Should classical music be a more forgiving world than other forms of culture ?

[ahinton]

As I mentioned above, I became aware of this disc from the laudatory article e-mailed to me by Presto Classical. What then if, as ahinton points out, the CD is praised to the skies by Gramophone, BBC MM, the Daily Telegraph, Guardian, Independent and Sunday Times? Presumably, the musicians were happy to make this disc?

What indeed (although BBC MM could perhaps be excised from you list on this particular occasion as it's a BBC publication!).

[Petrushka]

So I am required by law to pay for McGregor to promote the record of a convicted child offender and his victims are to be required by the law to pay for it too? No. Absolutely no. Groups of freaks in the establishment will no doubt get together in the privacy of their own sewers to produce for the similar minded. I am not going to be made to fund it without getting the tabloids involved.

And we all know about their ethics.

[Lateralthinking1]

ahinton, I haven't read your latest. You live in a very grim mind. Anyhow, I'm just going to e-mail The Sun and The Mail.

[ahinton]

So I am required by law to pay for McGregor to promote the record of a convicted child offender and his victims are to be required by the law to pay for it too? No. Absolutely no.

Well, at least you answer your own question correctly! For one thing, you are not "required by law" to possess a working television and are therefore not legally compelled to have a TV licence and, for anotgher, you do not in any case need a TV licence to listen to BBC Radio.

Groups of freaks in the establishment will no doubt get together in the privacy of their own sewers to produce for the similar minded.

I do not propose to risk appearing to dignify such a remark with a response.

I am not going to be made to fund it without getting the tabloids involved.

As I stated, you are not "made to fund" anything unless you insist on having a working television set, but the most risible aspect of your "threat" here is in your invoking "the tabloids", as though they and their content can somehow be guaranteed to be whiter than white whereas BBC by contrast is the alleged n*gg*r in the woodpile! Talk about taking the biscuit! That's utterly hilarious!

[Lateralthinking1]

Well, at least you answer your own question correctly! For one thing, you are not "required by law" to possess a working television and are therefore not legally compelled to have a TV licence and, for anotgher, you do not in any case need a TV licence to listen to BBC Radio.


I do not propose to risk appearing to dignify such a remark with a response.


As I stated, you are not "made to fund" anything unless you insist on having a working television set, but the most risible aspect of your "threat" here is in your invoking "the tabloids", as though they and their content can somehow be guaranteed to be whiter than white whereas BBC by contrast is the alleged n*gg*r in the woodpile! Talk about taking the biscuit! That's utterly hilarious!

I feel that you have a very perverse way of comprehending "threat".

And I do hope that the starred n word of yours isn't what it very obviously is.

[teamsaint]

Our society routinely employs the most dreadful double standards. In often leads us to employ double standards, and in any case it is exceptionally difficult to make the correct moral or ethical judgement, or follow the correct course of action in endless daily situations.

Many people have their careers , lives etc ruined for " lesser" offences, perhaps wrongly. Like many here, I find it pretty hard to stomach the thought of a man with King's background getting the money, plaudits, resumption of a career, while other , very able musicians struggle to find work.
It's tougher, though, in my humble opinion, to see, for instance, warmongering politicians, complicit in the arms trade, living off the fat of many lands, in the pay of investment banks and so on, and yet we put up with those people on our TV, radio, intruding into and running our lives, day after day, week after week , year after year.
So, I think on the whole, I just won't buy his CD or go to his concert. I'll view the BBC with a slightly more jaundiced eye, and hope that what goes around comes around.And the old Gary Glitter records will continue to gather dust.......

[Mary Chambers]

Anyhow, I'm just going to e-mail The Sun and The Mail.

I do hope that's a joke.

[ahinton]

ahinton, I haven't read your latest.

That's your prerogative, but presumably you have at least seen sufficient of it to decide not to do so.

You live in a very grim mind.

Wrong - and, in any case, you do not now where or in what I live.

Anyhow, I'm just going to e-mail The Sun and The Mail.

It's up to you, of course, but unless you either relish or are at least prepared to assume the risk of the prospect that you'll be laughed at for doing so, I'd give a little thought to that before proceeding.

Anyway, once again I note that you've said nothing about those besides Mr King who have been involved in making and issuing the recording concerned (in terms of whether or not you believe that Mr King should once again be continuing his career as a professional musician and expected and getting others to help him to do this) or whether or how anyone else has reviewed it or indeed how you think BBC could maintain credibility while ignoring a product that other sources might publicly praise for its artistic merits; making some attempt to do these things would put you in a rather more positive light here than will accusing unnamed BBC people of being "amoral bimbos", damning a named one as "airheaded" for airing an artistic judgement of a recording (without even giving your own view as to whether or not you believe that it deserves such praise), claiming without a shred of had evidence that someone whom you've never met "lives in a very grim mind" and braying from the elevated position atop your high moral horse about "groups of freaks in the establishment" who "will no doubt get together in the privacy of their own sewers to produce for the similar minded".

[ahinton]

I feel that you have a very perverse way of comprehending "threat".

Really? If you do indeed carry out your intention of writing to those two (or indeed any other) tabloids about this in the ways that you have done here, the perversity is surely all yours?!

And I do hope that the starred n word of yours isn't what it very obviously is.

What else would it be and why else would I have used the asterisks (the expression was once relatively common parlance in earlier less enlightened and sensitive times, as no doubt you know and my use of it here was prompted solely by what I perceive to be its sheer appositeness to the similar nastiness of much of what's being written here).

[Lateralthinking1]

That's your prerogative, but presumably you have at least seen sufficient of it to decide not to do so.


Wrong - and, in any case, you do not now where or in what I live.


It's up to you, of course, but unless you either relish or are at least prepared to assume the risk of the prospect that you'll be laughed at for doing so, I'd give a little thought to that before proceeding.

Anyway, once again I note that you've said nothing about those besides Mr King who have been involved in making and issuing the recording concerned (in terms of whether or not you believe that Mr King should once again be continuing his career as a professional musician and expected and getting others to help him to do this) or whether or how anyone else has reviewed it or indeed how you think BBC could maintain credibility while ignoring a product that other sources might publicly praise for its artistic merits; making some attempt to do these things would put you in a rather more positive light here than will accusing unnamed BBC people of being "amoral bimbos", damning a named one as "airheaded" for airing an artistic judgement of a recording (without even giving your own view as to whether or not you believe that it deserves such praise), claiming without a shred of had evidence that someone whom you've never met "lives in a very grim mind" and braying from the elevated position atop your high moral horse about "groups of freaks in the establishment" who "will no doubt get together in the privacy of their own sewers to produce for the similar minded".

That sounds like a perpetrator's speech. The philosophy is wholly what would be said of an abuser to a child - if he says anything he will be laughed at and isolated from the group, the caution not to proceed, the dismissal of anyone he speaks to as inferior, the repeated description of what he has said as not what he actually said. And to be from your pen of all people. How uncanny.

[ahinton]

Our society routinely employs the most dreadful double standards. In often leads us to employ double standards, and in any case it is exceptionally difficult to make the correct moral or ethical judgement, or follow the correct course of action in endless daily situations.

True, but in a case such as this where a criminal convicted of a series of grave crimes and who has completed the sentence passed upon him for them has given performances and made recordings both before and after that sentence which have attracted widespread critical and public accolades, I don't see how it's possible to have anything other than "double standards" because that's what's being presented to us all; in other words, if the standard of someone's conduct is - or is regarded as being - at odds with his/her standards of artistic production, what else is it possible to do than have "double standards" unless one chooses to ignore one or the other purely in order to avoid having to have such "double standards"?

[ahinton]

I do hope that's a joke.

What else could it be, whether or not he emails those journalistic organs of high moral respectability?!...

[ahinton]

That sounds like a perpetrator's speech. The philosophy is wholly what would be said of an abuser to a child - if he says anything he will be laughed at and isolated from the group, the caution not to proceed, the dismissal of anyone he speaks to as inferior, the repeated description of what he has said as not what he actually said. And to be from your pen of all people. How uncanny.

A "perpetrator" of what? Don't beat about the bush, please - just say what you mean without equivocation. My reference to your possibly being laughed at for what you propose to do has nothing to do with whether or not your moral indignation, which is your prerogative, is justified or even with whether your expression of it is a wholly proportionate and appropriate response to an item being reviewed on CD Review; it's about the notion of your sending an email about it to those widely respected bastions of moral superiority the Daily Mail and the Sun! If I'd made that insufficiently obvious to you, please accept my sincere apologies!

More seriously, though, you once again make no effort to answer the questions posed in the much longer paragraph that you quote; for someone as vociferous as you can be and indeed have been on this subject, your reticent taciturnity seems somewhat out of character...

[Mr Pee]

What else could it be, whether or not he emails those journalistic organs of high moral respectability?!...

Why should it be a joke? Whatever you may think of them, they are read by millions every day. No doubt you feel that those publications, and the readers of them, are some way below your intellectual level; although it seems a bit rich for you to opine on the moral rectitude of newspapers whilst at the same time wishing to gloss over Mr. King's appalling crimes against children.

[Lateralthinking1]

A "perpetrator" of what? Don't beat about the bush, please - just say what you mean without equivocation. My reference to your possibly being laughed at for what you propose to do has nothing to do with whether or not your moral indignation, which is your prerogative, is justified or even with whether your expression of it is a wholly proportionate and appropriate response to an item being reviewed on CD Review; it's about the notion of your sending an email about it to those widely respected bastions of moral superiority the Daily Mail and the Sun! If I'd made that insufficiently obvious to you, please accept my sincere apologies!

More seriously, though, you once again make no effort to answer the questions posed in the much longer paragraph that you quote; for someone as vociferous as you can be and indeed have been on this subject, your reticent taciturnity seems somewhat out of character...

You will know that the BBC has no scruples in terms of rejecting music of merit by decent people even when it is acclaimed and timely. You keep saying that I haven't addressed some question of yours about whether the ex-convict should ever be allowed to make music or perform it. I didn't say he shouldn't do so. I said that the BBC should not require licence payers to promote him.

You ask for clarification on the word "perpetrator". The philosophy you put forward shares many of the characteristics of a child abuser's approach to shutting up a child. That was what I meant by your lengthy posts sounding like a perpetrator's speech. He will find any way to stifle discussion or to distort anything that is said until the time when there is an outright accusation which he will encourage. He will then use it to drive him from the "house". I find that uncanny coming from you of all people as I said before.

There could easily be a discussion here which goes along the lines "I disagree with your argument because" and there is even scope for a political angle as with other things. The BBC is political. The difference is in your approach to argument - "you will be laughed at", "no one will believe you", "ahinton's version of what another said, while inaccurate, is to be the authorised version".