Clapton is not God just another flawed person
ASPartOfMe
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Eric Clapton Will Not Play Shows Where Proof of Vaccine Is Required
Clapton issued his statement in response to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s announcement on Monday, July 19th, that vaccine passes would be required to enter nightclubs and venues. Clapton’s statement was shared via the Telegram account of film producer and architect Robin Monotti, who has also been skeptical of the Covid-19 vaccine and expressed other doubts about the U.K. government’s response to the pandemic. (Clapton previously shared a message about his “disastrous” health experience after receiving the Covid-19 vaccine on Monotti’s Telegram page.)
The message was accompanied by a link to Clapton’s anti-lockdown song with Van Morrison, “Stand and Deliver”
Eric Clapton’s not God, just another vile anti-vaxxer
For many rock fans — white men especially — a mighty object of youthful adoration is Eric Clapton, the heavily decorated rock musician.
Clapton, who is 76, has been in the news this week — not for rock-goddery but his reckless anti-vax rhetoric. His dangerous stance on vaccines has forced yet another conversation about the importance of “separating the music from the man.”
Fans have started to argue again that Clapton was such a Michelangelo in music with songs such as “Layla,” “Cocaine” and “Wonderful Tonight” that his grave misconduct can never make them question his work.
Some seem further to have internalized the creed that “Clapton is God” — apparently without knowing that Clapton himself has suggested that the meme, which was spray-painted all over London in the mid-1960s, was invented by a Yardbirds promoter.
For these believers in Clapton’s divinity, you can criticize the man — and there is more than anti-vax politics to object to — but hands off the music.
Throughout the pandemic, Clapton has joined in criticism of the COVID-19 lockdown, as if governments were just 1960s priggish parents grounding kids for smoking grass.
But Clapton also chose to get vaccinated. (It’s almost as if he didn’t want to contract a deadly disease.)
After his second shot, he alleged that the vaccine left him with a 10-day flare-up of pain in his hands and feet, possibly —he implied — related to the peripheral neuropathy he suffers from. Neuropathy is the result of an injury to the nerves. It can be caused by alcoholism. Clapton has long admitted his alcoholic history.
There are decades of vileness that have been overlooked or rationalized.
There was that time in 1968 that Clapton damned Jimi Hendrix in Rolling Stone, using a casual racist slur and citing vulgar racist nonsense as the source of Hendrix’s appeal as a sexual fetish object.
There was the time in 1976 that Clapton announced at a concert, again with racist slurs, that he wanted to “keep Britain white” and to deport all Black people.
And of course there’s the time in 1999 when Clapton told the London Sunday Times that fueled by drugs and alcohol he abused the model and photographer Pattie Boyd in the 1980s, when they were married. “I took sex with my wife by force and thought that was my entitlement,” he said.
In the Guardian in 2018, critic Neil Spencer praised Clapton’s music as “dazzling” and full of “caustic brilliance,” cautioning against putting too much stock in his “poor behaviour and assorted addictions.”
“One must trust the art, not the artist,” Spencer wrote.
Dazzling and brilliant are generic words of praise, and clearly in the ears of the beholder. But “caustic” means corrosive. If Clapton’s music is corrosive, certainly so are his actions and ideologies. They’re all of a piece.
With Clapton, it seems time to trust both the art and the artist — and both seem to be begging (on their knees) to enter retirement.
That great and horrible stuff do come the same people is a fact. If I choose to separate the art from the person or choose to cancel the person the issue is my emotional inability to deal with that fact.
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funeralxempire
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I post on a guitar forum with a lot of boomers. Clapton is God isn't just a slogan used to promote the Yardbirds over there, it's theology (and I'm an atheist). Clapton has always been an as*hole and Page molested children.
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I knew Clapton was an ahole, but not about the other thing.
Clapton was born out of wedlock to teen girl after she had a fling with a Canadan serviceman stationed in the UK during WWII. His moms parents raised him, but told him that they were his "parents" and that his mom was his "sister".
Then one day they finally thought he was old enough to learn the truth. So they sat him down and explained to him the truth, and it traumatized him. "It was like my world was turned upside down" he said.
There was another notable gentleman in history who had an identical thing. A certain American who was born out of wedlock to a young lady who had an affair with a man at a church retreat (she never revealed who the father was). Was raised by his grandparents with the same cover story as given to the child Clapton. And then one day this other guy was told..."this little girl here...she actually your mom, and WE...are actually your grandparents".
This other man also survived the mental upheaval, but.... well... his name was "Ted Bundy".
So...I guess we should be grateful that Clapton only became musician with an attitude, instead of becoming a serial killer!
ASPartOfMe
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Not to many rock stars back then did not mess around with “jailbait” and if they didn’t they pretended they did. That was a key part of the whole “rock god” image. The lifestyle of going from city to city picking up all the free drugs and underage groupies was a fantasy teenage boys stuck in nowheresville suburbia were sold. It was right there in the songs, Ringo Starr singing “Your Sixteen you are beautiful and your mine.”, KISS with “Christine Sixteen” , Rod Stewart in “Tonight’s the Night” singing “Don't say a word my virgin child Just let your inhibitions run wild”. John Lennon reformed but before then he was a piece of work. And it was in the songs he wrote ‘Getting Better All The Time’ he wrote “I used to be cruel to my woman
I beat her and kept apart from the things that she loved
Man I was mean but I'm changing my scene
And I'm doing the best that I can” and there was this beauty he wrote
That is the same man who wrote “Give Peace A Chance” an anthem still and Rod Stewart wrote an one of the most emphatic songs about a hate crime even when homophobia was still quite acceptable
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Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 24 Jul 2021, 8:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
funeralxempire
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I'm aware it was common and it's something that taints the entire era. I can't look up to people who spent their 20s and 30s f*****g intoxicated high school kids.
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Watching liberals try to solve societal problems without a systemic critique/class consciousness is like watching someone in the dark try to flip on the light switch, but they keep turning on the garbage disposal instead.
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I was thinking that you meant that Page did seven year olds. Seventeen year old groupies throwing themselves at him isnt quite the same thing. Not that that makes him a role model for your own kids.
Hate to pile on with the slander, but even Carol King contributed to the RocknRoll hall of shame, by writing this (for Phil Spector and one of his groups) way back in the innocent pre psychedelic early Sixties.
Cringeworthy.
Oddly enough decades later it was covered by Courtney Love, and Hole.
funeralxempire
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No, seven year old groupies would be worse than 13 year old groupies, but it's all pretty sleazy.
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Watching liberals try to solve societal problems without a systemic critique/class consciousness is like watching someone in the dark try to flip on the light switch, but they keep turning on the garbage disposal instead.
戦争ではなく戦争と戦う
Jimmy Saville, Roman Polansky, Elvis, Keith Richard, Woody Allen Rolf Harris and numerous other entertainers abused young school aged girls. It was so common in the 1960s and 70s it was completely normalised among the Hollywood elite, Unfortunately the antics of these abusers fed the latter conspiracy theories of the MAGAs that somehow Washington leaders perpetuated it.
I think if you look at every male celebrity who had the opportunity to sleep with groupies nearly all of them would have slept with a teenage girl at least once. Its not just celebrities, every male royal, Thomas Jefferson, Mao Tse Tung, Mahatma Gandhi, Gaddafi, every North Korean dictator would have done the same.
From that perspective Clapton and Jimmy Paige are in goof company.
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As long as the state is never allowed the right to force people to get the vax, I don’t care what people do. If privately owned music venues choose to require a vax pass, that’s on them.
FWIW, I’ve gotten the vax myself because I chose to, not because I had to. I think it’s a smarter choice to get the vax until we see evidence showing otherwise. However, I don’t believe that I have the right to tell people what they should have to do just because I’ve done something. Clapton it seems is just expressing his opinion on the matter, same as many others have done. If he doesn’t want to play venues that require passes, he is under no obligation to do so.
Not to many rock stars back then did not mess around with “jailbait” and if they didn’t they pretended they did. That was a key part of the whole “rock god” image. The lifestyle of going from city to city picking up all the free drugs and underage groupies was a fantasy teenage boys stuck in nowheresville suburbia were sold. It was right there in the songs, Ringo Starr singing “Your Sixteen you are beautiful and your mine.”,
The age of consent in the UK has been 16 (for opposite sex relations) since 1929. While the song still gives me the creeps (“hope that sparkle and shine”, ), I also think it is a clear work of fiction. It was written by Paul McCartney as a simple “Ringo” song to appeal to a teenage market.
That being said…
I remember in 2012, during Operation Yewtree, McCartney giving an interview in which he said the Beatles had sex with lots of young women but only if they were over 16, and they always made sure. To me, this stretches credibility. I find it hard to believe that they would always demand ID.
If the girl turning up as a groupie was "pretty" and lied about her age, doesn't look like a child then I doubt they will bother checking.
People make fun of R Kelly but appear to ignore worse exploits from their favourite singers
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/music/1 ... ge-7980930
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