“I’m so sorry, but this is a Famous Dex fan account now,” I tweeted, an hour before r&b artist Tish Hyman posted a surveillance video of the Chicago rapper chasing a woman down a hallway and beating her (video is disturbing; please exercise caution before viewing).

Before the footage was released, Dex was one of the South Side’s fastest rising stars, aided by an alignment with Atlanta’s Rich the Kid and an ability to release new material at a lightning pace. In a city captivated by angelic backpackers, scrawny Dex stood out as deeply weird with facial tattoos, bright red hair, and an off-kilter delivery that fit right in with the rest of the new crop of emerging “mumble rappers.”

I became a vocal fan after listening to Kanye off May’s OhhMannGoddDamm mixtape. I couldn’t stop replaying or talking about the compact and catchy track that captures everything I love about being young, successful, and killing it in Chicago. “All this money on me, all this designer on me, baby, call me Kanye,” Dex urges in a radio-ready hook as samples of ohhmanngodddamm echo behind him.

Dexter’s third mixtape of 2016, Dexter the Robot, was available for download for less than 24 hours when Hyman’s footage became public. The Puma x Pink Dolphin collection he recently modeled hasn’t even hit stores yet. Though it’s hard to say for certain in a world where a Chris Brown hook on your song isn’t enough to keep it off the Hot 100, common sentiment seems to be that his extremely short and fertile career has been cut off at the bud.

I’ve written before on how to evaluate the careers of artists who were abusive to those around them during their lifetimes. All of the examples I used had the luxury of a degree of academic distance for me. The perpetrators were dead, or so deeply sus I never engaged with their work on a deep level; rumors about Woody Allen and R. Kelly have been around forever.

I’ve recently had to wrestle with quandries much more unexpected and closer to home, however. Freddie Gibbs’ track Harold’s, a Madlib-composed ode to Chicago’s iconic fried chicken, fries, and mild sauce, was already a part of my heart when I heard he was battling charges of drugging and sexually assaulting a victim while on tour in Austria.

Kodak Black created one of my all time favorite love songs, a uncharacteristically sweet track called Honeybun off the mixtape Heart of the Projects. The Florida rapper probably has as many mug shots as he does press photos; I wasn’t any stranger to seeing him booked for drug and weapons charges, or hearing colorist or otherwise problematic statements in his lyrics. When he caught felony charges for allegedly sexually assaulting a victim in a South Carolina hotel room after a show, I was given pause. Should I have seen this coming? Should I already have disowned his music? Where do you draw the line?

Some people draw the line uncomfortably far; it’s not difficult to find rambling Snapchat diatribes and earnest tweets from Team Breezy pleading for folks to, yet again, disregard Chris Brown’s abusive behavior. If you draw the line all the way at the other end – throwing any music with sexist, racist, or otherwise oppressive content in the dustbin – you’re ruling out the vast majority of rap, which I’m not willing to do.

The question of when it’s appropriate to stop supporting an abuser is hardly limited to the sphere of hip-hop, however. I spent this last weekend at Riot Fest, a three day exercise in punk rock nostalgia. I was surprised to see a woman wearing a Swans shirt and tried to put myself in her shoes. How would I feel if I had that in my closet when Larkin Grimm came forward to accuse her collaborator and abuser, Michael Gira of Swans, of a long campaign of sexual harassment that culminated in raping her and dropping her from his label? I personally couldn’t see myself wearing the t-shirt anymore. Not to a music festival.

Part of the danger of supporting the new and the novel is that you don’t necessarily know what you’re getting yourself into. Hell, it’s part of the danger of supporting anyone at all. It’s impossible to know someone’s entire history, or predict their future actions. I refuse to stop vocally supporting artists, both emerging and established, because it may turn out that they’re mortal, with all the attendant messiness and pain that goes along with being part of the human race. At the same time, how we respond when allegations come to light says so much about how we feel about justice for victims, acceptance of a societal status quo, and whether we feel fame and adulation are unconditionally granted or earned.

Do we treat a case like Kodak Black’s assault, where our only information about an incident is filtered through a racist police state, differently than when unmistakable evidence is put into our hands through social media? Why do I feel ok listening to Gucci Mane, who almost certainly killed at least one person? Is Famous Dex’s career really over?

I’m not sure there are any absolute answers in situations like these. All I know is that Kanye, Harold’s, and Honeybun are incredible works of art, ones that I won’t ever be able to divorce of association with their authors. When I think of the playlist that I want to soundtrack my life, they’re not on it.

Photo by Kyle Goldberg

I recently had the opportunity to sit down and talk to one of my favorite Chicago bands over spaghetti and garlic bread. Listen to their new EP on Bandcamp (or Spotify!) and read the piece for Bandcamp Daily.

I’ve always been partial to their fuzzy sassy grrl power musical vibes, but I really enjoyed the chance to delve into music business and branding strategy with the trio. If you’re in a band and you want inspo on collborating on an aesthetic identity, you’d be well served to check the interview out!

Glam Hot’s got two upcoming shows on the recently updated Store Brand Soda guide to all your DIY / indie pop / weirdo rock / punk af needs:

Gula Gila, Not For You, Ze’ev, Glamour Hotline
Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood
Sat, August 6 / 8pm / $5 / respect the space / ask a punk

Glamour Hotline, When Ships Collide, Roach Beach, Beachoven
Emporium Arcade Bar, 1366 N Milwaukee Ave
Tue, August 9 / 8pm / 21+ / free

I couldn’t be prouder of our homegrown scene here in Chicago. Despite major setbacks in the past year (the shuttering of YC & WW not insignificant among them) our creative community keeps evolving and mutating and oozing our sweat and Schlitz all over the midwest if not the world.

Two local outfits especially caught my eye this month; our buddies at cassette-smuggling ring Dumpster Tapes, and Chicago Singles Club, which puts together monthly profiles on local bands complete with slick photos, an exclusive song, a video interview and….lots of Malört.

Dumpster Tapes has recently put out some pretty sick tapes from the likes of Jollys, Dumpster Babies (no relation), Cass Cwik and more. They’re putting out their second compilation full of local rippers with no repeats from the first tape. You can (and should) stream it here, but if you’re REALLY cool you’ll hand Alex or Ed a cool fiver at the show and get your own monument in magnetic tape.

Dumpster Tapes Release Party
Crosstown, Skip Church, Pink Torpedo, Easy Habits
Cole’s Bar, 2338 N Milwaukee Ave
Sat, April 30, 9pm / 21+ / free

After three solid years of putting out an immense amount of slick, polished, and perfectly home produced media each month, Chicago Singles Club has to take a step back from their relentless monthly schedule. Dude, who can blame them. You’ll continue seeing the CSC team (Jeff, Kerri, Kevin, Iris, and Kelsie as pictured above, plus former crew Ron, Cassie, and Jordan) at Cole’s Bar every fourth Friday.

If you miss them the rest of the month, there’s always the thirty-six singles and interviews from disparate and innovative Chicago bands over at ChicagoSinglesClub.com to keep you company.

Chicago Singles Club Finale
Grandkids, Oshwa, The Gold Web, The Runnies
The Empty Bottle, 1035 N Western Ave
Mon, May 2, 9pm / 21+ / free

I’ve spent the past couple days meaning to write a follow-up post to my essay on Calvin Johnson’s shady business dealings/probable personal shadiness. Teenage Hotdog‘s tireless reporting on K Records’ longstanding pattern of ripping off artists had finally gotten the attention of The Stranger, which has since caught the eye of Pitchfork and The AV Club. Melissa’s cool and funny and I’m so proud of her and grateful to have made her acquaintance, so I wanted to say something to congratulate her on talking loud enough for long enough that the menfolk finally listened.

And Here We Are Again

But as I sat down with my half bottle of convenience store wine to pen that article, I caught the post on Facebook saying that Michael Gira (“Oh yeah the dude from Swans”) had raped Larkin Grimm while they worked together on her record in 2008, then had fucking dropped her from his label when she finally called him out on it years later. She hasn’t been able to sign to a new label since, so that’s been awesome for her career.

This, of course, comes on top of last week’s news that Kesha would not be released from her contract with Sony and would have to continue making albums with her rapist or face a financial penalty.

And that’s the point I wish I’d addressed more fully the first time around. When shady-ass dudes control access to money or power or prestige or press in your profession, you are stuck dealing with them on their shady-ass terms. People who are not in positions of power are forced to accommodate people who are. If you don’t go along, you might not work again. If you go along but later speak out, you might not work again. The deck is stacked against you, even without a public eager for a way to prove you’re at fault.

For those folks who inevitably tweet that silence about your rape perpetuates the cycle? Rapists are the one perpetuating the cycle.

— Jessica Hopper (@jesshopp) February 26, 2016

As Jessica Hopper said, people tend to blame the victims in these situations, saying that by not coming forward sooner, they have allowed a cycle to perpetuate. But the cycle perpetuates itself every time we give a shady dude a pass, every time we say “he’s always been nice to me,” every time we decide to keep giving him our money because we really like his work.

Reasoning vs. Reality

As a society, we seem to want to separate social issues and economic ones, but the two are intertwined (Melissa Gira Grant just published an excellent discussion of this idea in the context of feminism). You can’t live a fully actualized life in a capitalist society without some access to money, so any action that causes an economic harm also has potential consequences for a person’s health and well-being, and any fight against injustice that ignores economic reality is failing to see the big picture.

When a man feels entitled to someone else’s labor, money, body, emotions, etc., and when he holds the person’s career hostage in order to get what he wants, an injustice is being done. This person has now been forced to sacrifice their physical, financial, or emotional well-being (often all three) for some dude’s fucked up sense of entitlement. He is benefiting from their labor, while they are subject to increasingly high costs of exiting a situation they never even wanted to be in.

Instead of being sympathetic to people whose livelihoods are threatened, we have a tendency to discount their experiences, believing the situation couldn’t really happen in a just world. Americans tend to equate success with morality, believing the person who has more is more deserving, which makes an uphill battle for anyone facing abuse from someone in a position of relative power or status. And that’s not the only problem. Other research suggests people who regard themselves as being in a position of higher status are actually more likely to do morally questionable things and believe their own actions are justified.

When our brain flips into internet detective mode because “something doesn’t seem right” about a situation that’s terrifyingly common, it may not have anything to do with the situation itself. Instead, it’s the result of underlying psychological assumptions that uphold systems of power and privilege.

Moving Forward

As rational people, we may want a burden of proof or a line in the sand, but too often we are causing actual harm to another human being with these demands. While we wait for enough evidence to justify changing our behaviors or beliefs, a person remains stuck in an untenable situation while we deny support.

We are also perpetuating the cycle, so we can also play a role in stopping it.

Even as accusations of violence, abuse, and economic injustice in the music industry become distressingly common, we can still envision a better world. We can stand up for the humanity of every person in our scene. We can give our money to people who have been disadvantaged by assholes and an uncaring system and we can direct our support away from those who perpetuate injustice.

Thankfully, the initial responses I saw to Larkin’s post about Gira’s abuse were mostly positive. Major music news sources picked up her story and some even related it in a way that suggests they might believe her. The backlash is still unfolding, so I may regret this early optimism. But with the continued pressure to #freekesha and other small gains we’ve seen as of late, maybe the arc of music fandom is finally bending toward justice.

It’s hard to resist the call of a just world where the people who make the things we enjoy always do good. It’s not always practical or easy to vote with our feet and our wallets. But if we believe in making the world better than it is, we can try our best to keep calling out bullshit and keep standing behind the people who do.

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately building a list of bands I want to see and cool parties I want to attend as I prep for SXSW next month. I’ll be sharing all this on the blog over the next couple weeks, so if you are into standing in a backyard in Texas with a cold beer, rest assured we’ve got you. But all this obsessive planning and feeling kind of on the ball has got me thinking about the way I got into music to begin with, which was decidedly not cool.

One of the things I love about SBS is that we’ve never been about proving we knew everything about punk rock before you first popped Snoopy vs. the Red Baron into your off-brand childhood Walkman. In the spirit of this, I wanted to share a piece I recently read at the “Mixtapes” night of Miss Spoken, Chicago’s decidedly non-dudely live lit event, about discovering the joy of mixtapes and slowly learning to be cool with loving what I love.

I’m 16 years old, leaning forward in the backseat of Lindsey’s extended cab Ford F-150, shouting over the wind and The Bloodhound Gang, hair and sand and cigarette smoke blowing in my face from the lowered front windows as we drive the smokers’ circle. Lindsey teases Amber about hooking up with her boyfriend in Lindsey’s truck outside a high school dance (never leave your car unlocked), Amber teases Kristen about wanting to get with the high school English teacher, and everyone teases me about how the high school English teacher really wants to get with me.

You and me, baby, ain’t nothin’ but mammals

The music sucks and I have dirt in my teeth, but I’m so happy to be along for the ride.

As a self-proclaimed outsider, there aren’t many teen bonding experiences I can fondly recall, having sworn off drinking, smoking, drugs, team sports, and church as early as 8th grade. But circa 2000 in rural North Dakota, driving in a 4-mile square around our hometown offered a temporary escape from its confines, so I constantly found excuses to stay in town after school and drive around listening to mix CDs.

Honestly, I really didn’t even care about making mixes at first. At 15, I’d boldly declared that I “didn’t like music,” meaning I was super into that one Harvey Danger song but it hadn’t occurred to me that the rest of the album might also be good (still one of the biggest regrets of my life).

But gradually, I found myself pulled in, experimenting with loud music in place of booze or drugs or DIY safety pin piercings.

Let’s go, don’t wait, this night’s almost over, honest, let’s make this night last forever

Due to the lack of radio stations or record stores or really anything in western North Dakota, we turned to piracy on our parents’ computers, giant beige boxes barely running Windows 98, pulling songs from Napster or Kazaa on a 56k dial-up connection.

They’d dropped thousands of dollars so we could one day be at the cutting edge of technology with lucrative dot com careers, but instead we trolled Yahoo chat, played virtual pinball, and burned CDs featuring the kinds of alternative radio hits the reservation station sometimes played after 10 pm: stuff like Everclear, Blink 182, and Green Day.

I’m just a teenage dirtbag, baby, like you

Through the teenage dirtbag internet, I found more punk bands, bringing The Ramones, The Misfits, and other such classics into my friends’ mix CD pool. Throw in Nirvana and Weezer (my music nerd friend’s favorite bands), and of course my crush’s favorite band, Rammstein, and you had a passable soundtrack for my fondest high school memories: frantic 100 mph drives down the two-lane highway to Williston (usually for something incredibly dumb, like showing of Joe Dirt), or the time we stuck flavored condoms filled with silly string to our band director’s windshield (in the winter, so they’d freeze), or the trip to Minot where we drove around shouting Du Hast while wielding a piece of rebar out the car window (we’d found it in a junkyard while Lindsey was trying to buy parts for her AMC Javelin from a shirtless dude whose intentions seemed suspect), or all those nights we stayed up until 4 am forming our plans to get out for good.

As anxious as I felt about my lack of musical knowledge or taste in subsequent years, I regarded that time fondly–we’d made the most of what was available and had cobbled together some pretty great times.

Of course, memory is fallible. Nostalgia glosses over the rougher edges of your past, leaving succinct 5-paragraph nuggets of triumph without all the awkwardness of your actual life.

In college, I discovered indie rock (literally by typing it into google), then struck gold with my purchase of Cathy’s Comp Cassette at a thrift store in Bismarck, which caught me up on classics like The Smiths and The Cure. God bless you, Cathy, wherever you are.

Around this time, I came back for Homefest or some summer holiday and completed the familiar ritual of piling into a car with my sister Lisa and her friends, the new keepers of the stoner-nerd alliance we’d formed to make high school bearable for kids who didn’t play sports.

I cringed a little as a Flogging Molly song came out of the speakers and cringed more as the teens started bouncing along. “Oh wow, I haven’t heard this in years,” I said. “Whose CD is this?”

The driver replied, “Oh yeah, Emily, I think this mix is one of yours.”

Not old or new but middle school, fifth grade like junior high

Flogging Molly rolled into Bouncing Souls and NOFX and then two Green Day songs in a row and god knows how much Eve 6. SO MUCH EVE 6. I sank lower into my seat as they quoted lines from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Fight Club and SLC Punk, air drumming, giggling maniacally, and passing around some new flavor of Mountain Dew–something like Code Red or Live Wire–all red-mouthed and sugar high. Not exactly the crew of badass rebels I remembered us being.

I’d already decided most of my high school experience was garbage. Were my fond memories terrible too?

I wanna publish zines and rage against machines

Fuck a butte, anyway

Shortly after this visit home, I left North Dakota for good, heading off to grad school in Ohio and then a job in Chicago, expecting to be glad to put the past behind me. An important lesson from English class: Jay Gatsby never went back to North Dakota. You can be the person you want to be as long as you completely bury your past.

Except as stifling and uncool as hometowns can be, now that I’ve left, I find myself looking forward to visits back. My last trip home for the holidays involved getting a group of old friends together for a game night, daring each other to do shots of this disgusting “shimmery liquer” called Viniq, and catching up on the new rounds of local gossip (that English teacher is married now and has a kid). The night ended with the whole group singing Weezer songs in my sister Jamie’s kitchen.

“I’m a lot like you, so please, hello, I’m here, I’m waiting” has unexpected resonance when it comes from someone who used to (completely correctly) rib you for thinking Atlas Shrugged was a really good book.

I think I’d be good for you and you’d be good for me

Robitussin’s glittery cousin

Really, the inside of most of our heads probably resemble Weezer’s garage, full of comic books and role playing games and bad movies and stupid jokes. A realization that can horrify the way Weezer lyrics horrify: I loved this and it’s really, really, really bad. But embracing our whole, dorky, pretentious, clueless, teenage dirtbag selves can be liberating too: who you are and who you used to be don’t have to be secrets to bury. You can be cool without being mysterious, and sometimes the awkward weirdos turn out okay.

Swallow my doubt, turn it inside out, find nothing but faith in nothing

Recently, on a road trip to Memphis, I asked Lisa to put on something fun as we bombed down I-57 in our tiny rental car. So we listened to the first two Eve 6 albums in their entirety. I still knew every word. And, guys, I felt like a total badass.

Check out Miss Spoken the last Wednesday of every month at Gallery Cabaret or visit miss-spoken.com. Check out my twitter feed for an absurd number of Eve 6 references.