Incredible cheek of the music industry lecturing Trump on inappropriate behaviour

The “Me Too” movement has jumped the shark. At the Grammys, the music industry awards held in the US on Sunday, stars wore white roses in support of the campaign for gender equality. There were readings and lectures about Donald Trump’s inappropriate antics. In front of a choir, Kesha sang of the abuse she has suffered at the hands of a record producer. The message throughout the evening was that “time is up” for sexism and bad behaviour. Unfortunately, this did not extend to the awards themselves, where time was certainly not up for male singing stars. Only one of the main nine Grammy awards went to a female artist.

The hypocrisy involved in posing, pious music stars condemning Trump is mind-bending. This is the music industry, lecturing the rest of us and the US President on what is and is not appropriate and acceptable behaviour. This is the music industry where lyrics portray people as commodities to be used for self-gratification. This is the music industry where decades ago prominent people knew Michael Jackson was up to no good. It was a matter of public record. Yet still they treated him like a religious icon.‎ Jackson was hardly an isolated case, either.

Since the dawn of rock’n’roll in the mid-1950s, when Chuck Berry sang of “Sweet Little Sixteen,” when Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13 year-old first cousin, and Elvis sang of being a teddy bear for female fans, the music business has been one of the dodgiest industries on the planet. All of those artists – Berry, Jerry Lee and Elvis – made great records early in their careers, but their private lives do not stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny.

They were not the exception, either. David Bowie’s early trips to the US were highly colourful, involving all manner of illegal activity.

And if the pop and rock industry is now joining the Hollywood campaign to clean up history, we can say good bye to ever again mentioning The Beatles in their early days in Hamburg or on tour until 1966, where groupies were used as playthings.

The Rolling Stones between 1963 and at least the mid-1970s operated with complete abandon. Their attitude to private property and hotel decor was reckless in the extreme, as they trashed their way around the world. The treatment by several Stones of women was dire. My guitar hero Keith Richards was the nicest  it seems, according to Marianne Faithfull’s memoir. But listen to Jagger’s lyrics on Stray Cat Blues on 1968’s Beggars Banquet and be astonished the Stones were not arrested. Hold on, they were arrested on a number of occasions on drugs charges.

The Who were utter degenerates. The Sex Pistols were polite and well-behaved in comparison to Keith Moon, drummer of the Who. Ike Turner was a brute, although he and Tina Turner made a string of terrific records amid all the chaos and abuse. Other major bands since have been equally dysfunctional and wild – especially Coldplay. Joke. Not mild-mannered Coldplay. Their crimes are all purely musical.

None of this makes bad or sexist behaviour acceptable, but it does mean that we should not have to listen to any lectures – none – emanating from an industry which made its epic fortune out of celebrating hedonism in all its forms. It still does so in the lyrics of rap artists and others. The music business that built the Grammys makes Hollywood look tame.

Even today the BRITS, the British music awards, involves some incredible goings on afterwards, one hears. The “after parties” off site make the Presidents Club look tame, a music journalist tells me, although there are so many music journalists attending you will rarely read about it. Perhaps this is deemed okay because it is equal opportunities sleaze?

This is not a moralistic condemnation of rock or pop music. I’m listening to the degenerate Exile on Main Street, my favourite album by the Stones right now. But the seemingly widespread attitude to this stuff – the policing of it, the pious need to signal virtue and measure all cultural activity to a puritan code – does seem to have left people very confused all of a sudden.

In response, perhaps a safe space for truly terrible behaviour will have to be created, a theme park for dinosaurs or trainee dinosaurs of both genders, and everything in-between, to do whatever they want. Hold on, doesn’t that already exist? Isn’t that Las Vegas? Even there we read this weekend that one of the wealthiest casino owners is in hot water, and not in a “I turned up the temperature gauge in the hot tub” kind of way. Naughty, and worse, behaviour going on in Las Vegas? I am shocked. Completely shocked.