This is a column that I wrote for Hope College's student newspaper The Anchor, it deals with the idea of following an individual's life as a form of entertainment:
Steven Patrick Morrissey was the lead singer of The Smiths and along with Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke, and Mike Joyce, wrote and performed some of the finest songs that have ever existed. While The Smiths are no longer together and touring, Morrissey is still making music and touring the world. But the more I hear about Morrissey, the less I want to pay money to see him preform. He has described Chinese people as a “subspecies,” and after a mass murderer killed 77 people in Norway, he said that the violence was “nothing compared to what happens in McDonald's and K.F.C. every day.”
But should what Morrissey thinks or says influence what I think of his music? I've often heard the argument, and previously used the argument myself, that the art a person produces should always be evaluated on its own, that even horrible people can make beautiful art. The prototypical example of this being Michael Jackson and the controversy and allegations that surrounded him during the later part of his career.
However, I've recently come to the conclusion that there is no universal answer to the question of separating an artist's actions from that artist's creation. I now believe that it's a personal decision, and how you feel as an individual is the only evaluation that matters. If you knew someone who was killed in the massacre in Norway, it's not artistically close-minded of you to choose to never listen to Morrissey just because of what he said. Art is successful when it evokes certain emotions, that's how it connects to an audience, and when you have to shut off or ignore your own natural emotions to connect to a piece of art, I can't imagine that the net result is always positive one. Believe me, this is personally an extreme philosophical jump to make. I hate subjectivity. I don't even believe in subjectivity in sports, or when it comes to the quality of the music I like. If you don't think the Tigers are the greatest franchise in baseball, or if you dislike my favorite music. I think that you're wrong. I have never enjoyed a movie that has had an ambiguous ending (I HATED Inception).
The only other area of life in which I can handle this type of thinking is in comedy. I firmly believe in comedic subjectivity. I believe that a joke can be funny to one person, terribly offensive to another person, and neither individual is necessarily wrong for feeling the way they do. Consider the caveman. A caveman being squished by a massive pre-historic creature is a standard of comedy (or maybe I just read too much of The Far Side). But I'm sure that if squished cavemen comics were someone sent back in time and shown to recently widowed cave-women, they would take offense.
But this all leads to a bigger question, would we be better off without knowing personal information about artists and musicians. When it comes to Kanye West, his life is put on such a pedestal that to fully understand his music, there is a certain amount of information that you need to know about his life. On the other hand, I enjoy plenty of bands without knowing anything about their personal lives and I would almost prefer that it stayed that way.
The Anchor and all newspapers need to be able to make similar decisions about personal information. Should negative news about an individual's personal life ever be printable material? Where do you draw the line between gossip and news? Just like with offensive musicians and comedy, I don't think there is a universal answer.
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