torture the audience who loves the artist

or, the impossibility of separating art from yourself no matter how reprehensible the artist

The definitive biography of Dostoevsky was written by a Jewish man. It's, I believe, four or five volumes.

The project began with deep admiration, obviously. No one embarks on their life's work out of indifference. But over the many years of research, writing, and publication, he came to despise Dostoevsky over the depths of hatred Dostoevsky had for Jewish people.

I will always love Dostoevsky's books. They've meant too much to me for too long, been too much a part of who I am long before I learned of his anti-semitism, but his anti-semitism is inescapable.

Knut Hamsun and Louis Ferdinand Celine were great writers. Writers I love. But they both became propagandists for the Third Reich.

Is there a way to reconcile this? To overcome the absolute hatred directed at people who were literally being rounded up and murdered (while Dostoevsky predates the Third Reich, Jews had a pretty unpleasant time in Imperial Russia, to put it mildly)?

I don’t think you can reconcile it.

And so you fracture over it. You cannot love someone without condoning the things you hate about them. And so we split the art from the artist, the love from the person.

It's imperfect and ugly but so are we. Ugly little creatures crawling over the pockmarked skin of the earth, trying to find and create meaning for the ways we fail, the ways we have always been broken.

I have never liked Kanye West and yet I love Kanye West. I split him in two and split myself in two to accommodate this.

Deja Entendu was the first album I bought with my own money. I remember seeing this music video late at night on MTV when I was however old I was when this song came out.

I really had never heard anything like this at the time, or at least that’s how it felt to my hormonally deranged brain while sitting in front of a glowing screen the way I would spend so many different sleepless nights of my teenage years.

I was struck by the powerful emotionality of the song, but mostly it was the sonic texture that burrowed beneath my skin. The dueling vocals, the contrasting quiets and louds, the way it all crescendos.

It was enough for me. I had access to a car and a job that paid me in money and even a portable CD player. And so I drove to Best Buy and bought this CD and brought it home and put my headphones on and pulled the liner notes out and laid in my bed reading the lyrics while Jesse Lacey sang the words that would become a part of the fabric of my life, that would come to define so much of my young self.

I cannot express what that album meant to me and it would take me too many thousands of words to explain why owning my first CD meant so much to me and why it took until I had my own money and access to a car and my own secret portable CD player for it to happen, but the short answer is my parents’ radical Catholicism and a fear of the modern world, though a sort of answer is gestured at here.

It was the opening chords of this simple song, the first song on the album, that shivered through my body for the following twenty years. If I have a soul—if I ever had one—the texture of these opening chords forever thrums against and through it.

I still hear it when I close my eyes, when I think of love and longing, when I remember specific moments and the ways I broke my own heart over the love that meant so much to me yet had nowhere to go.

I’m sinking like a stone in the sea.

I’m burning like a bridge for your body.

This album has followed me around for twenty years now. I spent sleepless drunken nights wandering Dublin streets listening to this album on my iPod and I spent days on Korean buses and airports all over the world letting this album that defined my teenage years give shape to my continuing life.

Fifteen years after this album grafted itself to my sense of self, allegations came out that Jesse Lacey had behaved wildly inappropriately with underage female fans. Later, Lacey released a statement on the band’s facebook page, though he manages neither to admit nor deny the allegations.

The actions of my past have caused pain and harm to a number of people, and I want to say that I am absolutely sorry. I do not stand in defense of myself nor do I forgive myself. I was selfish, narcissistic, and insensitive in my past, and there are a number of people who have had to shoulder the burden of my failures. I apologize for the hurt I have caused, and hope to be able to take the correct actions to earn forgiveness and trust.

Like many, I was stunned.

I was not hurt because this didn’t happen to me.

It happened to those girls. It is their tragedy and hurt, not mine. Not yours. And not the legion of fans who fell in love with Lacey’s words, with his music.

I think this is an important distinction to be made and so I’ll speak a bit more about it.

When terrible things are done to people, they are not done to you. You may feel betrayed because feelings are beyond your control, but you need to understand that it had nothing to do with you. You were not even an observer in cases like Jesse Lacey and these young women. You’re barely even a bystander.

For me, then, or for me, now, to make this about myself would be a true derangement. I understand the impulse, but it was not me who Lacey betrayed. It was not me who Lacey coerced. It was not me who he hurt.

While he was using girls and young women, I was wrapping his songs around my life and burying my own hurts inside them.

And the question rises: does the pain of these women overshadow the experiences of my own life?

Maybe they should, but they cannot.

Had I known in 2003 what I came to know in 2017, I may have never grown attached to Brand New. I may never have allowed that work inside my life, inside my soul. May not have allowed those words and sounds to form a prism through which I began to understand myself, my own heart, my own pain and longing, my own hurt.

Instead, I spent nearly fifteen years with Brand New. I went back to their first album while waiting for their third and then fell deeply into The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me. Daisy did little for me, but Science Fiction felt as large to me in 2017 as In Rainbows did to me in 2007.

Because I never cared for their fourth album, I had become arrested, in a way, inside their second and third albums. For over a decade, these 24 songs along with various bootleg and rarities and covers and demos were everything to me. The enigmatic and obscure nature of Brand New’s online presence meant that I had nothing else to hold onto.

There weren’t hundreds of interviews or frequent updates. There was only the yawning silence of your favorite band who left you with two gorgeous, nearly perfect albums that meant so much to you that you could not even imagine the person you might have been had you never stumbled upon their music video late at night.

When Lacey finally revealed the kind of person he was to his many fans, I felt mostly lost. I didn’t turn inward and try to interrogate why these songs by this asshole meant so much to me, because I didn’t know anything about him.

I never knew.

To me, there were only ever the songs.

And so for me, the songs remain separate from him because he was never there but as a shadow. The songs themselves became a part of me.

But I’ll say it again:

You cannot reconcile art you love with the horrible people who make it.

You fracture over it. You cannot love someone without condoning the things you hate about them. And so we split the art from the artist, the love from the person.

And you split yourself in half over it.

I am, perhaps, more flexible than most with regard to this question. I am comfortable with shattering to pieces over the art that I love and the people who may have done things I despise.

Only you can draw the lines for yourself, whether you’re willing to split, how much of yourself you’re willing to split.

And it’s okay if you’re unwilling to separate the art from the artist.

For me, splitting them apart is as natural as breathing. I have spent my life not knowing the lives of the artists I love. First out of pure ignorance but later as habit. Possibly out of fear that I’d have to deny them or because maybe I understand, deep down, that the art matters more to me and I prefer not to stare into the yawning abyss staring back at me.

---

Some stray links for free books:

• Jay A Toney’s First Command

• AP Mobley’s Wrath of Persephone

• TC Marti’s Chronicles of Rondure

• Marc Layton’s 5 Demons

And then some links of my own!

• Sign up for the Goodreads giveaway for Colony Collapse! The giveaway runs until the 21st!

• Speaking of which, Colony Collapse is out in one week!

• I’m giving away the ebook of Howl! The sequel is coming at the end of April with the third in the series coming end of May. So catch up now!

• I sure would appreciate if everyone reviewed Glossolalia and Howl and At Home Inside You! I wouldn’t mind some goodreads reviews of Colony Collapse either, for those who have already read it.

• The audiobook for Sing, Behemoth, Sing is now out! Narrated by the incomparable Kelby Losack who also did the Glossolalia audiobook and will be doing the Howl and Iron Wolf audiobooks too.