My wife recently posed the following challenge to me: name an artist who's well represented in my music library (which we defined as 3 or more albums) that I could get rid of. Not like, erase from existence or anything - just disappear from my collection, entirely. See ya, no regrets, won't be listening to you ever again. Could you do it? I had a couple options pop into my mind, mostly teenage era faves that I once loved but haven't cared about for many years - you know, Journey, Billy Joel, Huey Lewis. Other faded crushes from later eras came to mind as well (Dave Matthews?) But that didn't seem fair, since they once mattered (a lot) and helped shape my musical journey to here. The mere fact of aging, and the changing tastes that accompany that process, didn't seem sufficient to relegate otherwise decent musical acts to the dustbin of personal history. It's not like they suddenly sucked, I just outgrew them. So how to decide? Was there a band, an artist, I could live without and not look back? Didn't seem possible. Almost everything in my music collection is there intentionally, it has purpose or meaning or value, especially if we're talking artists with multiple albums. And then it hit me.
Ryan Adams.
Don't know if you've followed along, but Ryan Adams has become something of a pariah in the music biz these days. (And for good reason - maybe if he'd displayed some actual contrition and taken steps to right his wrongs and make whole those whom he's harmed it would be different, but apparently he hasn't done any of that.) But that hasn't stopped him from releasing new material - his latest CD came out earlier this month, on the heels of another new album last December. And there's a full-blown marketing campaign underway, or at least it feels that way if you still follow him on social media. New videos, singles dropping, countdowns to release day - all of it feels completely familiar and normal. And also creepy and wrong and completely tone deaf.
To the casual fan who somehow didn't read about the mess ol' Ry got himself into, there's nothing weird about this. Popular artist drops new album; online fan base goes gaga for it; artist tours and makes some coin; everyone's happy. It's a common cycle that repeats for most artists every few years, more frequently if you're prolific, which he has been for going on three decades now. And back in the day I was right there for it. In my late 20s and early 30s I was a huge Ryan Adams fan. It started with his band Whiskeytown, one of the preeminent Americana / alt-country acts of the 90s. Stranger's Almanac is still a stellar record that holds up very well. When he went solo and released Heartbreaker I didn't think he could do much better, just a perfectly executed "sad" album. And then once Gold came out right around 9/11 there was lots of attention, and fame, and I don't think he handled it so well. But he was one of "my guys" at that point, and so I became a defender of his churlishness and petty bickering within the industry. When he responded poorly to gentle public ridicule, when trolls would deliberately confuse him with Bryan Adams just to get under his skin, I took his side. Saw him perform multiple times, most notably at Red Rocks and the Paramount, and he was musically marvelous, even if sort of a dick on stage. Through the 2000s and well into the past decade, the music kept coming. And as someone with completist tendencies (see Sting post, below) it wasn't always easy to keep up with all the new content. When an artist is both this prolific and this much of a chameleon, it can start to feel overwhelming. I'll admit I didn't fully get on board his pensive alt-country phase AND his leather jacket rock n' roll phase AND his 80s revivalist phase AND his Grateful Dead noodling phase AND his Taylor Swift fascination, etc. etc. There were some gaps in there. But the good stuff was so good that I was willing to give each release a chance. Plus there were the many singles and B-sides to track down, all of which added up to quite the healthy representation of his work in my library. Long story short, I've got a lot of stuff by Ryan Adams.
And I'm OK with never hearing any of it again.
How does that come to be? At what point does the artist become inseparable from his art? I'm certainly not the first to ponder this, it's an issue that consumers of all artistic disciplines have struggled with. What to do when the artist is remarkably gifted, uniquely talented, and also a complete asshole? Worse, what if he's not just unpleasant or a jerk, but actually dangerous? What do you do with art made by a criminal, a predatory creep? Where do you draw the line between morally judging the artist and appreciating his creation? Unless you traffic in moral absolutes, these are not easy questions to wrestle with. There's some cognitive dissonance involved if you intend to continue to support the artist, especially when it comes to their new art. Maybe you can compartmentalize the bad and focus only on the good - but separating the artist from his art ultimately diminishes the work, and what it means to you. The context of where, how, and by whom art was created may not seem as essential as where and when you were in your life when you encountered it, but that context of its creation still informs your experience with it. None of this occurs in a vacuum.
But how much is a bridge too far? I don't know that there's a hard and fast rule, at least for me - seems to be a case by case basis. I didn't shun all Woody Allen movies forever (not that I was a huge fan to begin with, but the great films are undeniable still great.) I'm still able to laugh heartily at a beloved Bill Cosby record - I can still appreciate the humor and wisdom for what they were, at face value. It's harder to enjoy his performance and his public persona while knowing in the back of my mind who and what he really is - but it's possible, And I think you have to be able to do that in order not to live your life in perpetual judgment of others. While the impulse behind cancel culture is a good one, to constantly be so hung up on whether someone is living up to the moral standards you ascribe to them, only to be constantly disappointed when they inevitably fall short at some point...that just feels exhausting. So while this doesn't mean we should continue to support the creep - I don't see myself dropping a couple hundred bucks to see Louis C.K. in person ever again - it also doesn't forever render their works of art illegitimate. Does it color my view of the performer when rewatching their show or listening to their album again? Certainly. Will I completely stop listening to/watching creepy artists? Well...
I haven't gone so far as to remove all my RA CDs, they're still sitting up there. Not sure there's much of a market for them at the moment. And while I might fancy myself a bold social justice warrior for standing astride my high moral ground as I decree which artists deserve to remain in my library ("Until and unless you are honestly repentant, you shall remain banished!"), it's not like I've begun the cleansing purge of kicking all the other moral reprobates to the curb. In the end this is still just a thought experiment. And if I'm being honest, the real answer to my wife's question comes down to this: if I had to, I could say farewell to Mr. Adams...because Jason Isbell is right there, just waiting to fill that Ryan-shaped hole in my library.
