We need to stop banning artists

The guitarist from blackgaze dreamers Deafheaven, a band mentioned just last week in The Guardian for their pioneering musical efforts, has come under fire for homophobic comments allegedly made on Twitter three years ago.

Putting aside the facts that the veracity of these claims has been disputed, the immediate response was the beginning of a Change.org petition to have them removed from the Pitchfork Festival where they’ve made their most significant gains.

It is reflective of similar efforts by local anti-sexism campaigning movement Collective Shout to have the Australian visas of performers like Tyler, the Creator and Chris Brown revoked, on the basis that their lyrics endorse and encourage misogynism and violence.

Conflating these two performers is, frankly, absurd.  Whilst Tyler has displayed a tendency to vilify women and homosexuals in his lyrics, he is guilty of at worst misdemeanour charges. Brown, on the other hand, also has typically misogynist (and occasionally rapey) lyrics, but nearly killed his intimate partner in 2009. Tyler, in fact, publicly chastised him for it.

One of these men raps about torturing, raping, and killing fictional women; the other wilfully hospitalised a real one. Regardless, Tyler has joined Brown on the substantial list of artists who have been denied entry, had to cancel tours or had their work censored in Australia. His response to his simultaneous ban from the UK addressed the fact that Tyler’s character in his music is a fiction designed to reflect the directionless fury of his generation, and not a reflection of himself.

(Interestingly, as commentator Clem Bastow points out, Tyler has also been the subject of a particular scrutiny often applied to RB and hip-hop artists that seems to give performers in other genres a free pass.)

What is truly at issue here is not that Tyler, Deafheaven or other artists are being silenced, but the fact that the cultural conversations that should be had around them is being effectively crushed. Instead of stimulating debate about the influence of art on social behaviours, we’re simply punishing artists.

Let’s be clear: the move to keep Brown out was backed on a federal level and is something to be celebrated, even if it does lay bare a certain level of systemic hypocrisy. There are plenty of other, predominantly white artists whose crimes haven’t stopped them from touring here or selling their work. But even if Brown’s assertion that he wants to raise awareness of domestic violence is true, his is one of the few examples of a visa ban that is given genuine cause by criminal behaviour, especially in light of the crime’s nature.

Clearly, domestic and sexual violence in this country are at epidemic levels. Organisations like White Ribbon and, indeed, Collective Shout have been fighting the good fight, making efforts to combat the pervasive culture of sexism that is so deeply ingrained in our social fabric.

The former have been doing so by engaging in a dialogue that seeks to reshape and remove the persisting, misguided values that lead men to hurt women. Collective Shout have been tackling exactly the same problems, but by assigning blame to artistic efforts alongside criminal activities, as if the two could ever be directly linked.

It’s natural for people to seek blame when violence explodes onto the front page, and there’s plenty of precedent for artists being on the receiving end of it. For example, the massacre in Columbine High School was partly blamed on Marilyn Manson, who wrote a stunning response for Rolling Stone about witch-hunting.

But by continually censoring and assigning blame to artists for inciting violence, we are dodging the issues. Whilst GetUp! and Collective Shout have achieved something admirable in revoking Brown’s right to perform here, they’ve also prevented a broader discourse about whether violent art breeds violence by shunning Tyler.

The same applies to Deafheaven. Whilst Kerry McCoy should certainly be held accountable for his comments (if, indeed, they are his), keeping the band off American stages will do little towards ending homophobia nationwide. The stupid, reprehensible statements of this artist are being used to vilify his wholly unrelated body of work, thereby making the artwork itself guilty by association.

Banning problematic artists for reasons outside of criminal activity is neutralizing the important cultural conversations that we should be having about their work and behaviour; specifically how it mirrors our social stigmas, rather than births them. This is the whole purpose behind divisive, confrontational art: to shake the viewer out of apathy and into emotionally charged, intellectually reasoned engagement with the world at its darkest.

We need to stop banning these artists. We need to stop pretending that violent lyrics, games and movies are the cause of men’s violence against women, and acknowledge that the issue is larger and more culturally ingrained. We need to stop acting as if young people who’ve made ignorant comments have no capacity to change, and no right to produce art. And we need to stop assigning blame to creative whilst glorifying and heroising documented criminals, regardless of the quality of their work.

Without doubt, there are more important discussions to be had at present about whom we do and don’t let in to this country, but the more that we censor artists, the more that we prevent them from shining the spotlight on the ugly truths we don’t want to face.