It’s not exactly news at this point that the rapper known as Tyga is, as a rather self-explanatory headline in The Daily Beast put it yesterday, “a Creepy Predator Who Is Attracted to Underage Girls.”
As the Daily Beast’s Marlow Stern points out, the rapper famously started dating Kylie Jenner when she was 17 — officially “jailbait” in the state of California, where she lives — and defended the, er, romance in a song featuring one of the creepiest couplets in the history of lyrics:
They say she young, I should’ve waited
She a big girl, dog, when she stimulated.
This star-crossed romance got even skeezier last month, with tabloids reporting that while Tyga was dating Jenner he was also creeping on an even-more-underage girl online — a 14-year-old “Instagram model.”
In a press conference on Monday, with attorney Gloria Allred by her side, the girl in question — identifying herself as Molly O’Malia.– told her side of the story, saying that Tyga had approached her online, sending her messages on Instagram and trying to convince her to meet in person.
If her story is true, Stern notes, it
shows that Tyga is a predator with considerable means and influence who targets underage girls, just as he did with a teenage Kylie Jenner. And the public—and tabloid media—shouldn’t laugh off this despicable behavior any longer. It’s this lack of seriousness and accountability that’s allowed a demon like R. Kelly to continue to flourish, despite the countless young girls he’s left violated and forgotten.
Unfortunately, as the mention of the henious R. Kelly reminds us, Tyga is hardly the first predatory pop star. And in most cases, the media has been content to trivialize the issue or simply look the other way.
Sure, rocker Jerry Lee Lewis famously faced a backlash after journalists discovered that he had married a 13-year-old girl who also happened to be his first cousin once removed.
But Elvis Presley somehow managed to avoid this sort of scandal even while he was actively pursuing Priscilla Beaulieu, whom he met when she was only 14. The two eventually married in 1967 after what Biography.com euphemistically describes as a “nearly eight-year courtship.” According to assorted biographers, Elvis was positively obsessed with girls in their early teens. The official story, for what it’s worth, is that the singer didn’t actually have sex with any of them, preferring pillow fights and girly gossip.
Elvis wasn’t the first or the last pop star obsessed with underage girls; most had a lot more than pillow fights in mind. In a spoken-word section of the 1977 Kiss song “Christine Sixteen,” Gene Simmons declares
I don’t usually say things like this to girls your age, but when I saw you comin’ out of school that day, that day I knew, I knew I got to have ya. I got to have ya!
But it hasn’t been just rock ‘n’ roll sleazebags like Simmons who have advertised their interest in underage girls. The Knack’s “My Sharona” was about a real-life 17-year-old who was dating one of the band members; the group returned to the topic of underage girls in another song,“That’s What The Little Girls Do,” which laments how these “little girls” allegedly torment older men, breaking both their egos and their hearts. Oh, and the album that followed the massive hit Get The Knack was titled “But the Little Girls Understand.”
The list goes on and on. There’s Foreigner’s “Seventeen.” There’s “Young Girl,” by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. There’s Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow,” a surrealistic ode to yellow vibrators — and 14-year-old girls.
And then there’s Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page. He didn’t write musical love letters to 14-year-olds. No, he just sent roadies to bring them to him, no questions asked. Or at least he did on one infamous occasion in 1972. As Cracked describes the incident, Page was so taken by 14-year-old groupie Lori Maddox, whom he’d spotted in a nightclub, that he
sent roadie Richard Cole to Maddox’s table with the message, “Jimmy told me that he’s going to have you whether you like it or not.” The roadie then grabbed her and chucked her in the back of a limo, saying, “You fucking move and I’ll fucking have your head.”
Page apparently did his best to keep the three-year “romance” that followed out of the press — and Maddox herself largely confined to his hotel room.
But the story has been out for decades now, and no one seems to give a shit about it. Page is still treated as a rock god, his creepy years-long exploitation of the extremely underaged Maddox seen as little more than a colorful example of seventies rock excess.
Some might say that it’s unfair to put Tyga’s skeezy but failed online seduction of a high school junior in the same category as, say, Page’s exploitation of Maddox. He didn’t kidnap her; they never even met in person.
Indeed, two other Daily Beast writers, Lizzie Crocker and Tim Teeman, sniff that
[i]n the annals of Allred cases defending pretty girls as victims of lurid celebrity scandals, this particular scandal was hardly a scandal at all before Allred entered the fray. …
it was not clear what made O’Malia … a victim in this case, until she had been transformed into one by Allred.
But that’s not really the point. It’s a good thing that Tyga’s pursuit of a 14-year-old is a scandal (and it definitely was one, albeit a somewhat smaller one, even before Allred got involved).
Pop stars’ exploitation of their young female fans used to be such a “normal” and expected thing in the music business that some of the rock ‘n’ roll predators not only wrote songs about it, but wrote songs in which they — shades of Humbert Humbert — made themselves out to be the victims.
Today, Tyga is getting called out on Twitter and in the tabloids for his predatory behavior. That’s a good thing.
I only hope that Jimmy Page and R. Kelly and all those other musicians who have happily exploited underage fans will eventually be held to the same standard.
“Edge of Seventeen” was inspired by Tom Petty’s then-wife when she said that they met when they were BOTH at the age of seventeen. Stevie misheard the word “age” as “edge” and hence the song title. It doesn’t seem indicative of an age disparity, both because the song is reminiscing about the past (when they were both young) and also because of the original inspiration for the title.
Oh and Weird Al is an upstanding gentlemen, but some of the characters he portrays in his songs definitely aren’t. “Airline Amy”, “Melanie”, “Do I Creep You Out?”, “Good Old Days”, etc. But that sort of dark humor is just part of his schtick.
I’m baffled by Edge of Seventeen. The lyrics make no sense to me; in addition to the bit about tom petty and his wife, Nicks says the song is about the deaths of her uncle and John Lennon, but all her symbolism is so personal that this doesn’t come across to me at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Seventeen
Ooh — two Kats? Well, I’m the green one. Welcome, Kat (the other)!
Donovan was singing “14”? I’ve heard the song maybe a trillion times and never understood what he was saying. I thought it might be “Fortran,” which is ridiculous — but would’ve been a better choice.
As far as Donovan is concerned, the song might not have been written from his perspective. Donovan has said that the “electrical banana” is a vibrator, and it’s possible that the song was actually written from the vibrator’s point of view, not from the point of view of a male. “I’m just made about 14, she’s just mad about me” because she’s experimenting with one.
Of course, it’s also possible it was just drug-induced stream-of-consciousness lyrics, too.
“Mellow Yellow”, as in the song they used to sell Mello Yello. 😐
AsAboveSoBelow: Ian McCulloch was fine. I had a very misogynistic moment with one of the bunnymen. Ian McCulloch IS echo and the bunnymen, as far as I am concerned.
As far as why these guys chase young girls, it’s the same reason that they want ownership over grown women, and bitch because we have any autonomy at all. They want an object that just thinks that they are the smartest, best looking, man ever.
Can’t convince a grown ass woman that a loser isn’t a loser, if all evidence proves otherwise. They convince children that they are just SO special, that it’s all about how they can’t control their feelings that this beautiful girl ccauses because the girl is oh so very special, when it is actually the opposite. It’s all about the perv.
These are guys that are unable to have a relationship with an adult because adults have wants, needs, desires, opinions etc. They don’t want a relationship. They want a pet.
@Jen:
Oh yeah, definitely. George was no saint in his personal life – he cheated openly, while ignoring Patti, and he could be selfish about his passions. I always felt really bad for her. She seems like a decent, lovely person who genuinely loved George, but her life with him didn’t go the way she’d hoped. She wanted the cozy suburban family life, he wanted Friar Park and God. Her relationship with him ended up being all about his spiritual journey, which took her (and them) to unexpected places. It must have been hard on her. From what I’ve read in various Beatle biographies, George’s fame and wealth, combined with his Krishna devotion and Liverpool working-class upbringing, gave him some peculiar ideas about sex. He shuttled from one extreme to the other. Sometimes he would completely renounce it, much to Patti’s dismay, and at other times, it seemed like he wanted to seduce practically every woman he laid eyes on.
That was a strange triangle they had going on with Eric Clapton, but I never got the sense that George was abusive or intentionally cruel to Patti – does her book say otherwise? I’ve been wanting to read it, because I always wanted to hear her side of the story. I love George and his music dearly, but he certainly had flaws (and would have been the first to admit them).
Definitely I would say many of the things he did qualified as abusive by today’s standards (locking her in a room,etc.) but she seems reluctant to call it abuse. Eric Clapton was even worse. Also, there it’s clear that there was a LOT of drug taking going on, and I think she elides a lot of her own participation in that for whatever reasons. I wish she had been more forthcoming about what she was really thinking during that time and why she stayed (i.e. where else could I go, what will I do without their money to sustain me) — it would have been a more interesting book than what seems to be a slightly whitewashed recitation of dates and facts. It’s definitely an interesting read and evocative of that time, but overall it’s really very, very sad.
@Green Kat:
Yes. Yes, it would.
I have trouble understanding a lot of Donovan’s lyrics. “Wear Your Love Like Heaven” sounds like various garbled ways of saying the sky is red (what the Niflheim is “rose carmethene?”) but I’m not even sure if that’s right, or what it means. (Ditto “Edge of Seventeen” and its one-winged dove, for that matter.) We didn’t have the Google back in those days to look up lyrics, and they weren’t always printed on the album sleeve.
Oh, I know! Maybe 14 refers to the length in inches of the electrical banana?
@Jen – That’s really sad to hear. I hope Patti managed to find happiness after all she went through. She deserves it.
I also hope she didn’t feel trapped in her marriages. She had a successful modeling career before she met George, but George made her give it up, as he didn’t think it seemly for the wife of a Beatle to be working. I guess by the time she and Clapton split up, it would have been too late to go back to modeling, but hopefully her family could have helped her out and gotten her back on her feet if she wanted to leave. I think she did have feelings for George and wanted to make it work, but all the drugs and craziness were just too much for the relationship.
It does make you wonder whether parts of the book were sanitized to protect George. So often, the women in rock stars’ lives get the short end of the stick, and they’re conditioned to think of it as just part of the price they have to pay to be around their men.
Gonna have forey for two-shine
Hmm-mm-mm-mm-mm-mmm
Gonna have forey for two-shine
If you want your cup-power filled
Speaking of Eric Clapton, the lyrics to “Next Time You See Her” go:
Although, as with Maroon 5’s “Wake Up Call”, he’s singing in character, definitely not autobiographically. It’s kind of funny how the music (which has a relaxed, almost reggae-like groove) clashes with the disturbing lyrics.
I was born in 1961, but I have five older siblings. As a result, I heard a LOT of 60s/early 70s music. Looking back on it, it boggles me how casually misogynistic some of the lyrics can be.
It appears that this was a feature, not a bug.
Todd Rundgren/We Gotta Get You a Woman (1970)
We gotta get you a woman
It’s like nothin’ else to make you feel sure you’re alive
We gotta get you a woman
We better get walkin’, we’re wastin’ time talkin’ now
Talkin’ ’bout things about that special one
They may be stupid but they sure are fun
It seems like sexualization of young girls was accepted by society in general in the seventies. Check out this ad:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_LyPn9ohkWc/UhTah9yGHEI/AAAAAAAALVE/9n2Wc9s6SDA/s1600/loves-baby-soft.jpg
Also, Louis Malle made ‘Pretty Baby’ in 1978, which starred Brooke Shields as a twelve-year-old prostitute and showed her nude. In theory, I’m not opposed to movies showing youngsters naked in a non-sexualized way–like, say, in ‘Pelle the Conqueror’. But Shields was definitely sexualized in ‘Pretty Baby’ (and Pelle was a boy, and male and female nudity are perceived differently).
I’m currently reading Soul Picnic: The Music and Passion of Laura Nyro by Michele Kort.
She was a critically acclaimed performer/songwriter from the 1960s to the 1990s. Nyro seems to have had many lovers — not groupies but lovers — but so far I’ve read nothing about her abusing her lovers. Male groupies for female rock stars are probably a vanishingly small bunch.
Her songs are very much about the female experience. Nyro had a cult following among (mostly) women.
I fell in love with her song “And When I Die” when I was sixteen:
Reading this book, I was shocked to discover that when she was sixteen, she wrote this song!
She died of cancer when she was 49. I think that she somehow knew….
@nequam @ken
Yeah, I probably could have phrased it a bit better, but I always understood it as Elfman singing about skeeviness in the music industry, not being skeevy himself. Wasn’t kidding about the demented vigor though.
@dlouwe
Queue up some old favorites! Only a Lad, Just Another Day, Insanity…
Damn it. I didn’t know that about Jimmy Page and I like Led Zeppelin. I also forgot Gene Simmons is a creep. :/
I guess this is why my playlist is full of rock from mostly the 90’s to now, despite my musical upbringing (Thanks, dad). It seems like there is a lot of dirt to dig up with older musicians. The people I like the most seem to be non-creeps. Some are openly feminist.
And I can actually listen to women and non-binary people who make great rock, metal, punk, folk, or rap. All of those genres don’t have enough women in them after all of these years, but there are more than there ever have been. Rap needs more women, and I would listen to more rap if there were more rappers who were not men.
I just rambled and I’m sorry. I really like music.
I hate to be the guy to ruin so many peoples view of Iggy Pop here but in “Please kill me” they talked about how he had sex with a 13 year old.
On the age of Consent talk I live in an area were 16 is the age of consent. I think that something similar to limitations put on the law in Canada should be in place here.
I did some googling about the people who made some of my favourite music.
TIL that James Hetfield is an NRA member who believes that the Second Amendment is what guarantees his freedom.
Le sigh.
God damn it.
Hm. That is a dumb opinion, but I’m not disgusted by it. :U
I’m…. pretty sure Ozzy is clean? I never heard anything bad about him. He seems like a nice guy and I don’t think he even wrote skeevy songs about women. Or any songs about women for the most part? The only one I can think of is a song about his mother. It’s not romantic at all.
Isn’t David Bowie also not terrible? I don’t know that much about him, all I know is that he’s attractive, a bit weird, and good at music.
And yes, Kurt Cobain was a great person. If I could bring any musician back from the dead it would be him.
I think there is a reason why I like musicians who don’t sing about romance, sex, and women a lot. The obvious answer is that sexy stuff just isn’t interesting to me, the romance is too heterosexual, and I like more imaginative stories, but I think the men who write things like that often fetishized women.
I’m itching to share music right now…
You know, if you’re going to sing a song about a lady you like, why not make a song like this?
It’s not about how hot she is, it’s about how god damn SUCCESSFUL this woman is!
(If anyone wants me to unleash some musicians who aren’t terrible say the word. I know a lot of slightly obscure shit.)
ALSO. LADIES. If you like punk or even slightly punky things, go listen to Bikini Kill and Bratmobile right now.
Maestro, if you please.
I so wish ‘celebrities’ would keep their tongues in their mouths when posing for pictures.
authorialAlchemy:
I think Ozzy’s clean. A quick googling turned up him being sexually assaulted as a child but no allegations have been made against him. He seems quite devoted to Sharon, I caught an interview a few years ago where she said he got a cellphone and had one of the kids teach him to text so they could sext.
I thought it was kind of cute.