Phil Spector and the harmful myth of male creative genius

To know him was to loathe him.

At least that’s the impression you get when you look at the reports of many people who worked with Phil Spector, the legendary record producer who died on Saturday at the age of 81 while serving a prison sentence for the murder of the actress. Lana Clarkson in 2003.

His conviction for the crime strengthened Spector’s reputation as a monster. But years ago, artists in his career – Darlene Love, Leonard Cohen, the Ramones and especially his ex-wife, Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes – talked about his abuse and his manipulations; others simply hate what he did to their music, including Paul McCartney, who reissued the Beatles ” Let It Be ‘minus the decoration of the Beatles’ trademark.

And yet, despite McCartney’s mockery, Spector is widely – and rightly so – regarded as one of the most important figures in pop history: a sonic visionary whose so-called wall of sound greatly expanded the dramatic scope of the three-minute love song.

In a hit career that stretched from the late 1950s, when he achieved his first number 1 with the Teddy Bears’ To Know Him Is to Love Him,, to the early 1990s, when his classic singles hit the lush box set received treatment. , Spector pushed the emotion in his music further than anyone else thought, and piled up voices and instruments in songs like the Crystals ‘”Then He Kissed Me” and Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” in an effort to to catch excellent pain from young romance.

That he succeeded is clear to all whose pulse accelerates when he hears the iconic drum beat that ‘Be My Baby’ opens. What are the four people thinking? Some photo you saw of a bunch of session musicians squeezed into the cramped Gold Star Studios in Hollywood – or even now your own first brush of love?

However, listen carefully to Spector’s stuff – to the trembling strings, the wailing vocals, the multiple guitars clapping on a non-scratchy itch – and you also hear fear. Spector, who allegedly gave the title “To Know Him Is to Love Him” ​​after the tombstone on his tombstone, would probably have attributed it to his “Wagnerian” approach; it was tragic-ecstatic love songs that consciously assumed the awful certainty that nothing good ever lasts.

But what if the horror in Spector’s music – such as ‘violence covered in sugar and sweets’, Bruce Springsteen once described it, years after he adopted the wall of sound for his own ‘Born to Run’ – was actually just documentation of the way he bullied? and musicians?

Our unwillingness to view Spector’s music as a kind of torture porn is the problem with the moral room for maneuver we allow when our artistic geniuses anoint. The abuse, when it occurs, becomes inseparable from the art; the art indeed serves saved the abuse, often even among the abused.

“He hit me, and it feels like a kiss,” the Crystals sang in a now infamous single Spector produced in 1962, and the similar version applies beyond the narrator’s toxic relationship: it’s not that she (or we) can not see what is going on; it is that she has convinced herself that it is acceptable, and so have we.

Spector, of course, entered an era when the public was eager to sweep horrible behavior, especially by men, under the rug of creative achievements. And things have undoubtedly changed since then. It was fascinating to watch over the weekend how news organizations wrestled with how to describe Spector’s complicated life in headlines and tweets.

Rolling Stone has been criticized on Twitter for saying Spector’s legacy was’ damaged by a murder conviction ‘, while the New York Times adapted the first line of his obituary, which initially said the producer’s’ life was increasing is “through his imprisonment, after readers objected to language centering his experience at the expense of the woman he killed. (The Los Angeles Times was no exception – the newspaper removed a latest tweet that made no reference to Spector’s conviction.)

But if we have become better at identifying wrongdoings committed from a position of privilege, it is hardly the case that we have learned to build up the privilege for artists who hurt others – or, more sympathetically – themselves. as a result. In Spector’s Day, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, dubbed ‘Be My Baby,’ the greatest song of all time, crumpled under the weight of being considered a genius; Half a century later we’re probably watching the same thing happen to Kanye West.

Can we be surprised when they start behaving the way they believe when we tell someone over and over again that their talent sets them apart from the rest of us?