"You chose a child molester's jam!!!" (Kids in the Hall reference, mm-hmm)

[ltmurnau]

As I so often say, it's things like this that keep me going, especially when they show up next to each other in the paper:

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SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) -- A handcuffed Michael Jackson walked into the county jail here Thursday to face child molestation charges that could destroy the pop superstar's career and send him to prison for years.
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ALHAMBRA, Calif. -- Record producer Phil Spector, the 1960s recording-studio wizard who created pop music's Wall of Sound, was charged Thursday with murder in the shooting death of a woman at his home last February.
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BUT HEY:

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TORONTO -- The chances of turning your radio dial and hearing Michael Jackson's Beat It, Billie Jean, You Rock My World or the new song One More Chance diminish with every scandal, radio programmers across Canada said Thursday.... "It would be especially inappropriate to play Jackson right now given the latest allegations of child molestation", said Rob Farina, program director at CHUM FM 104.5 in Toronto. "We can't separate his talents from these very serious allegations that continuously pop up about him," he said. "The feeling is that if these allegations are true, any parent out there, or anybody out there, translates us playing his songs as support for the artist."
***

Setting aside the fact that I do not like his music, and never did (sorry Eve!), for me it is more interesting to note that since he is in trouble, sexcrime trouble at that, he becomes an unperson and his artistic works (yeah, let's be generous with the term here) become unworks. This either-or, Ford-or-Chevy, with-us-or-against-us kind of schoolyard logic is not the exclusive property of the American psyche but seems to reach its most absurd heights within it.

Comments

[rosminah.livejournal.com]

yep, that's my town. Good ol' Santa Barbara. I was actually at the airport to pick up my mother the day he was arrested. Luckily I whisked her out of the media melee before it all went down. I can't watch the news now, it's all about Jacko.