In a recent essay for The Nation, David Hajdu recalls listening to Michael Jackson for the first time since watching Leaving Neverland, the HBO documentary detailing the pop star’s alleged sexual abuse of young boys. He is on the subway when he listens, and though he has earbuds in, his fellow passengers can hear Jackson’s music coming from his phone. “What are you thinking?” asks a stranger, as if the act of listening to Michael Jackson, once so ordinary, has now become a mark of turpitude, an indication of deep and willful apathy to the reported suffering of children.
If listening to Jackson’s songs after the Leaving Neverland revelations is a symptom of moral lapse, it is a common one. “The deafening backlash to the film by Jackson’s estate and diehard fans appears to have boosted his catalog,” reported the Chicago Sun-Times earlier this month. In the week after Leaving Neverland‘s release, “the “Billie Jean” singer … posthumously sold 6,000 albums and 13,000 song downloads … with streams of his songs jumping nearly 300,000 to 16.5 million.”
R. Kelly, another artist in recent headlines for allegedly sexually abusing minors, saw a parallel boost after an interview with Gayle King where he vehemently denied the accusations that have shadowed his star for the past 19 years. The interview followed the Lifetime documentary series Surviving R. Kelly, which aired in January. In the week after the interview, radio play of Kelly’s songs surged 71 percent. “His videos got a slick uptick with 9.5 million views (up 3 percent), while his song streams and downloads fell 1 percent and 16 percent, respectively,” reported the Sun-Times. “His album sales (1,000 copies moved) remained consistent both weeks.”
An optimistic reading of the data suggests that fans of both artists were, like Hajdu, listening to beloved music not out of apathy but out of a will to self-discovery, to see how the music hits in light of newly clarified and harrowing information. A more skeptical interpretation points to an immune response flaring up within each artist’s fanbase. A fan, by nature, is defined by the love of a pop star’s music, and when a threat looms over that bond, the fan might reinscribe their identity by listening to the music they love. They might voice tacit support to an artist accused of horrible things by pressing play on the artist’s discography.
Over the past few years, during what has been branded the #MeToo era, some famous men accused of sexual abuse have fallen from grace and others have not. Musicians seem particularly immune to the concrete repercussions that have fallen on even high profile actors, like Kevin Spacey, who was ousted from a starring role on Netflix’s House Of Cards after reports that he had sexually assaulted teenage boys. Last year, Spotify made a feeble attempt to clear certain musicians accused of abuse — namely XXXTentacion — from their promoted playlists, only to drop the policy after facing pushback from Kendrick Lamar’s record label Top Dawg Entertainment.
Music — especially pop music, centered on the voice — supplies an intimacy not found in more representational art like film and television. The voice rises up from the body, imprints on tape or data, and reverberates in the listener’s eardrum — a body to body connection. Because music is particularly ambiguous, it invites a deep emotional attachment. Listening to a song, it is easy to feel like it is being sung for you, or that you are the one singing it. Music curls up in the body and makes its home there, which may be why it’s so difficult to root it out. But pop music arrives at the body through a system of immense power, the titanic machinations of celebrity and wealth, which more often than not lends itself to abuse. There is the music that crawls into the ear, and there are the platinum records whose sales enable violence. It can be difficult to superimpose the two.
When a fan hears the bad news, it’s often easier to deny decades of accusations than to amputate the part of the body that harbors loyalty toward a favorite artist. It is often more palatable to freeze than to feel the pain of loss, especially in the case of Michael Jackson, where the music is all that’s left of him. When you have taken a stranger so deeply into yourself it can be hard to accept that the stranger has harmed others, that what you carry around inside you actually comes from a poisoned source. So you assert what you love is still pure. You slough off the bad news and press play.
Or you reckon, as Hajdu did, with the notion that a harmful person can insulate violence with beauty. “People think his music’s great, so he’s great,” one of Jackson’s alleged victims, James Safechuck, said in Leaving Neverland. “For me, Jackson’s music sounds different now, and not quite so great anymore,” Hajdu wrote. “It’s the same, aurally, of course, but it’s been reshaped in my mind by a new set of associations. Where I once found high theatricality in songs like “Thriller” and “Heal The World,” I now hear falseness and empty show. Where I found warmth in love songs like “Human Nature” and “Loving You,” I’m now reminded of the contortions Jackson went through to exploit his victims’ ardor.”
It is painful to let a song you love putrefy inside you, and many turn to music for its capacity to alleviate pain. Even in light of the most convincing confessions of survival, fans might insist that their music is theirs, and rewrite the stories they’ve heard to bolster that attachment. Music can connect the listener to the world and it can shelter them from it. In the wake of Surviving R. Kelly and Leaving Neverland, it seems many fans are choosing shelter.
