UNCANCEL CULTURE

UNCANCEL CULTURE

Ryan Adams is back, baby. Will we continue to let moneyed elites decide the fate of monstrous men?

Michael Friedrich

The most hateable-faced man in rock is back. Alt-country’s alleged sex pest Ryan Adams has returned from the near social death of being “canceled.” The time has come for more concerts, according to Adams and his management team and his booking agents and the goons at Ticketmaster and venues named after prominent beverage conglomerates and lucrative festivals like Austin City Limits.

He is, in a word, “uncanceled.”

Adams, poor thing, was a casualty of the #MeToo movement. In early 2019, a New York Times expose reported that seven women, including his famous ex-wife and famous ex-girlfriends, accused him of a pattern of sexual misconduct, predatory behavior, and emotional abuse. Adams offered career opportunities and then vindictively retracted them when spurned, the women said. Not to mention that he allegedly exposed himself during a video chat with an underage fan. When people say “canceled” they can mean a lot of different things, from X users dogpiling a pundit over a stupid opinion to college students heckling a conservative commencement speaker. In Adams’ case, there were briefly real consequences: Public outrage mounted over his alleged wrongdoing, and his music-industry representatives all pulled the plug on him at once. The tortured singer-songwriter, who had seven Grammy nominations to his name and a top 10 album as recently as 2017, was summarily relieved of his career.

The hope of the #MeToo era was that if women spoke out about their abuse by powerful men, it would lead to social change. Norms would shift. A system of consequences would back up women who were victimized. A critical mass of public disapproval would force beady-eyed corporate suits to reconsider their relationships with musicians with a questionable past. Men would be forced to stop their sexual misconduct. But when companies cut ties with celebrities, it was never about stopping the harm they caused to women. The optics of working with them had simply become radioactive, and these greedy corporations wished to protect their bottom lines. These days, the climate around Adams seems tentatively less toxic, as he has resumed his extensive touring career. No matter that he never truly atoned: There’s money to be made.

How can Adams, who was canceled for goodness’ sake, stage such a comeback? The answer is that socalled cancel culture has always been a weak system of consequences, despite the panic that it provokes among middle-aged pundits. It’s a makeshift solution, and at a moment when both accountability and mercy are desperately needed, it truly offers neither. Instead, it relies on private capital to banish abusive men. But the owners of capital are fickle, and they like to see their wealth pile up. The result is that cancellation only lasts until corporations decide that it’s once again safe to profit from the work of abusers. Meanwhile, a bunch of the most loathsome industry guys on the planet grant themselves license to complain that you can’t say or do anything anymore while continuing to say and do whatever the fuck they want.

WE DISAPPEAR

Cancel culture enjoys a prominent place in the public discourse, sustained almost entirely through cursed entries by writers like me who fear the power of the online mob. Our definitions tend to be both vague and overblown, so that readers will share our moral panic. Is a non-hyperbolic definition even possible? I’ll do my best here: Cancel culture is a relatively rare social phenomenon in which the public relies on powerful private actors to deliver consequences to public figures accused of wrongdoing.

Most attempts to explain cancel culture don’t explicitly talk about the role of capital. According to the left-liberal Vox, for example, a canceled public figure is “culturally blocked from having a prominent public platform or career,” with people calling for “boycotts of their work or disciplinary action from an employer." The conservative National Review describes cancel culture as “a form of soft totalitarianism: the persecution of one’s political opponents in the place of debate and the complete condemnation of those who make mistakes.” What these definitions seem to be referring to, Vox favorably and National Review unfavorably, is something like John Stuart Mill’s conception of the power of public opinion to condemn private citizens. In practice, though, rarely does anything so organized as a public “boycott" occur. I have no idea what “soft totalitarianism” means, but government actors are also mostly uninvolved. Businesses are always the ones that call the shots about consequences.

In the case of the #MeToo movement, appealing to corporate suits’ sense of shame often seemed like the only recourse. The phrase “me too" was coined by Tarana Burke in 2006 as a banner under which victims of sexual violence could voice their experiences. In 2017, the hashtag went viral when actress Alyssa Milano posted allegations of sexual abuse against Harvey Weinstein to the platform formerly known as Twitter, encouraging thousands of others to share their own experiences. Women’s charges of misconduct sometimes provoked civil lawsuits or criminal charges. But cases like those of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and R. Kelly were rare exceptions. Many accusations were too old, too ambiguous, or didn’t meet the burden of proof required for legal action. Still, they called for some kind of reckoning.

Groups of women used “whisper networks” to alert each other to known abusers. A magazine editor created the “shitty media men” list, a public spreadsheet that helped women in the industry anonymously share information about a range of misconduct claims. If these shitty men could not be formally prosecuted, they could at least be avoided—and even named and shamed. The occasional firing or blacklisting served as a necessary form of accountability.

Adams is a case in point. No criminal case was brought against him, but the women’s claims were seemingly credible. The singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers said that he had offered to take her on a career-making tour, but his behavior became obsessive and emotionally abusive, characterized by barrages of texts, demands for phone sex, and suicide threats. He later took back the offer. The singer and actor Mandy Moore, Adams’ ex-wife, described similar patterns of manipulation and sabotage of her professional ambitions. Most haunting were the alleged messages he exchanged with a girl starting when she was 14 years old, alternately offering to shape her career, demanding that she prove she was of age, and asking her to send him pictures of her nipples. “If people knew they would say I was like R. Kelley (sic) lol,” he texted. The FBI investigated these communications, ultimately clearing Adams after finding little evidence to support charges. But unless you were cowering under a pall of denial, it was hard to read these accounts without taking away the impression that Adams is an awful guy, and that these women had suffered terrible distress at his hands, and that he ought to be held responsible in some way.

If you were a fan of Adams’ music, it must have been a blow. I am, admittedly, a nonfan. For me, the revelations comported with a long-standing association of the man with a certain type: a deeply broken lothario figure who self-consciously treats other people as badly as possible, believing all the while that he is acting in some tragic drama. (Consider the totalizing self-pity of a song like “Come Pick Me Up.’’) It’s tough to say, however, whether the Times report was enough to generate a critical mass of condemnation from his devotees. On social media, some were defensive of their favorite shaggy-haired troubadour. “I just don’t care if Ryan Adams is a jerk guy to be in a relationship with,” one Reddit user posted. “It’s not criminal behavior and it’s certainly nothing to ruin someone’s career over. The fake outrage over this non-story is disgusting.” Others thought he had handled himself poorly, and they defended the women who came forward. “Whatever is happening now, it’s due to his behavior and his choices,” another user posted. “He’s not a victim.” Regardless of the public consensus, the whole affair made Adams’ corporate backers very itchy. Ticketmaster canceled a planned U.K. tour. Universal Music Group, his label’s distributor, spiked his forthcoming album (which eventually saw its way onto his own PAX AM label, along with a dozen others). His manager publicly quit. Radio stations dropped his music from rotation. Adams, previously a meal ticket, was now a liability.

There were, of course, canceled men whose cases seemed less cut-and-dried, and more like instances of overreach by sweaty-palmed entertainment dolts. Some of these unfolded in the famously social-justice-oriented indie underground. In 2017, for instance, anonymous rape accusations on social media torpedoed the career of Ben Hopkins, one-half of beloved queer-punk duo PWR BTTM—despite the fact that no further details ever materialized. When Ian Svenonius, singer of formative punk bands Nation of Ulysses and the Make-Up, issued a statement on Instagram in 2020 supporting the #MeToo movement and admitting that he had, in the past, been “completely inappropriate to women,” he was promptly dropped by his label.

Did these high-profile sacrifices result in something like justice? In the absence of formal consequences, you might argue, the public demanded that American capitalists penalize powerful abusers. But the penalties didn’t stick. So-called cancel culture only worked as well as the market logic that enforced it.

BAD BLOOD

Today, the men are being uncanceled.

It’s not so much that their reputations have been restored. Few have made new efforts to atone to their victims, in public or in private. After all, there was never a process of reckoning, whatever that means. Little voice was offered to the victims of abuse, except as sources in the news media. No standards were set about the duration of penalties or pathways to redemption. Instead, private entertainment and media companies decided unilaterally whether to dump alleged abusers. Now some men are ready for a comeback, and in many cases the same companies believe that enough time has passed for them to extract an untainted profit from these men’s work.

For Adams, the whole experience seemed to harden the pathologies he always exhibited. In public, he veered between fits of varying shades. First came rage. “I want my career back,” he told his manager in a leaked text. “I’m not interested in this healing crap." Next came vague contrition. “There are no words to express how bad I feel about the ways I’ve mistreated people,” Adams wrote in a letter that failed to mention any specifics and for some reason was published in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid. Finally, Adams settled, predictably, on self-pity. “I’m losing my life’s work and my dream of who I am,” he pouted in a sympathetic 2021 Los Angeles Magazine profile.

His comeback concerts didn’t so much represent redemption as a brazen market test. In 2022, Adams hired a new team and booked Carnegie Hall as part of a tentative five-show run. “We are comfortable presenting this concert," a representative of Carnegie Hall’s promotion company told Gothamist, “knowing that the consumer has the ultimate power to make an informed decision and to support an artist.” The consumer spoke: Adams pulled around $600,000 for the week, and a set of East Coast dates followed. Then a full tour of 26 dates to finish off 2022. And a couple of months in the U.S. and E.U. in 2023. He and his representatives were once again flush with cash. (Adams and Key Music Management did not respond to CREEM’s request for comment on this story.)

Does this shift indicate a public backlash to the perceived excesses of the #MeToo movement? More likely, the average person simply doesn’t know or care about these stories. After all, plenty of hideous men never suffered real consequences. Everybody still listens to Michael Jackson. Almost nobody is picking through the dustbin of entertainment history to condemn the alleged ghastly exploits of Iggy Pop or Gene Simmons or...well, take your pick. Artists like Chris Brown and Robin Thicke faced sexualassault allegations and yet continue their careers unabated. Even within the ambit of the #MeToo era, some offenses never rose to the level of career damage. Allegations that comedian Aziz Ansari was sexually aggressive on a date temporarily humiliated him, but soon Ansari was back to selling out top venues and directing his acclaimed Netflix series. Arcade Fire frontman and big sloppy theater kid Win Butler, who reportedly groped and sexted a number of semi-consenting Canadian teenagers, has gone on headlining mega-festivals and being nominated for Grammy awards. In general, the showbiz-industrial complex keeps humming along.

CANCEL CULTURE HAS ALWAYS BEEN A WEAK SYSTEm OF CONSEQUENCES, DESPITE THE PANIC THAT IT PROUOKES AMONG miDDLE-AGED PUNDITS.

Uncancellation, in part, reflects a media and entertainment industry that has always been deeply uncomfortable with the potential of the public to influence their deranged little circle jerk. Ansari’s relatively mild experience of public disapproval served as the beginning of the end of the #MeToo era. Called out over a bad hookup? This was the perfect occasion for reactionary pundits who spend all day on X to wail that the whole social justice experiment had gone too far. Women have become “very, very dangerous,” wrote Atlantic columnist Caitlin Flanagan. Time to shut it down. What we’re witnessing now is not a public backlash but a corporate backlash, as companies become more sensitive to being perceived as canceling someone in much the same way that they were sensitive to being perceived as supporting abusers several years ago.

In such circumstances, the question of whether the public has “forgiven” these men is basically moot. Among those online enough to know about their abuses, the answer may well be yes—if they cared in the first place. As Claire Dederer notes in her recent book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, there’s no simple calculator to “assess the heinousness of the crime versus the greatness of the art and spit out a verdict” on whether to consume the work of monstrous men. Fans make cmde calculations on the backs of their own moral envelopes. In Adams’ case, the same social media channels that once debated his condemnation are now debating his rehabilitation. In 2023, one Reddit user posted: “He has been forgiven by me and apparently by a lot of other people who are supporting his career and enjoying his music.” Another user responded: “He’s not well. Was a total dick in Vancouver.” Point. Counterpoint. In both cases, however, the consumer is consuming. The harsh reality is that as long as Adams puts asses in seats, like he’s expected to on a June tour throughout the U.S. and E.U., neither his victims nor his detractors have the power to break his career for good.

PUNISHER

We live in a punitive culture. Formal punishment— the kind that gets litigated and decided by a judge or jury—is profoundly capricious. A person who can’t afford to pay a traffic ticket, say, might be arrested, assessed more fines, and even serve time. In this way, our sanctioned system of justice regularly ruins the poor, leaving them little opportunity for redemption. Meanwhile, the rich possess the resources to do more or less what they please without consequences. Hell, even the men who were tried and convicted in the wave of #MeToo revelations are contriving to have their sentences reversed. In 2021, Bill Cosby’s team of attorneys persuaded the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to overturn the actor’s 2018 conviction for sexual assault, and he was released from prison. The New York Court of Appeals recently overturned Harvey Weinstein’s 2020 conviction for sexual assault, though, at the time of writing, his rape conviction and sentence in California still stand. It’s no wonder that those who seek justice are eager to create consequences outside of the formal system.

What would a better system look like, one that avoids the punitive id of American justice, the whims of capital, and the death rattle of cancel-culture discourse? It might take the form of “restorative justice,” a framework that looks at wrongdoing not simply as a violation of the law but as a harm to relationships and communities. Restorative justice seeks solutions that are more reparative than punitive, leaving room for growth among perpetrators, their victims, and society at large. Schools have used the approach to resolve disputes between children without resorting to disciplinary actions like suspension. Some prosecutors have tried it for youth who commit crimes, aiming to avoid the harsh penalties of the traditional justice system. When given the choice, 90 percent of victims pick restorative justice over prosecution, according to one study in New York City. The idea is to create accountability within communities without ostracizing people who have done wrong and perpetuating a cycle of damage.

Would a restorative process be appropriate in Adams’ case? Maybe you think he doesn’t “deserve” it. Maybe you’re an Adams defender and argue that men like him shouldn’t be put through the paces of some mini social justice tribunal where they’re forced to face women like Phoebe Bridgers over accusations they deny. My God, you might say, your voice tremulous, we’re descending into soft totalitarianism! Or maybe, like me, you’re an Adams detractor and think he deserves a sterner sentence, one that doesn’t treat him with kid gloves or try to rehabilitate him: a term in an oubliette on a One Tree Hill set, say, or a lifetime in the inventory department of an Urban Outfitters retail location. (Keep him away from the fitting rooms.)

The truth, however, is that it doesn’t really matter what Adams “deserves.” As Danielle Sered, an expert on imprisonment in America, points out in her 2019 book Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair, accountability is not primarily for the benefit of the perpetrator. “True accountability is not neutral—it is a set of actions as equal and opposite as possible to the wrongful actions committed by the person who caused harm,” she writes. “It is the active exercise of power in the opposite direction of harm; as such, it is a force for healing." For men like Adams, that might mean private atonement to those they hurt, a public acknowledgement of the harm they did, and an agreement that they won’t do it again in the future. That type of process can be transformative, allowing a person who has done wrong to make a kind of living amends. No matter the outcome of their lives in the public eye, these men remain members of families and communities. Better that they participate from a position of repair.

From one perspective, to focus so closely on celebrities is to individualize the widespread problem of sexual abuse when in fact the problem is systemic and calls for systemic solutions. Almost seven years after the initial #MeToo explosion, some of those solutions have been forthcoming. More than 20 states have passed laws to make workplaces safer, including changing statutes of limitations so that people have more time to report sexual assault or harassment. Companies have introduced new policies that encourage workers to report misconduct. More women feel emboldened to voice their stories of being harmed. Hundreds of abusive men have been fired.

But celebrities, for better or worse, still serve as the bellwether for our cultural trends. They appear as symbols of our social dysfunction, avatars for our imagined remedies, and inflection points in the selfperpetuating discourse over our made-up culture wars. It is nearly impossible to envision a restorative justice process for these figures who loom over us, remote and godlike, doing what they please and demanding to be adored. We live at too large a scale to deliver true accountability to them. Besides which, we do adore them. Their frictionless rehabilitation forms a referendum on the state of consequences for powerful men, and the consensus is that consequences are done. Phoebe Bridgers gets to the nauseating core of this problem in the song “Motion Sickness,” which apparently concerns her relationship with Adams: “There are no words in the English language,” she sings, “I could scream to drown you out.” We are bound to keep hearing from these men, as long as wealthy elites decide it’s profitable for them to be heard. We are bound to keep hearing about the horrors of cancel culture, as long as it remains a convenient way for our rulers to distract from the material realities that affect most working people’s lives. Yes, monstrous men may suffer occasional career setbacks and reputational damage. But they are, by and large, uncancelable.