When activists plastered Chris Brown albums with the warning "This Man Beats Women," the Internet (rightfully) cheered. But now that John Lennon albums are also getting stickered, the online response is a lot more conflicted. Abuse Sticks Out, the guerrilla campaign that flagged Brown's latest album Fortune in British retailer HMV, picked an easy first target. Pretty much everyone already hates Brown, and for good reason. There's even an app that conveniently makes him disappear from the Internet. Words like "nice" and "Fab!" were common reactions to the stickers.
But people have mostly forgotten that Lennon was also physically abusive towards women. "I used to be cruel to my woman," he said, citing the lyrics to "Getting Better" in a Playboy interview near the end of his life. "Physically—any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women." In his biography The Lives of John Lennon, Albert Goldman also maintains that Lennon was guilty of spousal abuse...
Does this change your opinion of Lennon? Or does it make you more willing to forgive other abusers? What is your standard for bad behavior for artists? It's easy to condemn artists whose music or books or other output you dislike anyway. But what about when it's someone whose artistic creations mean something to you?
"When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives." Winter is Coming Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky; And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk, the Law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
