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Sunday, March 3, 2024
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Music|Disgraced but Embraced: Pop Culture Pariahs Are Making Big Comebacks

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/02/arts/music/disgraced-but-embraced-shane-gillis-ye-canceled.html
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Critic’s Notebook


DISGRACED BUT EMBRACED: POP CULTURE PARIAHS ARE MAKING BIG COMEBACKS

Shane Gillis hosted “S.N.L.,” the show that rebuffed him. Ye topped the
Billboard chart after making antisemitic remarks. Has the mainstream given up on
banishing bad actors?

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The comedian Shane Gillis hosted “Saturday Night Live,” five years after he was
fired from the show before ever appearing on it.Credit...Will Heath/NBC, via
Getty Images

By Jon Caramanica

March 2, 2024

Last weekend, the comedian Shane Gillis hosted “Saturday Night Live,” five years
after he was fired from the show before ever appearing on it, when old podcast
appearances in which he’d used slurs were brought to light. During his opening
monologue, Gillis showed how he had evolved since then, which is to say, only
slightly. In a tame bit about his parents, he fondly recalled spending time with
his mother when he was younger, noting sweetly, “Every little boy is just their
mom’s gay best friend.”

For the past two weeks, Ye — formerly Kanye West — has sat at the top of the
Billboard albums chart with “Vultures 1,” his collaborative album with the
singer Ty Dolla Sign. In late 2022, Ye began a public stream of antisemitic
invective that, for a while, effectively imploded his career, leading to the
dissolution of his partnerships with Adidas and the Gap. He seemed, for a time,
persona non grata. But he, too, has returned to something approaching old form,
with a single, “Carnival,” that went to No. 3 on the Hot 100, and a series of
arena listening sessions that have been the hallmark of his album rollouts in
recent years.


Image

Ye debuted his latest album, a collaboration with Ty Dolla Sign, at a series of
arena listening events.Credit...The New York Times

Cancellation was always an incomplete concept, more a way of talking about
artists with contentious and offensive personal histories than an actual fact of
the marketplace. Except in the most extreme cases, moral failure has never been
an automatic disqualifier when it comes to artistic work.



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What changed in the years since the beginning of the #MeToo movement is the
presumption that strong enough discursive pushback might indeed lead to actual
banishment. That proved to be true in the wake of #MeToo, in which powerful men
like Charlie Rose, Bryan Singer and Matt Lauer were effectively cast out of
public life after allegations of sexual misconduct. (And it should be noted:
Most of those facing banishment, or the threat thereof, have been men. Roseanne
Barr is perhaps the most high-profile woman to meet that fate, following racist
and antisemitic public statements.)

The sense that bad actors could be weeded out at the root was satisfying liberal
fantasy, though. What’s happened instead is the emergence of a class of artists
across disciplines — call them the disgraced — who have found ways to thrive
despite pockets of public pushback. Their success suggests several possibilities
about cultural consumption: Audiences that don’t care about an artist’s
indiscretions can be more sizable than the ones that do; those who publicly
agitate on these matters might be privately relenting; or that perhaps some
audiences may have a tolerance — or maybe even an appetite — for offense.

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Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic for The Times and the host of the “Popcast”
podcast. He also writes the men's Critical Shopper column for Styles. He
previously worked for Vibe magazine, and has written for the Village Voice,
Spin, XXL and more. More about Jon Caramanica

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