this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
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Goth Industrial Music
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Ngl, he is a douchebag.
But so was Jim Morrison, and John Lennon and Elvis and pretty much every damn musician ever. Finding musicians, especially in rock and its offspring genres, that aren't shady is harder than it should be in an ideal world. Even John Denver and Pat Boone had their moments of dickishness. And you don't even want to know what contemporary christian musicians do when they're out of the public eye, so even people that claim, in their music to be all about being decent and loving (their) god can't be assumed to be worth a damn.
For me, with any genre, the question isn't about the musician, it's about the music. Manson, while he covered some dark topics, didn't write songs encouraging raping people. Not that such a song wouldn't have been able to be a good song, but I wouldn't have listened to it. John Lennon didn't write songs encouraging people to be abusive to their spouse or abandon their kids.
Hell, even Phil Anselmo hasn't put out songs espousing his batshit version of white supremacy, and he's the kind of guy you'd expect to do that.
That's the line for me. IDGAF about the artist, so long as the music isn't centered around their douchebaggery. I might never buy an artist's music because they're a douche (Manson included), but I might pirate it.
Even Bowie was banging teenagers, allegedly, in the 70s.
Oh yeah, it was everywhere. Pamela Debarre (I think that's the spelling) has an autobiography called "I'm with the band", and all the old school groupies were young as hell, well under 18 in many cases.
A lot of the musicians started out young themselves, so the age gap wasn't as huge as it seems in retrospect, but it was a gap nonetheless. Truth is that there's all kinds of 60s and 70s era that half the reason to be in a band in the first place was to meet girls. They just kept meeting girls after they stopped being boys
I can't even say they were wrong at the time because there was such a cultural shift where everything was up in the air. The groupies usually made conscious choices. Bad choices, but the explosion of sexual awareness during and after the sexual revolution meant that everyone was redrawing boundaries, and that included when and how women were free to express their sexuality. It included the idea that sex wasn't a dirty thing, that it was supposed to be fun and interesting, not some heavy weight that required marriage and corrupted anyone that engaged in it.
Yeah, the line ended up being lowered way further than it should have been, and abuses occurred. I just can't automatically point a finger of blame at the musicians of the era and say they were acting as predators. Most of them were young as hell and just looking for fun, and nobody was flashing IDs or worrying about anything. That's a big difference from the way Manson acted, and most of his partners were adults, or at least legal.
Which is all tangential, really, but a lot of the "kids" from that era were the parents of my generation, and even out here in the boonies away from New York and California, they were having their fun, when you can get them to tell the stories. Some of the shit my mom was doing at navy bases around the world would be scandals nowadays, and she remembers it all fondly.
In some places, all that there is to do is fuck and take drugs. Think Alaska in the darkest of winter.