Every day the Internet tells me which artists I’m not supposed to like anymore. As much as I don’t want to enable anyone’s shitty behavior, people have a right to say and do stupid things. I don’t participate in public shaming mobs online. If an artist says an assholish thing that I can’t abide, I simply stop giving them my time and money.
But the work they did before that stupid thing isn’t ruined for me. Mel Gibson is a shit bag, but I still love Lethal Weapon and Braveheart. Louis C.K. can fuck all the way off, but I still think Louie is a masterpiece and Horace and Pete is the closest thing we’ve had to The Great American Novel lately. Thriller is still a major part of my childhood soundtrack even though Michael Jackson is… well, you know.
Sometimes, the offense is less severe, but more baffling. Like when punk icon Johnny Rotten goes full MAGA/Brexit. Or when Dave Mustaine goes hardcore Jesus freak and makes birther comments.
Twitter periodically says I should cancel Roger Daltrey for being a pro-Brexit gammon and an absolute bellend, but I read his book, Thanks A Lot, Mr Kibblewhite anyway. (You can check it out here.)
And I enjoyed the hell out of it. Bellend or no.
The Who was just another band on the classic rock station until I reached junior high school. When MTV aired Tommy, it put weird new things into my latchkey kid brain that were not there before. I liked those weird new things, even if I didn’t fully understand them. Reading what went into the creation of that film now that I’m much older transported me into the head of the confused adolescent I used to be. It’s fun to revisit her sometimes and I understand those weird things better now.
At first, when I see Roger Daltrey on Good Morning Britain complaining about how the YouTube generation expect everything to be free, it’s bewildering. This is the guy who sang at the top of his lungs in defense of his own youth culture? The same guy who sang, “I hope I die before I get old” in defiance and disgust with the oldsters who frowned upon him and his peers back in the day?
What the fuck, Rog?
Then I read this book. While his remarks were uncalled for, I can understand his thinking a little better, even if I disagree with it. Here’s a guy pushing 80 who came up in the poverty of post-war England, making his first guitars from scraps while working in a factory.
“We couldn’t afford to buy one so I bought some wood and some guitar strings and made one. It wasn’t very good, like playing a cheesewire, but it taught me. It made the noise of a guitar and I could play, relatively in tune, the first three chords that anyone needed for most skiffle songs.”
At one point, the guy was so broke he seriously considered bank robbery as a trade, never looking down his nose at others who turned to unsavory means of making a few quid.
“It’s easy to say you’re an honest sort when you’re not desperate.”
Throughout the book, I was on the lookout for some Tory-esque gammon talk, but never found it. He doesn’t speak much about politics other than to say,
“I’m aware of what’s going on out there. And I do try and think, how are they ever going to solve this rather than just going round and round making the same mistakes?”
I can’t say I disagree with that.
In fact, he says a lot of things I agree with, like when he briefly mentions religion:
“The whole God thing seems to me to have caused most of humanity’s problems.”
People are more complicated than their worst or best moments. Here’s a guy who’s said some pretty shitty things about immigration, yet after spending time with the disabled community while preparing for the role of Tommy, he shows empathy for the obstacles these people deal with every day and how we, as a society are failing them.
While he did say dumb things about Brexit that demonstrate how out of touch he is, (the accumulation of years and money can do that) he’s the same guy who’s helped to raise £25 million for kids with cancer while also building four interconnected lakes on his property, caring for the wildlife, and opening it up to the public. Anyone can go spend the day fishing at his trout fishery.
“I’m proud of what I’ve done to that land. If it had been left to fall fallow, the whole valley would have been lost. It takes a huge amount of work to keep the countryside looking and working the way it should. It means a great deal to me that I’ve looked after my bit of it. It’s a cliché but I’m just the tenant. I’m keeping it in trust for future generations. Hopefully, I’ve left it in good shape.”
I could cancel Roger Daltrey because he said some old man yelling at cloud shit on breakfast TV. But then I couldn’t rock out to Who’s Next anymore. I couldn’t lose myself in the weirdness of Tommy. I couldn’t enjoy Quadrophenia anymore. I’d have to remove large swaths from the soundtrack of my life, not to mention entire episodes and story arcs from Highlander: The Series.
It hardly seems worth it. Most of us have friends and relatives who say worse shit on Facebook. Every generation seems to think theirs is the only worthwhile one. (GenX FTW!) Daltrey’s voice in the book is great; he sounds like any regular dude down at the pub spinning tales about back in the day. This is why we read: to get the entire picture beyond the best and worst facets of a person; to understand another’s point of view. Even if they sometimes sound like an absolute bellend.