[musicplurk] [cw: death-of-the-artist ponderings via acapella covers of songs by bad people] [so far no specific topical cws, but names of original artists are probably in link titles]

so this week while laughing bitterly at the irony of politicians pretending that 90% of party politics isn't open-season cancel culture in action

and since pretty much everyone in fan culture with any self-awareness has had to grapple with personal-as-political choices of how to engage with stuff that was meaningful to them but turned out to be made by extremely awful people

and there are absolutely creators where once I know about some kinds of things they've done, whether it's objectively bad or just personally squicks me, I just don't want to interact with their voice or face or language style anymore

it's occurred to me that I like fic and covers and remakes partly because there's that conscious degree of separation

(I mean I like those things anyway, but for me personally, it feels like when bad creators are involved, they can preserve the good, meaningful part of a thing while taking it away from that person)

(I'm using 'bad' instead of 'problematic' here because I'm mostly talking about people where a genuinely bad thing was revealed about them, not just "they trashed a hotel room once and are super rude")

and decisions about whether to engage with media from bad creators are so personal. some people genuinely need a complete break from remembering the person exists, some people genuinely need to keep the parts of those bodies of work that saw them through really tough things)

...all that is to say that I respect artists who cover songs by bad people (unless they're deliberately seeking out the association with the person's badness) because it kind of feels like they're rescuing something from the ashes

and this might not be the case for others. and that's ok and it's what cws are for.

so I'm leaving this here with these off-the-cuff ponderings because it was important to me for quite a while and I feel I can listen to it again when it's rearranged for someone else.

Earth Song (Michael Jackson cover) - Galite's french...