Today new interviews came out with both Julian Casablancas (ex The Strokes) and Jack White (ex The White Stripes) in which they said a variety of dopey things. Because of this, half of my twitter timeline took victory laps about how they never liked the Strokes and the White Stripes, that the Strokes and the White Stripes were never good, and so on. It’s a low-grade version of how people fall all over themselves to announce that they always hated the work of the latest man to be exposed as a sexual predator, and it’s just as goofy here as it is there.
I understand the compulsion to seize any available opportunity to advertise your distaste for a passionately disliked artist. Couple that with the catharsis of dunking on people who’ve revealed themselves as fools or creeps under any circumstances and it’s like you’re playing socio-critical tee-ball. But in every case, this unspoken logic behind these comments is that only fools and creeps can make shitty art, and you had the perspicacity to see through the act from the start. It’s a totem wielded against the nerve-wracking uncertainty involved in investing your time and energy and emotions in art, a field in which being a smart person, being a good person, and being a good artist often have little to do with one another.
I’ve disliked a lot of art made by people who turned out to be pretty awful; Louis CK is the most obvious example here. But I also love, and continue to love, a lot of art made by such people as well, though I don’t love the people themselves. I’m sure I’ll be disappointed to learn that other artists I love are awful people in the future. And god knows that any number of artists I both love and hate are doofuses. (One of the “I never liked them anyway!” comments I saw about the Strokes and the White Stripes unfavorably compared them to Britney Spears; I like a lot of her music too, but is the implication here supposed to be that she’s never done or said anything unfortunate or asinine?) I’m hard pressed to think of a single case in which my feelings about their work and the truth about them as people had a connection I sussed out years in advance, and therefore now deserve to crow about publicly. Critics, of all people, should know better.