A virtuous music listener

I’m grateful to the reader who alerted me to Chris Richards’ earnest essay “The Five Hardest Questions in Pop Music” that appeared in the Washington Post last Monday. In the piece Richards worries about “questions about cultural appropriation, problematic lyricism, selling out, the ethics of posthumous listening, and the slippery white whale of 21st-century cultural criticism, ‘separating the art from the artist.’”

I empathize with my reader, who wrote “if [Richards] is right, I will have to give up the pleasures of listening to music. Recently I have listened to John Coltrane’s lost album, Run the Jewels, Angelique Kidjo, Low Cut Connie, Neko Case, Irakere, Ry Cooder, and yes, Dave Matthews. All through Apple Music. I have violated all of the

WAPO rules.”

At the same I disagree with him. Because Richards isn’t really setting out bright-line rules, just raising valid ethical questions about how we might approach art made by hateful (and/or dead) artists. That’s something I’ve thought about a lot. Consumers of popular culture face choices as to how they’re going to spend discretionary income and free time. Collectively, we have the power to determine which artists succeed in the marketplace.

In the old days, the mechanism was fairly simple. If you didn’t like an artist for whatever reason, you didn’t give him your money by buying the products he put on offer. These days it’s more complex because often what we’re giving in exchange for the experience is not our money but our time.

While there have always been ways of monetizing eyeballs, digital technology has made this a viable business plan for companies like Facebook and Netflix, who exist to capture and engage our attention.

Even if we have no desire to be what Richards calls a “virtuous music listener,” we probably ought to give some thought to the entertainment products we consume. Because there are consequences to all decisions, even those made by default. Some of our frustrations can be traced to the American vice of passive television viewing.

The conventions of reality television and around-the-clock-infotainment disguised as breaking news surely have had something to do with shaping the professional wrestling culture in which we find ourselves.

Yet, while the First World problem of feeling weird about enjoying the work of an awful person is worth examining, I was taken aback by Richards’ assumption that we are “living in an era in which listeners expect their favorite musicians to reflect their personal values and politics in neat, legible, completely literal ways” and that we “demand that our pop heroes be virtuous in their private lives, valiant in their public art—and if they aren’t, we try to compensate by being ethical in our listening.”

I don’t expect anyone, much less my favorite musicians, to reflect my values or politics at all. Often I don’t think about their values or politics.

While they have every right to express their opinions, I have the right to dismiss those opinions. And while I pay attention to who gets my money, I don’t boycott people lightly—if they offer something I want I don’t care about their politics.

And cultural appropriation is only a difficult question if you believe a group of people own a tradition. Which I do not. White people can play the blues, but you don’t have to listen to them.

Yet we can recognize the phoniness inherent in pretending to own that which you haven’t earned, whether it’s street credibility or military glory. It’s offensive for imposters to wear medals they bought online; it’s offensive for poseurs to pretend to experience they don’t have. But not all fiction is a lie, and artists are constrained by the limits of imagination, not experience.

When the young John Prine sang “I am an old woman, named after my mother” he wasn’t stealing; he was opening up a fresh territory for songwriters to explore. Like a lot of things in law and art, intention matters.

And intention is not something that can be with certainty ascertained. We base judgments on our visceral reactions and external cues. Kanye

West presents as a smug, naive idiot, but there’s a nub of genius in his work. I’m not, as the kids say, “canceling” him because he thinks slavery was a choice.

Similarly, Bill

Cosby deserves what he’s getting, but his criminal behavior doesn’t mean his old Fernet-Branca routine wasn’t funny. Laughing at it doesn’t make you a bad person.

Execution matters too; just because Cosby turned out to be a bad person doesn’t mean he was a bad artist.

And the decision to police one’s consumption of culture is a personal one. Sure, it’s worrisome that a sizable number of our friends and neighbors would watch a reality show about Cosby (or O.J. Simpson), but there’s always been a market for trashy, amoral spectacle.

I don’t get the feeling Richards condones the schoolmarmish censure of artists for being politically incorrect, supporting the wrong candidate or failing to transcend the prevailing attitudes of their times.

But there’s a difference between Laura Ingalls Wilder’s reflecting the attitudes of late-19th century settlers in her Little House on the Prairie series and the accusations against R. Kelly.

I can’t watch Woody Allen’s films without thinking about the allegations that have been made against him. Yet I still watch and write about his movies, trying to consider the text without confusing it with my opinion of the artist. Of course that’s impossible—yet we persist.