Joss Whedon, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, and some country singer about whom I know nothing except "the n-word"

 Two related and contrasting pop culture observations for today.  First, the story roiling the science fiction & fantasy world is the news that continues to surface about what a douchebag Joss Whedon apparently is.  And unfortunately, he is not just a douchebag.  He created a hostile work environment on his sets.  Most recently, Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia Chase on Buffy, and then on the clearly, objectively superior Angel, told some rather horrific stories of Whedon's treatment of her.  What an asshole.

On the other side of the political, social and cultural spectrum... country music.  Y'all know I love country as much as I love Buffy, but of course, "country" encompasses rather a lot.  Until a recent dust-up, I had never heard of Morgan Wallen, because I listen to real country music.  Yeah, that means "pretentious, hipster douchebag" country, but with the word, "douchebag" doing something different in this paragraph, but it also means the old stuff.  Like, the old stuff.  Regardless, Wallen used a racial slur.

OK, so what now?  Whedon's fanbase is divided between the sleepy left and the woke left, so the question is what to do with the legacy of Buffy.  I imagine brown coats will be donned if we get similar stories from the set of Firefly, but as of yet, I have heard none.  Regardless, what do we do with the artistic product?

My position has long been that art and artist must remain separate.  I have explained my position enough times that I feel no need to rehash my arguments, save for the observation that I still haven't seen anyone seek to banish Alice In Wonderland from the Western canon, nor Chuck Berry, nor the creation of rock & roll.  And hell, yesterday's music post was Miles Davis (for the purposes of honoring Chick Corea).  Total douche.  Miles, not Chick.  By all reports I know, Chick was cool.

Of course, is it different when the art itself came about from an abusive environment?  I can't answer that question for you, but I will pose an altered form of a question I have posed before.  I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you aren't some anti-vaxxer twerp.  Suppose there were only one vaccine, and the lab that produced it had been a hostile work environment.  Would you take it?

Of course, I can live without Buffy, in literal terms.  But now that it exists, what do you do?  I know you still let Alice into your life.  Rock & roll, and plenty of vile artists.

How pure are you?  Stripped of your self-justifying bullshit, how pure are you really?  Just askin'...

And then there's Wallen.  I was never going to listen to him.  I said I listen to real country.  Yet plenty of the old guys were racist.  I know that.  Should I stop listening?  I know plenty of people assume racism and refuse to listen to the genre on that basis, never having heard of artists like Jason Isbell, but their ignorance does not impress me.  Closed-mindedness masquerading as virtue.  Me = not impressed.

Yet the Wallen story is that when his linguistic quirks became known, his record sales went... up.

Whedon's douchebaggery goes public, and sci-fi fandom grapples with whether or not to cancel him.  Wallen uses racial slurs, and country music fandom says, "hey, we like the cut of your jib!"

That's the world right now.

Of course, it's not quite so simple.  A few years back, a pop-country singer named Shania Twain had to apologize for saying nice things about... Trump, which may mess with your head, and the wokeness of sci-fi can turn into things like the Isabel Fall fiasco, and even the disaster that was NK Jemisin's last book, which I called straight-up racism.  The distinction between the Morgan Wallen dust-up and the sci-fi community's reaction to Joss Whedon is not a demonstration of a clear good-versus-evil dynamic between competing fandoms.  Yet it does demonstrate that we can observe different kinds of reactions.  The reaction to Whedon is, regardless of what one thinks of cancel culture, motivated by a desire to eliminate hostile work environments, whereas the increased sales for Morgan Wallen probably do indicate, if not outright racism, then sympathy for the devil anyone accused of it, regardless of the validity of the accusation.

Why might that be?  Is it that those buying the records really are racist?  Are they simply tired of the accusations?  That's hard to say.  It may not be quite as simple as racists who want to support their own, even if that is the Occam's razor interpretation, but it certainly isn't pretty seeing those sales numbers go up, particularly in contrast to reactions to Whedon.

Yet to apply my rule, what should the reaction be?  Well, does he make good music?  I honestly haven't listened.  I have no idea how he sounds.  I'd have to click on something, and if I did that, revenue would go either to him or his record label anyway.  Besides which... I fucking hate pop-country.  I like real country music, and people like that just don't deserve my time anyway.

So what if Jason Isbell were caught on tape using the n-word?  Well... I'd be really surprised.  It would be somewhat out of character, given how he presents himself.  Of course, there are plenty of frauds in the world, so the probability that he is a good, old boy behind the scenes is not zero, but he doesn't play the mega-star game, so if he's being a fraud, he's doing it wrong.  And Patterson Hood?  Yeah, that's not how you do it.  Play a recording of either of them talkin' like Trump, and I'd be very surprised.  But I suppose it could happen.

Would it detract from the quality of their art?  No.

Art and artist.

Yet artistic tastes, and public declarations of them are, in many ways, social signaling.  Why do people sneer at country?  They are signaling the groups with which they affiliate, and the groups with which they do not.  They are signaling politics, and all of that.  Sci-fi?  Oh, yeah.  That's why people get so persnickety about taste.  Social signaling.  So when an artist crosses a line, or sends what may be perceived in some quarters as a positive signal, interpretation of the art gets messed up.

Did you listen to In A Silent Way?  It really is one of the most brilliant albums ever made.  And Miles was an "Asshole" with a capital "A."  Does it matter?  Does it matter what form that assholery took?

Still waitin' for people to burn their copies of Alice...