Ryan Adams and the hypocritical nature of fandom

I don’t suppose the world needs my thoughts on Ryan Adams but, hey, here they are anyway.

I’m not at all surprised, there’s the thing. I’ve been a fan of his music since ‘Heartbreaker’ came out in late 2000, I buy his new albums, I follow him on twitter, I’ve always rooted for him and wished him well, but I didn’t wake up to the article in the NYT about him and go “Oh, no, how can this be? Surely not Ryan Adams …”

Which I know makes me an enabler, to a tiny extent. Perhaps I knew, or suspected, enough about Ryan Adams, from scathing comments about him I’d read down the years from female musicians, to his regular self-pitying outbursts and invectives, to stories in music books and magazines, to just the very fact of how many creative women he seemed to be romantically involved with in quite an indiscreet, self-aggrandising way, so perhaps I knew enough about him not to be a fan of his music, certainly not to root for him.

Adams is an interesting case – he’s being held up today as a typical example of an enabled creepy powerful music biz man, but I’m not sure if that is true. I’ve rarely seen a musician I like be so pilloried as an individual, for most of their career.

From being an acclaimed golden boy at the start, with the release of Heartbreaker and then Gold, I saw the music press pretty rapidly turn against him, in a way that seemed quite odd, in that the quality of his releases didn’t seem to be dipping that much.

He was clearly a troubled individual, but it was also clear that a lot of the people that wrote about him found him to be an unbearable dick too. I kind of feel today, retrospectively, that some music journalists did their best not to enable him, to the extent that they could (being far more in the know than a mere music fan, albeit an attentive one, like myself).

But his success has continued and grown. Most record buyers don’t read the music press obsessively, so probably today’s news really is a shock to a lot of buyers of his records.

But his being “an arsehole” wasn’t all there was to him. An arsehole is very often perceived as being close to a little boy lost troubled genius, and I think a lot of music fans, male and female, root for their little boy lost troubled genius, hope they come good, are interested in how they express their pain. That’s the nature of rock music all too often.

Ironically, his music had moved on, from signs of genius early on to something much more like solid, reliable AOR. For many years, I’ve liked his stuff without loving it, though the troubled genius persona persisted. It has probably all worked together to serve him, but he pushed it too far to get away with it anymore.

Most of what he’s been accused of so far isn’t criminal, if any of it (as far as I can tell, that possibly criminal bit is dependent on different jurisdictions). But it’s massively gross, and that massively gross bit could clearly be read through the lines of what I’ve observed about him for almost two decades. So, maybe I chose not to read through those lines … I don’t know …

It’s a big topic at the moment. Should talented people (nearly always men) be “cancelled” because of some personal misdeed? The question is not really being phrased properly, but the answer is, naturally, somewhere between, hmmm, it depends, and, well, there’s a scale …

I’ll speak for myself. R Kelly is a good example. Everyone’s known for years that Kelly was completely creepy, that there was blatant criminality in his actions. Thankfully, I wasn’t a fan of R Kelly, and his most famous songs comfortably reflected that creepiness. She’s Got that Vibe, Bump’n’Grind …. Yuk … I mean, of course …

But then came ‘Ignition’ … which everyone loved, and I loved, because it’s fucking awesome … and also hardly creepy at all … so the R Kelly who did Ignition, I could kind of get on board with, and kid myself that, because this song wasn’t creepy and because lots of people loved it in a non-creepy way, this R Kelly might not be too criminally creepy, and was ok to have a little dance to (incidentally, the worst piece of DJing I ever saw, but also a living piece of art in exemplifying what I’m saying, was when I was at the disco at indie festival ATP a few years ago, and the floor was packed with people joyfully dancing to Ignition, before the DJ segued directly into Bump’n’Grind, and it cleared, in disgust, in, like, seconds.)

Now, I criticise myself. I knew. How could I even listen to Ignition? … but I guess I didn’t know … not all of it … I just suspected, so I cancelled R Kelly in a nuanced/self-serving way …

And that’s really how it is with all of them. My male faves across sport/music/film are really a litany of creeps, suspected and proved … sometimes it matters to me, sometimes it doesn’t, it kind of depends on a) how much of a fan I am and b) how deep I am into that fandom.

There are e.g. a couple of extremely famous sportsmen about whom significant wrongdoing (of different types) has been mooted recently. Now, these are men in whom I have not invested significant fandom. But I remembered, when these matters came up recently, that I’d come across hints about unpleasantness much earlier in their careers, and those hints probably took me away from fandom. Or maybe I’d never have been a fan of their anyway.

It’s definitely the case that if I find out about someone’s objectionableness early enough, it may make a difference, but then again, with Adams, I don’t really have that much excuse.

Whereas there are people (you probably knew who they are if you ever read anything by me) across sport/music/film who have, unquestionably/probably/possibly committed a variety of unpleasantnesses, whether criminal or not, but I am that much of a long fan of theirs that I have rationalised what I think about this and maintained my fandom.

I guess that’s the hypocrisy of it. It can matter. Definitely. Finding out something horrible about someone can definitely affect whether you’re a fan of theirs, but if the fandom is strong enough, it may well survive it, and we’ll either rationalise and accommodate it or turn a blind eye.

What’s the question, then? Will I stop listening to Ryan Adams now? Maybe that depends on what further comes out. There’s a hidden line. Maybe the fact that the arsehole always suspected is out in the open is enough in itself.

To be fair to "fans" (including myself), we are nearly always kept on the side of full knowledge which means we do not know the full extent of our idol's sins till the big reveal. We can retrospectively fit hints and tall tales into a pattern we should have recognised, but maybe that's not really our job.

From my point of view, there are two conflicting explanations for why sometimes I let people off the hook. On the one hand, there’s a certain naivete. I do not personally have anyone I am close to who is a terrible, creepy arsehole, so sometimes the regular depths of male behaviour (albeit powerful male behaviour) are still a surprise to me, that people who seem ok can be such blatant arseholes.

On the other hand, there’s the fact that in the all the film and rock bios I’ve been reading from a young age, elements of that kind of behaviour are so normalised, that I think I’ve learnt to take it on board when it comes to people whose work I admire.

Eg the debate of Bob Dylan the plagiarist has come up again recently. Now, I’m such a huge Bob Dylan fan that, though I take his probable misdeeds on board, I’ve essentially restructured my whole idea of what plagiarism is, or how much it is by definition unconscionable, for his benefit. Still love you, Bob, you wild forgivable male genius …

It's all hypocrisy, really. For so long it's felt like a necessary hypocrisy. Perhaps the positive thing that will happen is that we do not need that hypocrisy to still be fans of bad people, or perhaps we weill absolutely realise that we do.