Until producers stop giving him money and actors refuse to work with him he'll continue spreading hate, the guy has been an obvious bigot and moron his entire life
āI separate people and their artā people are the fuckinā worst and huge part of the problem, too, since they donāt do a damn thing to incentivise those losers to stop what theyāre doing, either.
When I learned that āSweet Home Alabamaā was in bitter response to Neil Youngās āSouthern Manā I just stopped listening to it. There is so much music in the world, Iāve been fine without Lynyrd Skynyrd. I also donāt think Iāve ever seen a Mel Gibson movie and I seem to be ok.
This might be an unpopular opinion, but I would say that "Sweet Home Alabama" is very different. It was not written bitterly and it was written by a bunch of Neil Young fans (and Neil himself loved the song). The point of "Sweet Home Alabama" was to show that there were people who grew up in the South who weren't racist, who acknowledged and decried the racist history of the South, but who also felt resentment at being lumped in with the racists, past and present. Being both proud of being from the South and ashamed of being from the South at the same time even has its own term, coined AFAIK by the band The Drive-By Truckers: "the duality of the Southern Thing."
There are plenty of artists and musicians that should just be written off, but I don't think Skynyrd is among them. They were actually relatively progressive for their background and were trying to paint a fairly sophisticated and balanced story; it's not their fault that their fanbase evolved into a bunch of racist assholes who preempted the song for their own causes, especially since the heart and soul of the band died in a plane crash in 1977. But that's just my two cents as a huge music fan who grew up listening to Skynyrd in the 90's.
They heard āSouthern Manā and went so hard ānot all southernersā that they even included the line directly telling Neil to fuck off. One of their black back-up singers went on to cover āSouthern Manā as a little bit of a personal win for her. Lynyrd Skynyrd could have done a million things that werenāt that in response but instead they wrote that little piece of whiny-baby bullshit. They did it all on their own, without their base needing to misinterpret anything. Fuck āem, I got loads of fantastic music to listen to without giving that one any of my time.
People have literally died for their rights and weāre so damned soft we canāt even just consume different yet equally good, or better, media and thatās fuckinā weak. Sometimes we arenāt given much choice but itās not like weāre hurting for high-quality music, TV, and literature. Itās so fucking easy.
Maybe Lynyrd Skynyrd shouldn't have constantly used the Confederate Battle Flag and other Confederate imagery if they didn't want to be lumped in with the racists.
It was bad, but mind the cultural context they it was widely considered the "southern" flag (by southern whites) which just happened to also have been used by the Confederacy. There was a century of pro-Confederate propaganda we were raised under, and we've only recently reckoned with that.
A lot of those same people who flew it when they were kids decades ago denounce the thing today, thankfully.
I havenāt seen āem and Iām doing perfectly ok. And guess what, I didnāt know he was involved and now Iām gunna not watch āem even harder. Itās just that easy.
I didnāt say itās a brag, I said itās extremely easy to not consume content when you know that the people who produced it are garbage. I wasnāt even asking people to look up the histories of every artist theyāve ever seen.
Beyond Thunderdome is a bit shit to be honest, but I wouldnt say Mel Gibson can't act or hasn't been in good films. I just don't want to have to stare at his racist fucking face.
I was a lot younger when I first heard it. I did think it was a little weird but not enough for that young Canadian white boy to really have too much of an opinion. The only āplainly laid outā reference to āSouthern Manā is a single line referring to this āNeilā I also didnāt really know anything about at the time.
Bro I was a kid and didnāt know what āSouthern Manā even was, either, and the concept of a person from the south isnāt exactly unique to the song by that name.
I'm not criticizing you for misunderstanding it as a kid. You're not a kid anymore. You just said, as an adult, that the only reference was a single line with the word Neil in it. That's wrong. If you can't handle being corrected when you say something wrong maybe the internet isn't for you.
Oh Iām so sorry, it was four lines back to back and three of them were just saying his name. Will you ever forgive me? Please, your admiration is all that I crave!
I know that youāve never missed something small that you frankly werenāt paying much attention to in the first place. Teach me your ways, enlightened one.
I already learned, I know what the song is about now and I not only knew it long time ago but I literally had already said that. You arenāt teaching anyone anything, you just tried to mock me for not knowing something.
I hope you find, one day, something kinder to fill that gaping hole in your personality. This aināt it.
We don't have the celebrity thing you have in the US here, so I only see bits and pieces of this, but his (and several others, really) spiralling into insanity has been quite bizarre to witness. First into extreme bizarro religion and then (predictably) into far right politics.
As is often the case, the rejection just entrenches his beliefs.
I wish I knew how people started falling into that kind of mental trap. I'm not sure he was always like that (or maybe he was, I don't know the guy).