Dunno if it’s been mentioned, but Sean Penn.
But you’re still misrepresenting the situation. As the more complete quote I provided demonstrates, it was not simply any random white man that he was talking about. He was talking about racist white men, the type who discriminated against him.
To be honest, I think his comment is probably also hyperbole, something that Davis was well known for in his interviews and his public pronouncements. I would have to see a lot more than that single quotation in order to nominate him for this thread. How would you like to be judged by a single statement, especially if it were the dumbest or most offensive thing you’ve ever said?
I clicked this just to make sure you meant “homophobe”, but the second part of the article about pork tenderloin sandwiches is a great read, and makes a great point about how restaurants will give you an absurd excess of one thing (the mean in said sandwich) and an absurdly paltry serving of something else (cole slaw).
Forget Eminem or whoever he claims to be. Us artists remember Ol’ Peggy Guggenheim, Ms. lead wallet cos it never came out of her pocket. She saved modern art from Hitler, and when asked how many husbands she’d had, she said “Mine, or someone else’s?”
I don’t think that’s what’s going on in that quote. I think he let his guard down and expressed his genuine sentiment, then realized it would look bad in print and made an attempt to amend it on the fly.
…Oh, but I would only choke a racist white man to death! Yeah, that’s the ticket.
I remember reading that he didn’t fit the profile because such offenders usually try to keep a very low profile, and/or seem completely inconspicuous. The latter seems to be possible in cases where someone is prominent in their community or otherwise well-known. Some very famous people have managed to live far quieter lives than Jackson ever did. He always made headlines, and his increasingly strange persona was both obviously suspicious and totally conspicuous, especially after the first set of allegations in the 1990s.
Here’s a Rolling Stone interview with Miles Davis. He comes across as pretty surly and race-obsessed.
There’s a lot more similarly race-obsessed sentiment in the interview. Sorry, but to me he just comes across as an asshole. Now you could say his experiences drove him to be an asshole, and maybe you’re right. But he was still an asshole.
Upon further investigation, it looks like the Jet author may have been trying to mitigate Miles Davis’s racist comments by splicing two different interviews together. The choking a white man to death part of the quote is from a 1985 USA Today interview, but it looks like the second quote was taken from a Playboy interview from 1962.
It sounds to me like he’s talking about what it’s like to be a black artist in a country where whites still run things. He doesn’t sound especially obsessed to me, and if he was actually an asshole, i don’t think that interview constitutes very good evidence. Quite a few of the questions he was answering were specifically about race. If talking about race in the late 1960s (or at any other time, for that matter) makes a black guy an asshole in your book, you must live a pretty bitter existence.
He is not just “talking about race.” He is making blatantly racist statements.
Unless I’ve missed it, no one has mentioned Ritchie Blackmore yet. Other than to praise his guitar mastery, it seems no one has a good thing to say about him.
Ian Gillan:
Ronnie James Dio:
Without much digging I could come up with many more examples.
Because the brutal racism and anti-black violence of the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s, in both the the North and South, was all in his imagination. And it wasn’t the result of policies advocated and supported by the great majority of white Americans.
I don’t know if she’s horrible or not, but everything I’ve heard about Julia Roberts says she’s a genuinely unpleasant person in real life.
And that justifies Miles Davis’s racist sentiments (including violently racist sentiments)?
Not when so many others made it through the same era without giving themselves over to that mode of thought. Nope. Still an asshole.
Here’s a way that Miles Davis was definitely an asshole: he beat his wife, Cicely Tyson. He mentioned in his autobiography that he “slapped the shit” out of her when they were having a disagreement. He didn’t express remorse at all. As far as I could tell, he didn’t see anything wrong with it.
Ronald Reagan wasn’t a particularly good actor or a particularly bad politician. As has been mentioned before, disagreeing with someone’s political viewpoints doesn’t make them a “horrible” person.
Depends on how you feel about war criminals. I personally think they are scum.
As I’ve mentioned before, this isn’t a case of disagreeing with someone’s politics. The Nicaraguan Contras and the death squads of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras were basically indistinguishable from the Einsatzgruppen, and yes, I deliberately made that comparison. When people flee from these destroyed countries, they are demonized/scapegoated as illegal immigrants, curiously unlike what happens when Cubans flee from a leftist dictator.
I could go on, all around the world, but you get the point, right?
Oh, suppose Bill Clinton had been an accomplished saxophonist or something like that. He would go on this list also, for similar reasons (Iraq, Serbia, Sudan…).
That’s some very loose definition of the term “war criminal.” You cheapen the word by your use of it to the point where it’s meaningless and every world leader who ever committed troops to a military venture is now a war criminal.