Most of us are judgmental and base decision on our judgments. As age has crept up, I have been working to be less judgmental. But, the news that Charles Manson had died set me to judging my own judgmentalism yet again.
Probably not many people shed tears at the news that Manson had died. His evil side is widely known. His gang of drug-addled young people committed at least nine murders.
His artistic side isn’t so widely known. Manson once lived with Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boys’ drummer. The Beach Boys song “Never Learn Not to Love” was credited to Wilson but was originally titled “Cease to Exist” and was written by Manson. The versions barely varied, according to reports.
Other songs written or co-written by Manson were performed by Guns N’ Roses, the Lemonheads and Marilyn Manson, who took his stage name from Charles Manson. Except for the Beach Boys, none of those bands is a must-hear for me, so deciding whether to listen to other bands that recorded Manson songs is easy. I don’t.
So, the Manson/Beach Boys question, applied generally, is: Would I be so judgmental as to refuse to patronize an artist’s work because of the way an artist lives, as opposed to the value or the artist’s work? Let’s look at some other examples.
“Woody Allen is a sleazeball,” my friend said. “I wouldn’t go see anything he does.”
She was referring to Allen’s behavior with his step-daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, who was adopted by Mia Farrow, Allen’s lover for 12 years and his co-adopter of other children. When Soon-Yi Previn was 19-21 — her exact age is unknown but docs using a bone scan estimated her birth date as October 1970) — she began having sex with Allen, with whom her relationship had been step-daughter/step-father.
Soon-Yi Previn and Allen married on Dec. 22, 1997, and have adopted two children.
Allen made it easy for many of us to boycott him because he stopped making great movies at least 20 years ago. He just continued to pluck the same strings (death and sex) time and again, in the hope some of his old magic might come back. Occasionally it did. “Vicky Christina Barcelona,” in 2008, and “Midnight in Paris,” in 2011, and “Blue Jasmine,” in 2013, were wonderful.
Cat Stevens was a successful singer-songwriter in the 1960s and ’70s. Stevens had a number of hits, most memorably “Peace Train,” “Moonshadow” and “Morning Has Broken.” He was brought up a Christian, his father Greek Orthodox and his mother Swedish Baptist. In 1977, he converted to Islam and took the name Yusuf Islam, though Islam does not require converts to take Islamic names.
Stevens wrote all of his songs except, oddly, one. “Morning Has Broken” is a Christian hymn written in 1931 by Marjorie Farjeon who set it to an old Scottish tune, “Bunessan.”
Yusuf Islam earned a lot of scorn, including mine, when he endorsed the fatwa (order to kill) issued by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini against the writer Salman Rushdie. That earned Islam a place on the U.S. government’s no-fly list, and in 2004, he was taken off a plane at Bangor and returned to the U.K. He was removed from the no-fly list two years later. His condemnation of Rushdie, who was raised Muslim, put Yusuf Islam on a lot of people’s don’t fly list.
Norman Mailer has been almost a household name for more than 50 years. Among his widely known books are “The Executioner’s Song” (about Gary Gilmore, a murderer who asked to be executed), “The Naked and the Dead” (notes on soldiers in World War II) and “Advertisements for Myself” (aptly titled, though in it he also criticizes himself).
The dilemma of artist vs. artist’s actions arises in Mailer’s support of Jack Henry Abbott, who had been convicted of manslaughter. Mailer worked for Abbott’s release from prison, saying Abbott’s writing talent merited leniency. Six weeks after Abbott was freed, he murdered another writer. He went back to prison, where he hanged himself in 2002.
All four of these artists did or do things that in other people might be unforgivable. Yet, they continued to work as artists, and people continued to patronize their art, making it possible for them to earn a living from art.
It seems difficult to condemn the Beach Boys for flirting with a creep who later became a mass murderer. I don’t really know the song “Never Learn Not to Love,” so I’m not just cutting the Beach Boys some slack because I like that song. It might have been harder if Manson had written “Help Me, Rhonda,” which may have been one of their poorer tunes. Still, I can’t help “singing” along with “Rhonda” when it plays on the oldies station.
Woody Allen marrying his step-daughter is creepy, but I guess I haven’t given up on the hope that once in a while he will make a movie worth seeing. I remain wishy-washy as to whether I should boycott his art because of his behavior.
Yusuf Islam redeemed himself, in my eyes, when he condemned the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. Still, I lost the habit of listening to his music when he condemned Rushdie and have felt no need to return to it.
I’ll never read Jack Henry Abbott. Unlike other crimes, killing can’t be taken back. Does any murderer deserve leniency? Nor was I fond of Norman Mailer. His writing and persona were too testosterone-laden for my liking. That he won freedom for a man who killed another human just added to my distaste. I haven’t read him since.
Judgmental? Yes. And I don’t buy the argument that art must be judged only on its merits as art. It may stand alone as art, but it is still sometimes the work of a real — to use my friend’s term — sleazeball.
Bob Neal loves books, music and movies. But he doesn’t much like to support sleazeballs by buying their art.
Bob Neal
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