Music Journalism’s Silence on Sexual Assault
More people care about a band name than rape.
Maybe I’m cynical and jaded, maybe I’m looking at the wrong sites, but as I scroll through social media, I see more discussion around a band who is “self-censoring” than a man accused of sexual assaulting a fellow musician.
For context, the folk-punk act Andrew Jackson Jihad has officially changed their name to AJJ, as to not offend Muslims and to distance themselves from Andrew Jackson (who was not the nicest guy). Afterward, I saw a flurry of activity on Twitter, Youtube and Facebook, bemoaning the change as “not punk.” Popular critic Anthony Fantano derided it as “the weakest play they could’ve made.” Meanwhile, American singer/songwriter Larkin Grimm accused Swans frontman Michael Gira of raping her while he was producing her 2008 album Parplar. You can read the full post here but, sadly, it mirrors so many other stories of sexual assault both in and out of the music world. “Michael Gira, my producer, raped me and dumped me from his label when I confronted him about it, needing to feel safe,” is the most telling part of the post, not just for the accusation, but because it also reveals a dark truth that few in the music industry want to talk about. Men in places of power take advantage of women whom they’re working with, using that power to silence women’s voices in the aftermath.
That is a discussion in and of itself that must be had, but I don’t believe it can be properly made in current music journalism environment. Many of the biggest publications in music were uncharacteristically muted after the accusations aired. Pitchfork, which will review an album less than 24 hours after it comes out and pounces on tweets for news pieces, took eight hours to run a headline. What surprises and enrages me is that many modern music publications take on a façade of being paragons of all things liberal. They fight misogyny, rush to cover diverse artists and give features to often voiceless segments of the population. But the moment someone big reveals something hideous that should be condemned…silence. As my fellow writer Brice Ezell said, “Kanye tweets some minutiae and it gets major coverage, but 4 hours after Michael Gira is accused of rape, radio silence from Music Twitter?”
This is, quite frankly, systematic bullshit. A mask of progressivism that drops as soon as a sacred cow does something vile. The liberal lean in Pitchfork and its ilk is a lie. Clicks, traffic and ad revenue come before proper discussion. There are people talking about this, Jessica Hopper has a fantastic series of tweets laying down how we can fix the system now, but there’s an eerie quiet where usually it’s a cacophony of hot takes and tweets. I believe that evil is rare, but cowardice is exceptionally common, and all I see in the comments, in the posts, in the editorial boards are cowards. They’re afraid of upsetting fan bases, the artists, the labels. They are progressive when it is convenient to them and their investors. And convenience and cowardice have no place in a discussion of rape.
-Nathan
