A few years ago, Ryan Adams was credibly accused of sexting with an underage fan (an accusation he was later cleared of) and, more credibly, accused of being a music industry creep, leveraging his influence to control the careers of several women, his ex-wife Mandy Moore and Phoebe Bridgers among them.
As a Ryan Adams fan, this was a little awkward.
It was like finding out your beloved local burger joint is owned by an asshole. The burgers are great, but knowing how poorly the owner treats people, you can’t eat there anymore.
Right?
The news about Ryan Adams confirmed what I had long suspected: he is an asshole. Confronted with this reality, I defaulted to the insidious logic that cancel culture has mandated in recent years:
- An artist behaves badly.
- We cancel them.
I call the above “insidious,” because whenever culture hands us a chunk of template logic, the last thing we should do is execute it, no questions asked. We should pause—ask questions and seek some answers. But good liberals like me tend not to question authority, especially when it comes to the mistreatment of women.
So I cancelled Ryan Adams. I didn’t listen to him for years.
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A few weeks ago, I read an interview with Nick Cave in The New York Times, where—in recognizing that many artists are problematic people—he made the following observation:
When you look at people who often make extraordinary music, it feels that the journey from the person to the thing they made might have something to do with stepping into this creative realm that is itself valuable and good, regardless of the faulty human that has the courage to make it.
When I learned what an asshole Ryan Adams is, I shut the door and walked away.
Nick Cave’s reaction to an artist like Ryan Adams is different.
He wonders about that “faulty human.” How could they create something so “extraordinary”? He continues:
I get a little tired of this casting around for bad actors and exposing them. It doesn’t make any sense to me. It feels like the ideal of it is justice and mercy, but the weaponry being used is injustice and mercilessness. That is very uncomfortable to watch, and quite obviously it’s creating a lot of boring, self-important and morally obvious art.
I think I read the response three or four times over before I understood.
Nick Cave isn’t defending the bad actions or the art as object itself. He’s defending the faulty human, defending—broadly—the struggles of humanity, defending the movement towards grace and forgiveness.
Elsewhere, in an answer in Cave’s Red Hand Files, he offers the following response to a question about whether artificial intelligence will ever be able to write a good song. Cave posits that the presence of a human—an artist—is what makes it possible for a song to conjure a sense of awe in the listener.
But, I don’t feel that when we listen to Smells Like Teen Spirit it is only the song that we are listening to. It feels to me, that what we are actually listening to is a withdrawn and alienated young man’s journey out of the small American town of Aberdeen—a young man who by any measure was a walking bundle of dysfunction and human limitation—a young man who had the temerity to howl his particular pain into a microphone and in doing so, by way of the heavens, reach into the hearts of a generation.
Cave appends an “in spite of” to the art produced by faulty humans. Ryan Adams created wonderful music in spite of his flaws.
Separating the art from the artist is a foolish game. The art is transcendent insofar as it transcends the faults and failures of the artist.
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So, I listened to the Ryan Adams album Gold for the first time in years. It was great—but different, different being aware of what a troubled and troubling man he was, and may still be.
Can you always apply this thinking to the art produced by any faulty human?
I don’t know. Certain artists—like Michael Jackson—still withstand this framework for me. There’s a spectrum of wrongdoing, obviously, and the background of each artist demands individual consideration rather than a broadly applied framework.
But this framework offers a more thoughtful and less reactionary place to start.
Taylor Coe 