his album and concert ticket sales in the 90s, now that he is dead and officially canonized as Saint Michael, he is the richest dead man on earth! So people forget, are in denial and eventually music is sold again. That said Jackson’s music will very probably remain much more significant in music history than Lostprophets’ music, so I am not sure that in this case, the value of the art will outweigh Ian Watkins’ horrific crimes. Furthermore, with Watkins’ case, we enter into something even more sordid every time we read anything about the guy: his former girlfriend revealed he wanted to rape and kill newborns… ‘’He even wanted to get me pregnant so he could rape our baby.’ Words can’t describe a mind this sick.
I am against any form of censorship, if I don’t want to buy music from this beast or another monster, I am an adult and I can decide for myself, I don’t need a store or a company to tell me what I have to do! I have never bought anything from Manson, not even listened to his music, his awful crimes are a complete turn off for me, and I am sorry about this idealistic discourse about the separation between the art and the artist, there is just a limit I can’t cross sometimes. We all have our own limits on what we can tolerate from an artist, and we just have to define them ourselves.