Should I Listen to Music by Bad People? Link Drop
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Should I Listen to Music by Bad People?
Afrika Bambaataa died last week. Along with DJ Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash, Bambaataa is considered one of the forefathers of hip-hop. He was also a highly problematic character. In the last decade of his life, Bambaataa was repeatedly accused of grooming and sexually molesting children through the Universal Zulu Nation, a hip-hop awareness group that he founded in the early 1970s.
When I heard about Bambaataa’s death, my mind went to his “Planet Rock,” one of the most important records in the history of hip-hop. As I went to pull the song up on YouTube, I hesitated. Should I be listening to a song by a bad person?
I did still play the song. But this question kept coming back to me throughout the month. d4vd, a singer-songwriter best known for his track “Romantic Homicide,” made headlines after he was arrested in connection to the murder of a 14-year-old girl whose body was discovered in the trunk of his car. Buzz has also continued to grow around the forthcoming Michael Jackson biopic, a biopic that apparently ignores the troublesome parts of the second half of the singer’s life.
This brings us back to the same question: Should we listen to songs by people who do bad things?
