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[linnea]

As Perez said, he'll be best remembered for being a wife beater and drug addict. Obituary link.

[theinevitable]

It drives me nuts how some entertainers get away with doing anything they want, and some get the comeuppance they rightly deserve. A lot of fantastic musicians have been thugs, druggies, and just utter assholes. Do we remember Ike as a wife-beater only because the woman he beat was Tina Turner? We let these people get away with too much. I can accept that, say, Jim Morrison was a complete asshole and still like his music, you know? A lot of the big rock guys were complete douchebags, especially to women, and yet the only case in which it seems to overshadow their contributions is in this one.
I mean, maybe because no one has ever heard "Rocket 88" unless they googled "first rock song."

[AlohaDawg]

The world is full of douchebags who use drugs and treat people bad.

Some make no contribution to the world at all. Most just exist and die.

Ike Turner had some good times, did some memorable things. He also happened to be at some point one of a billion douchebags on the planet. Except he was famous so he was a douchebag in a giraffebowl.

Good music, Ike.

Maybe he was a dick. But the brother could play and that's what the world wrung out of him.

[KeithHernandez]

600 million, douche.

And oh yeah, damn good point.

[pmcd9]

That movie about Ike and Tina is probably about as factual as Pearl Harbor.  You can't believe a fuck*ng thing that Hollywood tells you.

Ike Turner (and Sam Phillips) Invented Rock and Roll.

They're partying in heaven tonight.

[Limmo]

Well, I wouldn't go so far as to dismiss what he did to his wives that completely, Paul, but...yeah.

[littlefallsmets]

Ike Turner was a fully-stamped-sealed-and-enrolled royal douchebag.

He was also one of the great shapers of our musical culture as it stands today.

I'm comfortable with the idea that both of these things are true and... since I never met the guy... why should I try to rectify that? Why is that my concern or my job, y'know?

The older I get, the less comfortable I am with people wanting their public figures to be heroic and moral in their personal lives or else their public achievements don't mean anything and... tied up in that... the desire to believe that someone is/was a great person just because they did a great thing once, especially if that great thing was in the arts or a sport or something.

It's one thing to try and apply personal morality to politicians, maybe, there's at least SOME validity to that... if not full validity... but if you liked how a guy played a guitar and he turned out to eat babies, man, how does that change the music you listened to? Christ, some of the guys that seem the "nicest" in sports are some of the least talented.

The Mets have scooped out the heart of their talent... getting old injured untalented guys who are really nice and discarding talented guys who've also maybe been arrogant or jerks. I ain't paying to see nice people hang out, I can do that on my own time.

We want our famous people to also be our Pantheon of gods, we want to be able to project ourselves onto them and have them live our dreams out for us and... it's fuck*ng disgusting. It holds us down as a species more than any other factor... more than any religion or power structure or economic model...

Our desire to designate certain humans as gods that we can live triumphs through and never try anything ourselves...

And then be crushed and rageful if they make different choices or turn out to be dickweeds... and still do nothing ourselves...

The older I get (and the longer I live in Southern California) the more I realize that... this is our fatal flaw.

Ike Turner was a great artist and a terrible human being and... neither of those things changes nor modifies nor condemns nor justifies nor negates the other.

We love Britney Spears for being a "normal" cute kid at first and then we hate her for "screwing up" the fame and beauty and fortune we wished we had, that we put upon her the responsibility of letting us live through... and then we hate her for crumbling into madness under the weight of the flip-side of all that, of being a millionaire sex-symbol when she was supposed to be a freshman in college or whatever.

We love Barry Bonds for smashing home runs, we hate him for being a dick to the press... oh, we'd do it for free, oh, we'd smile for every camera, we'd just be so gosh-darned happy to be there, we'd never need to cheat, we'd just be happy with the gifts we already had...

We hate him for blowing the shot we wished we had and how he blew it.

And sit around hating him for it instead of doing something great ourselves.

If there's a Christian heaven and hell... which I must say, I have my doubts on... Ike Turner's burning long and good.

And he also made some great fuck*ng music that'll probably live on much longer than we do, if there's still Western Civilization around in a hundred years... which I also have my doubts on.

And...

It's okay that both of these things are true, y'know.

[theinevitable]

We want our famous people to also be our Pantheon of gods, we want to be able to project ourselves onto them and have them live our dreams out for us and... it's fuck*ng disgusting. It holds us down as a species more than any other factor... more than any religion or power structure or economic model...

See, this is why I don't get that you like Guns n' Roses and the like so much. Bands like that are the epitome of that to me. "LOOK HOW FAST I CAN PLAY THESE NOTES! JESUS! IMAGINE HOW MUCH PUSSY I AM GETTING TONIGHT! I MAKE MORE MONEY THAN YOU WILL MAKE IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE EVERY TIME I HIT THIS GUITAR STRING!"
To me, punk music is about this idea. The idea that music is something that everyone can do. musicians aren't meant to be worshiped.

...I mean, except Hendrix, The Beatles, you know how it goes.

[AlohaDawg]

See, this is why I don't get that you like Guns n' Roses and the like so much. Bands like that are the epitome of that to me. "LOOK HOW FAST I CAN PLAY THESE NOTES! JESUS! IMAGINE HOW MUCH PUSSY I AM GETTING TONIGHT! I MAKE MORE MONEY THAN YOU WILL MAKE IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE EVERY TIME I HIT THIS GUITAR STRING!"
To me, punk music is about this idea. The idea that music is something that everyone can do. musicians aren't meant to be worshiped.

...I mean, except Hendrix, The Beatles, you know how it goes.

Don't forget about the reprehensible misogynism in some of Axel Rose's (in Rock Star Persona?) interviews and the original cover art for "Appetite for Destruction". I actually had issues with Axel when I put all that stuff together in my head, but that's still a band with serious rock chops.

And maybe musicians aren't meant to be worshiped (but the music is, dig?) but that doesn't mean we can easily displace our own notions of propriety and social order easily when presented with the non-musical aspects of human beings. It comes down to whether or not you feel like you are supporting certain values if you buy the music. If you feel that way, you might focus overly much on the aspects of your fellow human being to which you object rather than what they produce that you might otherwise really like.

The whole Dog Chapman thing illustrated this to me. People love to be entertained by a relatively coarse guy who dwelled partially in the more sordid underbelly of society catching bad guys. I don't think anyone expects Dog to shave, cut off the mullet, don a shirt with a collar and melt into suburbia. He's not that guy. He was never that guy. We safely assume he uses a lot of cusses. We may even assume (possibly wrongly) things about his upbringing or his family life.

So who could be possibly surprised that, in a fit of anger with one of his kinds, with whom he's had documented 'differences and disagreements' with, he uses some objectionable and in the eyes of many, culturally and socially unacceptable language?

Yet he pretty much hanged for it. Not that he's hurting- unless he's financially overextended, I know they have lots of property and are doing just fine.

Maybe it's just that we too often compare people to ourselves, and then, naturally, find them wanting.

[littlefallsmets]

Ah, GNR speaks to the fourteen-year-old stuck in a shitkicker little town, frustrated as hell, that still lives inside me.

Much as they were psychotic and driven insane by fame and riches... I listen to a song like "Dead hoss" or "Estranged" and... they do speak to a part of my life experience, to the part of me that's half-crazy and half-wise but can't tell the difference between the two.

Forget the image and so on... they're songs about a well-read but slightly deranged Midwesterner with a fucked-up youth transplanted to Los Angeles and trying to make it in entertainment while all the while trying to not give into the madness. Of course they're gonna make sense to me.

C'mon, though, I've seen just as much fucked-up hero worship of the Ramones and Johnny Rotten and Sid N Nancy as anyone else.

Punk is hardly hardly hardly immune. Even if the starting ethos is, as you claim, "we suck on our instruments and since most people suck on instruments, this democratizes the music!"... it didn't last very long at all.

You can go into Best Buy and buy a Guitar Hero guitar that says "Sex Pistols" on it... if democracy-through-mediocrity was punk's goal, it really really really fuck*ng failed.

Yeah, of course, they're all terribly flawed human beings.

Most human beings are terribly flawed and... the more drive we have toward possessing soul-toxic things like riches and fame, the more fucked up of a place we probably come from.

If you NEED to be famous so bad that you'll make your whole life about being famous, you're probably deeply fuck*ng twisted to start.

But this transcends any genre within music or entertainment or business or anything.

Generally, the people who are great successes became them because they were able to abandon most of the other things in their lives... their ethics, their old friends, their family, their privacy, their downtime, their outside hobbies, their sanity... to claw to the top of that fuck*ng mountain.

The system is basically rigged against people who ain't gonna sell their soul with a smile, of course, none of them are heroes.

But some of them still make music that speaks to me and I like that music a whole damned lot, even if they're assholes.

But still.... which is gonna make more sense for me to connect with?

"I ain't quite what you'd call an old soul/still wet behind the ears/I've been around this track a coupla times and now the/dust is startin' to clear"

OR

"Oooooooooy am an anarchist/Ooooooy am an anti-christ/Ooooooy (unintelligible)/etc"

It's gonna be the first one.

If you connect more with the second, well, mazeltov for you.

But my liking a GNR has nothing more to do with my desire to emulate a late eighties rock "scene" than your like of the second means that you wanna die in a flat in London surrounded with filth and four heroin needles in ya or... whatever the hell the punk thing is.

I dig one artistic expression, you dig another and... all the people who made both of them were probably humoungous douchebags.

[AlohaDawg]

If there's a Christian heaven and hell... which I must say, I have my doubts on... Ike Turner's burning long and good.

Well, I hope that Ike at some point in his life turned around his sinful nature and worked toward improving himself and living something closer to the kind of life God envisioned for him. In that case, maybe ol' Ike is doing OK. I'd rather think that. Positivity helps everyone. I really believe that to some degree Religion helps people and gives people higher levels of life satisfaction and happiness in poll after poll because it gives them some degree of hope and positivity.

[littlefallsmets]

Well, to be fair, you could read those the opposite way around and say that... it's easier for happy people to buy into a religious worldview because... hey... things are good for them so there must be an intellect behind this strange themepark we're all stumbling around in.

But I get your general point about Ike and agree with it.

Frankly, if the fundamentalist Christian vision of the afterlife is correct, it means that God is kinda a dick.

And if there's a God, I'd rather not believe that of Him/Her/It.

[AlohaDawg]

I dig one artistic expression, you dig another and... all the people who made both of them were probably humoungous douchebags.

I hope it's just where you are right now in your life that makes you see the bad side of everything - I really do. Right now, I know from other posts that someone else's shit hit your fan, and it blows, seriously.

My house is packed up. My wife and daughters are leaving in January. I gotta stay here to work at a job I really don't like, in the hopes of getting back into something resembling the career I had and was happy with. Every day that goes by right now brings me closer to the minute I send everyone I care about the most through a metal detector and across 5000 miles. Is it easy to stay positive about it? No. 

I cry about it when I'm by myself and I realize that it all comes back to me and apparently a large need on my part to be humbled and/or taught and/or formed. I'm accepting it and I'll be accepting better things when they come.

We do our best and try to create opportunities to grow and improve from the rubble we perceive that, at times, our lives have become. And of course, remember that there are people suffering degrees of sickness, death, and loss that is unfathomable (and that if we have something and someone we care about has nothing, no matter how small our something is, it's made all the greater by sharing).

I'm not saying go out there and find religion or spirituality or anything like that. That's your choice to make and finding it doesn't mean you let it transform you. But at least let a little love in, and once it's in, let it out for your fellow man - maybe start by thinking or expressing a little positivity. It's a start.

This is going to be a terrible Christmas in some ways for me. And 40th Birthday, too. But it's gonna be great for my kids and next year - next year has to be awesome.  I hope yours is awesome too.

[Arachno-capitalist]

If there's a Christian heaven and hell... which I must say, I have my doubts on... Ike Turner's burning long and good.

(not totally serious) What about the insta-release deathbed confession and acceptance of Jesus? Doesn't that one still work? I went to catholic school and Im pretty sure that one still at least buys a dude some purgatory, as long as the confessor truly confesses that is.

[Arachno-capitalist]

I hope it's just where you are right now in your life that makes you see the bad side of everything - I really do. Right now, I know from other posts that someone else's shit hit your fan, and it blows, seriously.

My house is packed up. My wife and daughters are leaving in January. I gotta stay here to work at a job I really don't like, in the hopes of getting back into something resembling the career I had and was happy with. Every day that goes by right now brings me closer to the minute I send everyone I care about the most through a metal detector and across 5000 miles. Is it easy to stay positive about it? No. 

I cry about it when I'm by myself...

This is going to be a terrible Christmas in some ways for me.

We need like a touamb group hug or an open bar, one of those, probably both. The stars are just not aligned this year.