White Washing History
I never thought online bullying was a real thing...until it happened to me.
I woke up the other morning feeling pretty good. Things have been looking up. I have been feeling better about myself, the direction my projects are heading in, and my overall mindset as it relates to this insane fucking world that we live in.
I made my coffee, poured a cup, and then I sat down with my iPad and opened up the New York Times, as I have been doing almost daily for about 40 years. Well, not on an iPad, but you get it. Honestly, these days I just scroll through the headlines with a mixture of fear and dread, usually stopping at the opinion section to see if there’s anybody that might have something insightful to say about the world we live in today. I was immediately drawn to a vivid painting of Kamala Harris in a straw hat, with a vivid yellow background, and the article that accompanied it. I started to read.
I was immediately drawn in by the authors opening in which she described being a southerner living in New York, and the acrobatics of mouth and mind that come along with that territory. I am from New Jersey, and I grew up just a few miles from New York City, and I have been living in the south, first in Austin, and now a small town near Durham, NC for over 15 years. So, I often have to navigate between the world of “Y’alls” and “YouGuys.” I felt a connection to the writer at that moment. But then, about four or five paragraphs in, I was stopped in my tracks. THAT NAME. I immediately felt my good morning vibes come crashing down like a wave onto the shores of my depression.
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I just turned 49 a few weeks ago. I’ve been around the world. I’ve been in jail. I lived in Newark, NJ for a few years. I’ve been to more funerals than I care to remember. In short: I’ve seen and done some shit. And if you had asked me about online bullying five or ten years ago, I would have probably written it off as “kids today”, or made a remark about this “overly sensitive culture that we live in today.” How can someone be bullied online? Can’t they just turn off the computer and walk away, or delete their account from whatever platform the bullying is taking place on? I really did not view online bullying as an actual thing. After all, it isn’t the same as being stuffed in a locker. Then it happened to me.
It was the spring of 2020, and George Floyd had just been murdered by a cop on a Minneapolis street in broad daylight. Emotions were raw, and tensions were high, especially on the social media platforms. Especially on Twitter. I was never a huge Twitter user, and social media is basically poison my personality type, but I always found it a useful place to follow breaking news and conversations on certain topics. Plus, as a musician, you “need” to be on there to keep up your social media presence and attract new fans. (I’m not so sure about that these days, as the dreaded algorithm seems to severely limit any kind of promotional post I try to make make)
I don’t even remember what the exact post was about, but I think it had something to do with George Floyd’s death and whether he should have been “following the orders” of the police, a ridiculous argument that comes up every time a person of color gets harassed, or killed, by the police. The Bully was on Floyd’s side, and two of the Bully’s fans were arguing against it. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it was something to the effect of:
“Why couldn’t he (Floyd) be peaceful like MLK”
Siding with The Bully, I replied:
“And they killed MLK too!”
I moved on with my online life, scrolling mindlessly through the days minutia, but a few minutes later I got a notification that my reply had been quoted in a re-tweet. I promptly pressed the button to see what kind of response my quip had received. And there it was: My response, “And they killed MLK too!”, was quoted and retweeted by the Bully himself, to his thousands of followers:
“This clown is trying to white-wash history”
Ugh.
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In May of 2020 I probably had about 200, maybe 300 Twitter followers. Maybe less. It didn’t matter. Nobody “liked” my tweets, or re-tweeted my sharp, learned analysis of all things human. I was mostly tweeting into the void, my insights falling like a tree in the woods. From the days of Myspace, through the Facebook years, up to today's assorted clusterfuck of vanity machines, I’ve never been “good” at social media. I’ve never had a lot of followers, and I always felt a little weird, and still do, requesting somebody’s “friend” acceptance. I’m a little shy. I’m not an exhibitionist. I think I’m always right. I have a quick temper. I am stubborn. I am an addict, and I don’t come off great on social media. I’m the exact kind of person who should not be using social media. In fact, I’m sure that people who only know me through the lens of social media probably have a pretty distorted picture the kind of person I am, and rightfully so. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Facebook. But it’s 2024, and I could make a billion of excuses as to why I’m still on social media, but those excuses don’t matter. I’m still using it, despite my own personal mishaps. And here we are.
When I first started out in the music business, hard work was the key to getting your foot in the door. If you wanted to start getting some serious attention, then you had to hit the road and play as many shows as possible. In the world of artist booking, if you didn’t play one hundred shows a year, you wouldn’t receive any serious interest from booking agents or talent buyers. You needed to build an audience, and show that you were growing that audience through repeated performances and all of the work that goes into performing. There was an entire world of singers and songwriters traversing the country, playing hundreds of gigs, drawing small but enthusiastic, paying crowds, and making a decent living. This is the model I based my music career on when I first set out to make a living playing being a musician. From the early 2000s to around 2008, I prided myself on being a hardworking musician, playing as many gigs as possible, and collecting every email address I could along the way.
When the financial markets crashed in 2008, it sent a ripple through the world of independent music. Live music, after all, is essentially a business built on people having disposable cash. Entertainment, no matter how small the price, is a luxury for most folks. After the crash, not many people had that extra money, and the landscape of the touring business changed. Promoters who used to book four or five shows a week, offering artists a small, but guaranteed rate, could no longer book that many shows or deliver the small fees without fear of losing their shirt. A lot of this venues closed. The road became a free-for-all. When every artist is playing for lower fees, or “door deals”, it opens the door to a wider range of artists, and, in a way, floods the market. I watched with my own eyes as established artists, some of them used to making a thousand dollars a night, were forced to play smaller rooms to much smaller crowds for a percentage of what they were used to making. This was not only hard on them financially, but mentally as well. One night I got I got a call from a promoter of a 40 seat listening room who had hosted my friend, who just a few years prior was playing to 1000 people a night. The promoter was worried about this artist, as he had spent his entire show berating the six people who actually showed up because the other 34 people did not. Hard times indeed.
Over the next several years, the mark of an artist’s work would be measured less by the quality or quantity of their work, as streaming replaced selling, and the number of social media followers replaced real-time and real-life concert and record sales numbers. The work of an independent musician had changed from being a hard-worn road dog to being a social networker, and with it, the measure of a musician changed. Many of us who had spent years building up an audience piece by piece through songs and hard work were left behind by those more willing to be use their vanity and brown-nosing skills to create an illusion on social media rather than putting the hard work down on tape and counting the miles. I used to have a rule when I was a booking agent: if the number of photo shoots that artist has done is greater than the number of songs they’ve released, then I’ll pass. Today, that’s the norm. If I just scroll quickly down my Instagram feed, I can instantly show you four or five artists that have not really made much music, or played many shows, but have the monetary means to be able to project the image that they are living the “rock and roll life”. They have lots of pictures with bigger, more renowned artists, due to spending more of their time glad-handing, ass-kissing and getting selfies than they are honing their craft. After all, social media is a visual medium, and what people see matters more than what people hear these days. I know of one 40-something year old musician who is making some waves in the music world, and only has one record and an EP, but a lot of more famous friends than most people. That blows my old, antiquated mind.
Where would we be right now if the entire history of twentieth century music rested upon Elvis’ ability to attract Twitter followers? Could you imagine Dylan with a Twitter account in 1965? What would have happened to John Lennon if he had made his infamous “bigger than Jesus” comment in the age of Facebook? Thankfully, we’ll never know.
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“Was that directed at me?”
That was my response to the Bully, who had obviously misread or misinterpreted my response to his original tweet. I waited several hours for a response and got nothing.
Actually, to say I got nothing would be wrong. I got plenty. Suddenly, my little profile, with just a few hundred followers and almost no engagement activity, was blowing up. And not in a good way. Now I was a racist. An moron. A white supremacist. My email inbox, which received maybe three or four emails directly from my website a month, received fifteen emails in one day. None of them complimentary.
In the course of just a few hours, a misinterpreted tweet had suddenly given me a reputation as a white supremacist, and the Bully’s minions were very thorough. One of my albums was flagged for review by the Apple Store, as it was reported to have been infringing some kind of copyright. I wasn’t threatened by any of this activity, or offended, just annoyed. It was all just bullshit. The worst kind of bullshit, too: totally avoidable, stupid bullshit.
This is the world of social media, where a comment is taken out of context, misread, and taken as fact by people who don’t know, or want to know, the context. These people emailing me, or commenting about me on Twitter didn’t know me, who I am, or my history. Nor did the Bully. But here I am, a singer-songwriter who has been writing about racism and police brutality long before the George Floyd murder, and I’m “white-washing history”. So I posted in my defense, and I paraphrase:
“I know (The Bully) is new to being “woke” but I’ve been writing songs about racism and police brutality for over a decade”
And then the real good stuff started. The Bully quickly replied ultimate Musician Bully move:
“Yeah, well I never heard of you”
Oh yes. The social media equivalent of “Do you know who I am?”.
And then another quick tweet before I could even reply. Again, paraphrasing:
“I bet your DDDD GGGG songs are really good”, a dig at me, insinuating that my music was somehow lame and simplistic. (My music, by the way, is far more complex and intelligent than The Bully’s by every measure…I really needed to throw that in!)
I should have replied with my song “Fall From Grace” from Poor Man’s Bible and that probably would have shut him up, but I’m never good at saying what I need to say in the moment, especially in a situation like this, where I’m caught off-guard. That’s the main reason I became a writer. My Irish temper and my need to be right all the time often get the best of me.
I forget the series of events that happened next, but the conversation went back and forth briefly. The Bully continued to insult my music, and my lack of success in the music business.
The point was clear: my lack of success, exemplified by my number of followers, meant that I had no recourse, and no right to defend myself, and no right to the truth. For the rest of the day I felt like the world was spiraling out of control. In just a matter of hours, I went from being an obscure leftist songwriter with 300 followers making a comical quip to an unsuccessful loser of a songwriter with a penchant for racist ideologies known to thousands. How did this happen? How did it happen so fast? I felt helpless.
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As I get older, one of the things I find fascinating is connecting a term or set of words that once seemed foreign and distant with a familiar feeling you once felt, but could not identify. The power of the mind is amazing, and as I get older, I often recall memories of moments I have not thought about in decades. Bullying was like that for me.
When I was growing up, I didn’t have a lot of bullies, or at least the way they are portrayed on television. There was no big, dumb kid pushing me around, trying to take my lunch money. I didn’t experience bullying in that sense, so I didn’t really know what being bullied, in the traditional sense, felt like. But when this incident on Twitter happened, I had an emotional flashback to a particular time in my life.
When I was in high school, I played football. In our high school, all of the freshman played on the freshman team, which was completely separate from the varsity team. When you became a sophomore, you were included on the varsity team, and every summer, right before the school year started, the entire team would go the Pocono Mountains for three or four days of a training camp, featuring long morning runs with your helmet on, three practices a day in the summer heat, terrible summer camp food, and, of course, the hazing.
Hazing, until recently, had been a right of passage in sports, fraternities, and a host of other segments of American life where privileged gate keepers use fear and punishment to test the loyalty of those who want to enter their world. It’s a ritual that probably dates back to the very first time humans decided that there was a particular segment of their society who were not “good enough” to join their club. Hazing was designed to keep out the weak, and hold power over those allowed to be included through fear tactics and “othering”. A loyalty test, so to speak. In the world of high school football, it is (or was) pretty much an expected ritual.
The entire sophomore class was aware of the hazing stories. Were we going to be paddled? Forced to eat bugs? The urban legends ran wild throughout our little football enclave. But when we got to camp, we were happily relieved to find that the seniors in that particular class were benevolent rulers. They merely slapped masking tape with unflattering nicknames on our helmets and made us take an embarrassing “class photo” of all of the sophomore players in their underwear. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the stories our imaginations had conjured. Unfortunately for me, I had my own personal hazing at that camp.
I was never blessed with incredible athletic ability, so when I started playing football, my lack of blazing speed and physical size gave me a disadvantage when it came to getting on the field. But I worked very hard. I would spend the summers trying to get stronger, faster, and smarter so that when I did get my opportunity, I would be ready. I knew that our coaches had no reason to think that I would contribute to the team going into the season, but when off-season practices began a few weeks before camp started, I showed that I was more fit, more prepared, and more improved than any other player in my class. The coaches began to notice. And so did one particular junior.
As a freshman, I played safety. I did ok. I had a few interceptions, but I was also not the fastest player. In the offseason, I had lifted weights religiously and worked on my running speed in order to become a better safety, but when the coaches saw my new size and improved speed, they had me moved to Middle Linebacker, a position that required speed and strength, as well as the ability to grasp defensive concepts and communicate them to the rest of the team. If I had anything going for me, it was my football IQ. The best part about getting moved to Middle Linebacker for me was that it moved me way up on the depth chart. As a safety, I was maybe the 5th or 6th best player, but once I got moved to Middle Linebacker, I became the third man in line to start. It was a good place to be as a sophomore. The coaches loved the way I adapted to the position, and I was thriving. There was only one person that wasn’t happy about it: the Junior ahead of me on the depth chart. And he let me know about it.
All summer long leading up to the trip to the Poconos, I would get these little hints that camp was not going to be good for me. Whether it was at a football practice, or out at a party, the Junior would tell me how he was going to make my life hell at camp. It made me nervous, of course. I was a just a slight, socially awkward sophomore, trying to fit into this new world that was high school. I was insecure about everything.
In the days leading up to our camp trip, I was so frightened about what would happen to me, but I couldn’t say a word to anybody. First of all, I wanted to fit in with the team, and I certainly didn’t want to make waves by ratting on another player. And outside of football, this Junior who was bullying me was somewhat popular in school, and was the older brother of one of my best friends, so showing any kind of fear or trepidation would be socially damaging for me. I knew that nobody would stand up for me.
When camp came, none of the seniors, who I dreaded all summer long, did anything remotely threatening. In fact, most of them were very nice and helpful to us young kids experiencing camp for the first time. But at every turn over those four days of camp, the Junior would strike. During one practice, he stepped on my leg with his cleats. Every time I came into the cabin after a practice or a meal, I found find my clothes and equipment thrown all over the place. At one point, I found my mattress in the shower, with the indication that it was pissed on. I was afraid to eat my food, drink my drinks, and I could not sleep.
In situations like this, nobody wants to stand up for you when you're just a little sophomore. The older kids are “in the club” and your friends, who would normally be your best defenders and have your back if you were going to fight a rival from another school in the diner parking lot, don’t want to be bullied either. It’s a lonely place. The power of the bully does not lie on the physical damage they can do, but the fear that they can create. It’s mental warfare.
I did survive this bullying. In fact, on the last day of camp I made a long run, juking the Junior out of his cleats. Throughout the rest of the season, I proved my worth as a player and forced the Junior to show me some respect, which he begrudgingly did. In a turn of events that should be a surprise to no one, that bully eventually became a cop. Over the last thirty or so years, I had forgotten about those terrible feelings of fear that were caused by that experience, but the Twitter incident with The Bully bought those forgotten feelings rushing back.
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It’s a lonely feeling when you get ganged up on by a bully. You just want to set the record straight, show the world that you are in the right, and be vindicated. But in situations like the one with The Bully, there is no recourse. I could yell into the void, posting in my defense all I wanted, but my tiny little following is no match for a larger presence in the social media atmosphere, where those with more followers have more reach to a larger audience, and therefore, much more power. The voice of the little people just gets drowned out in all of the noise. And sadly, the people with the larger followings are unaware of the raw power they have at their fingertips.
After 24 hours of accusatory Twitter replies and poorly written, loosely threatening emails, I felt the best thing I could do was defend myself on my own turf. I figured that anybody who would want to throw more gasoline on the fire via email would be coming at me through my website, so I wrote a blog post defending myself and posted it in on my site. In that post, I explained the situation, my history as a musician who has been writing about racism, inequality, and police brutality, and a brief history about singers who spent their careers singing protest songs. I call these people The Saints of Good Intentions.
I’m sure protest music has been around since the first song was ever written. Music is the great communicator, and what better way is there to draw attention to injustice than through a catchy song? Many folk songs, stretching back long before the recording age, dealt with issues that plagued society, particularly the common and poorer classes. But at the dawn of rock and roll and the rise of the music industry, a pattern emerged. Although many early “protest singers” like Guthrie and Seeger, became influential in the grand scheme of things, none of them had any hits of any kind, and were mostly fringe character in the cultural landscape. That all changed when Bob Dylan began writing his own protest songs, using the language of poetry to create fiery and powerful songs. Dylan’s influence was felt deeply outside of folk music, influencing bands like The Beatles to write and sing about topics of the day like war, poverty, and civil rights. There was a period in the late sixties, with the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War raging, and the draft taking so many young men into a war they didn’t want to fight, when protest music was on the top of the charts. But that wouldn’t last.
Throughout the rock and roll era, there have been ebbs and flows of protest, or topical music making the charts. The mid-to-late sixties was dominated by anti-war and civil rights music. In the early seventies, R&B music was dominated by music expressing the problems and issues in the Black Community, best exemplified by Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin On.” Even the Temptations were making psychedelic protest music, along side greats like Curtis Mayfield. In the late seventies there was a brief blast of topical punk that countered the care-free vibes of the Disco Era (although Disco itself was a form of protest music, too), but that soon gave way to New Wave, forcing the more political hard-core punk underground. And then there was the “heartland rock” that captured the frustration of Reagan’s working class America with Springsteen’s “Born in the USA”, Mellencamp’s “Small Town”, and even Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is”. But what happens to protest singers when the cultural zeitgeist moves on to another trend? In many cases, they end up forgotten.
Nina Simone started singing protest songs very early in her career, but by the time she was established in the early seventies and the songs of the Civil Rights era were no longer in fashion, she still kept at it. In turn, she was shunned by the industry, and it eventually crushed her. Phil Ochs was one of the great protest singers of the sixties, but he refused to change, his record sales slipped as protest music went out of fashion, and he ended up hanging himself. There are many examples of these tragic stories throughout music history, and one could easily surmise that these singers, who so desperately wanted their music to help create change in the world, felt defeated by an industry that only cared about the issues when the records sold. They were crushed by the world they were trying to save.
I never wanted to sing topical or protest songs. There were a few mildly topical songs, like “Shoot to Slide” on my first few albums, but I never thought I had the smarts, or the knowledge to put my words out there and take a stand on issues I cared about. But all of that changed around 2004, when the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars began. At the time, there was a was a lot of great new music exploding into the culture. Arcade Fire, TV on the Radio, and My Morning Jacket were a few of the bands I was into at the time. I kept waiting for that one record to come out from one of these artists: the record that would expose the corruption of the Bush era, and galvanize the people to take to the streets , speaking truth to power. But it never happened. So I started writing my own little protest songs. But I didn’t have the nerve to record or release them. I played them when I was home alone, or left them to collect dust. Finally, in 2011, after touring post-financial crash America for a few years and seeing first-hand the hurt and devastation that it caused to so many people throughout the country, and the rising tide of open racism that came along with the crash and the inauguration of a Black president, I decided to record some of those songs. I released “Talkin’ Revolution Blues” in 2012. My first topical record.
In a sweet twist of irony, it was this record, featuring the song “Hard Times,” that I handed to The Bully backstage at a show at The Continental Club in Austin during SXSW of 2013. We had a mutual friend, who I was planning to work with on my next record. He thanked me for the record and moved on. At the time, nobody in Americana or Rock, or at least in the world of music dominated by white people, was singing about topics like racism and police brutality, except for me. I got a lot of shit from fans and critics, and a lot of “I liked the love songs better”, but these important topics were being talked about in the R&B and Hip-pop world. Some of the best records of the last decade plus, like Kendrick Lamar’s “To Pimp a Butterfly”, D’Angelo’s “Black Messiah”, and Solange’s “A Seat At The Table”, were exploring all of these issues in a way that no Americana songwriter could touch, and they didn’t. Until George Floyd was killed in broad daylight. It was front page news. It was “cause celeb.” All of the sudden, white Americana singers, who were all raised in the South but, for some reason, never said a word about racism, were all protest singers. When in Rome, I guess.
I made all of these points in my blog post that I put up on my website, without mentioning the Bully’s name. I didn’t want to continue to stir the pot, and I sure as hell didn’t want to continue getting animus from him, his fans, and his followers. I just wanted to clear my name and defend myself from being called a white-washing racist without having to deal with the shit-show that is Twitter. Instead, it just got worse.
I posted my blog piece late at night, and when morning came, I thought the entire incident was over. But I was wrong. The Bully had somehow read the blog post, and took issue with the fact that I pointed out that he had never once uttered a single word in his music about anything other than himself until George Floyd became the topic of the day, so that it was quite hypocritical for him to be calling me a “white washer” of history. Bully’s don’t like being called out. Especially one who was conducting a quiet promo campaign to get people to compare him to Springsteen.
First, he tweeted that he was planning to tell me I was “ok” because he checked with some mutual friends and they vouched for me, as if the act of him misreading my tweet and then announcing me to the world as a racist was my fault. But since I made my blog post, he was no longer going to do that. Of course, this is ridiculous because I had done nothing that needed vouching for, since he had been in the wrong the entire time. When a handful of my fans tweeted at him, telling him to back off, he told them to “go back to their mother’s basement”, a common retort you see on social media from people who can’t defend their own thoughts or actions in any meaningful way. To me, it’s a clear sign that the attacker doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to win the argument, so they turn to belittling anybody who challenges them. When examining the lyrical content of the Bully’s music, that theory tracks.
My only reply to The Bully was to basically tell him to fuck off. That I had done nothing wrong. That all he needed to do was tweet an apology for basically calling me a racist in front of his thousands of followers.
His reply was to belittle me again, with a “good luck with your ‘career,” insinuating that I wasn’t a popular enough artist to receive an apology.
But I was done arguing with this clown.
Then, the biggest bully move of all: He started following me on Twitter. That was beyond creepy.
I promptly deleted my Twitter account.
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The hardest part of my online bullying experience was not the fact that I was publicly humiliated and silenced. Or the flood of angry emails from ignorant fans of the Bully. Or having to deal with the faceless streaming services in order to get the album that was flagged back online, although dealing with all of this things was a time consuming ordeal that could have easily been avoided if The Bully had just acted like a man. The hardest part for me was the deafening silence of nearly all of my peers.
Throughout the entire episode, not one artist that I knew personally stepped up and defended me, despite the fact that at that point, I had released three albums in which racism and police brutality were major themes. Sadly, the only two people who publicly stood up for me were singer-songwriters that I only knew in passing. They know who they are, and I thank them for their bravery. I use the word “bravery” because that’s what it takes to step outside of your assigned role in the music business and call out assholes like The Bully who sit higher up on the industry food chain than you do, looking down on those below.
But bravery in the music industry should not be limited to standing up to bullies. It takes bravery to call out the sexual predators, the self-involved agents, the greedy labels, and the crooked promoters. I say bravery because when people stand up to the bad actors in the music business, they are often discarded and silenced. We have all heard the stories about the film industry and the stories of Harvey Weinstein’s behavior and how they were followed by literally hundreds of stories about hundreds of bad actors, and the fear that all of the victims lived with, afraid to tell their stories publicly in fear of being blackballed and exiled from the industry. The music business, even on the smallest levels, is no different.
In my experience, I felt so marginalized and afraid to stand up for myself, that instead of taking a Bully head on, I decided to put a post on my own webpage, where much fewer people would see it. I still, to this day, nearly 4 years later, feel an inexplicable fear to accept gigs in the city where the Bully lives. I feel belittled and marginalized. Worst of all, I still have a fear to tell my story because I don’t want to ever have to face that kind of backlash again. For example, I have had a major urge to email the writer of the opinion article that triggered the return of my trauma to tell her how misguided she was in using The Bully as an example of someone who writes about toxic masculinity (ha!), but I weighed my need to express myself and tell my story with the bullshit and backlash I would face in doing so, and I opted for silence.
In the end, my story amounts to a hill of beans. I am fine. My life is relatively good. I have, and will, survive worse. I don’t ever think about The Bully, unless I see the name in print. However, there are certain opportunities that I may have lost in this ordeal. Will I ever be invited to be the opening act on a bill with someone who is friends with The Bully? Will the thousands of people who saw my name attached to “white washing history” ever wonder if it was true? Will they ever take the time and listen to my music and see that, in fact, I have not been white-washing history and that my music is proof? Will I ever get the credit for being a white guy who was singing about police brutality and racism long before the George Floyd murder, and unlike The Bully, continues to do so to this day?
Probably not. Because the fact remains that I am just a small fish in the music world, and an even smaller fish in the world of social media, and in the space that exits between those two worlds is an invisible hierarchy where those with more followers can create and control the narrative and use it as a bludgeon to silence anybody who may challenge them, or more importantly, their self-styled image. We see it in journalism, in politics, and in music. The internet is a powerful tool, and can be used to destroy people with very little effort. Of course, musicians who want to continue to have careers, or the chance at a career, will remain silent, and it will stay that way until musicians and music fans who yearn for truth and authenticity, take a stand. We should never be made afraid to do so.
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