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.
Sorry to spoil it for Ozzy fans but he did once try to strangle Sharon. (Sharon says the reason she’s so against guns is that had she had access to one during those turbulent times she’d have shot him :-/ )
“Sorry to spoil it for Ozzy fans but he did once try to strangle Sharon. ”
Without more context, it’s hard to say he is an asshole just for that. I mean, that’s a shitty thing to do, but said that way it can go from “one time he had a breakdown and all the other time he was able to be nice” to “for years on hand he was an abusive asshole”.
And, unlike having sex with 13 year old, having a violent nervous breakdown once, or abusing of alcohol way too much once, is something I believe can happen to most people. I know I ended up in a police station once for alcoholized shitty behavior, and yet I never did anything close to that again.
(note : I am not even sure in which band Ozzy is. Isn’t he the bad guy of Chrono Trigger or something ?)
“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.”
Here’s a great article which addresses that point.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/11/20/bill_cosby_and_r_kelly_both_alleged_sexual_predators_but_only_one_s_career.html
Nah, he was in Black Sabbath. He’s been solo for a number of years. But yeah, having been both a morphine addict and an alcoholic I can see a number of circumstances where that could happen.
Edit: It’s still a crappy thing to do and he’s fortunate for him that she loves him as much as she does.
There was an interesting documentary the other night about footballers that touched upon rape culture in the sport. One chap who runs a football academy ( and does try to educate his progeny in proper behaviour) suggested the reason was:
“You take young idiots, give them obscene amounts of money and unlimited adulation and shield them from any consequences”
I think there may be parallels with some musicians.
Why don’t female rock stars have groupies?
Chiming in late on this one, but I just have to say that if I knew as much of my favorite stars’ peccadilloes as I do, say, my customers’, I’d never listen to anything but white noise. Eventually I just said to myself that even if they’re complete creeps, for that brief moment, they made something that I connected with positively. Otherwise, I’d have to throw Elvis Costello under the bus for some pretty blatant racism, a bunch of the listed stars and many more for the underage skeeze of the rocknroll lifestyle, and then all the rich rightwingers who happened to be that way when they made music and long before I cared about politics.
I also want to add a couple of things – a lot of musical literary devices that get handed down (as well as a bunch of timeless songs otherwise) were written and performed in an era less than a generation away from the idea that 16 was an old maid in large parts of the country. Add to that the fact that a lot of these folks know they’re writing songs for horny teenagers and want a hook, and write accordingly. Songs that I loved and perfectly described my hormones when I was 15 just sound creepy as hell thirty years later, but that’s a positive change in my attitude, and I’m not (and I suspect the large portion of listeners aren’t) using it as propaganda to fuel my teeny girl sex fetish.
I got curious about the lyrics to Mellow Yellow as I, too, thought it was the name Fontaine, not fourteen.
I found a site that stated “Donovan says the song is actually about a fourteen-year-old girl exploring her sexuality and getting to the point where she will soon start using a vibrator — a yellow model called “Mellow Yellow.””
http://www.backofthecerealbox.com/2005/05/masturbation-narration-truth-about.html
The song now makes sense in a completely different and more interesting way, from the vibrator being the narrator.
Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
That actually makes some kind of sense.
Garden Gallivant:
Oh, good! I wasn’t the only one.
Also, re the song “Run for your Life” John Lennon later said he regretted writing it and George Harrison said it was his favorite song on the Rubber Soul album. :/
@kat
Sorry, but David Bowie had sex with 13 year olds Sable Starr and Lori Lightning/Maddox-the same Lori Maddox that Jimmy Page kidnapped. This is according to Sable, who seemed to base her self-esteem on whoever her next rock star conquest was, but I would not put it past him.
@authorial Alchemy
I do like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile! I saw Bikini Kill once around 1994, and Kathleen Hannah was, hands down, the most charismatic performer I’ve ever seen on a stage. And I’ve seen Iggy Pop. She’s got a good, powerful voice, but it was her persona I remember. Larger than life. I forgot that there were other people on the stage with her. Wow.
Somewhere, somehow, I got the idea that the 70s were kind of a relaxed time for sexuality, after the Sexual Revolution of the 60s and the Pill.
The more I see of it, though, the more it looks like white guys granting themselves absolution for having lots of sex, watching lots of porn, and sometimes doing skeevy shit.
@falconer
as you can probably tell from all of my comments, I’m a big fan of the 70’s-era for music, and I’ve read a lot of books and seen movies about it. And holy shit, Katy bar the door, everyone was out of control. Nobody seemed to get out of that time period unscathed.
I’ve given this rant here before, but I’m going to repeat it.
JB is completely correct that there’s a difference between pedophilia and ‘ephebophilia’. Where she errs is in believing that ephebophilia is less morally reprehensible. It’s actually much, much worse, in terms of moral culpability.
A pedophile is a person afflicted with a broken, intrinsically harmful sexuality. There are non-offending pedophiles who have never touched a child, and they have my genuine sympathy. The best thing we can do for such individuals is make it easier for them to admit to their condition and get treatment, counseling and care to keep them in that ‘non-offending’ category.
Once they’ve offended, of course, we have to take extra steps, but I’d still prefer institutionalized care once the term for the actual incarceration is done. (I’d want incarceration to remain part of the reaction because that would hopefully encourage non-offenders to seek help before they cross the line.)
An ephebophile, OTOH, is just someone with a typical sexuality who is deliberately seeking out individuals that they hope and expect to be vulnerable to manipulation, exploitation and domination. They know that women their own age are more likely to see through their bullshit, so they seek out a target that seems easier to achieve. In this, they have more in common with the date-rapist than with an actual pedophile.
@Freemage
100% true words.
Isn’t it convenient how, when it comes to intellect and decision-making, female adults are children….but when it comes to sex, female children are adults?
Interesting, that. Apparently they think all girls are born 14 years old and never change or mature. Until they reach the wall, then suddenly they’re decrepit.
The wrong part about the “if she’s old enough to bleed…” mindset is that puberty marks the start of sexual maturity, not the end. Just because hormones are newly flowing doesn’t mean a girl is emotionally, mentally, or even physically ready for sex. Do these guys turn on the stove and immediately pour the pancake batter onto the griddle because, hey, the stove is on? (Not that women are appliances or have off-on buttons, I’m just trying to illustrate the stupidity of this thought process)
@Hambeast
That may not have been because of the lyrics, though. George loved country and western, specifically Chet Atkins and Carl Perkins, and you can hear those influences in that song. He may have also liked it because he had a major part in recording it. He got to overdub several guitar parts, including the main riff, the guitar solo, and the D major slides. At certain points during the song, you can hear four Georges.
FWIW, the first line of the song, “I’d rather see you dead, little girl, than to be with another man”, was lifted directly from an older Elvis song, “Baby Let’s Play House.” Still doesn’t excuse the rest of the song, though.
“Talkin’ ’bout things about that special one
They may be stupid but they sure are fun”
IMO, it sounds like Rundgren’s singing about how people behave while in love–the “things” in question. He isn’t saying that women are stupid.
Music by people who aren’t shitlords/sex offenders:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0siYUjV9UM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uT1BuLYt2RU
I think Roger Waters is a good person? He isn’t a sex offender at least. I don’t know, though.
The list of older musicians is short because so many of them were bad or I don’t know much about them so I’m unsure of who is horrible and who isn’t, but I know some cool contemporary people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCUpvTMis-Y
Gerard Way is currently working through gender stuff. He/they might be transfeminine. He certainly supports the LGBT community and women. The song “Teenagers” is anti-violent and anti-bullying. Not sure about the other band members, but they seem nice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOks2HArHf0
I like her. I haven’t heard anything bad about her yet. She’s an artist I really want to hear more from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LDEm8mC-Nw
I don’t think any Gorillaz members did anything bad? The people behind the music and the voice actors. Murdoc is a parody of poorly behaved rock stars. He’s a fictional shitlord. 😛
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3g0d6Cgqyg
Speaking of artists I want to hear more of, this man only has one album and I’ve listened to it so many times. Again, I don’t think he did anything reprehensible, but he hasn’t been around for very long. But if he’s singing about a woman, she will be presented as a complex person. This is probably my favorite love song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXvkTuMyZpM
These guys are from my hometown and one of them lived in the same trailer park I lived in. They hit it big in contemporary rock. I actually met Matt Dirito at the DMV when I renewed my ID for my 21st birthday, and he was nice. He knew about the college I attend and how tough of a school it is because someone in his family went there. He congratulated me on doing well there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIBdpFJyFkc
No criminals here. I don’t think they even have a groupie problem. All of them are married except the songwriter/pianist. Tarja did try to screw over the band and was fired. They only care about making good music rather than money, although that doesn’t stop them from making money because they are popular in Europe. The symphonic metal scene isn’t very seedy and it’s surprisingly female-driven.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpXEUCyJDqI
CN Lester is an LGBT activist. They are openly feminist. CW: Slurs in the music video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KvXteZkByE
Folk could use more women, especially women of color. The singer is queer and a feminist. The fiddler is a genderqueer trans man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzMGqVh8G20
Bikini Kill spearheaded the Riot Grrl movement. Thier music is a little queer and body-positive. Obviously feminist.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qpvh8a3EeY0
Bratmobile was also a Riot Grrl band.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kSpeugWix4
Angel Haze is an agender rapper. They are pansexual. Just listen to this, they are cool.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3f1zii5skA
Mary Lambert. Yes. Good. 10/10 body positivity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VB6Ul0fP2PY
Good performers, nice people! I saw them live. Steampunk popfolk. Bunny Bennett is a trans woman, and the character she plays, Rabbit, is trans too.
I’ll post more later.
Falconer:
But remember! That’s all the fault of the liberated wimminz what burnt their braz, o’course /s
Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Yeah, okay. I’ll give him that, especially since the much vaster amount of male privilege floating around in the world at that time made it easier to overlook the horrible lyrics. And it’s a catchy tune with a punchy beat.
I’m not an Elvis fan, so I don’t recall the playing house song, though. Not in the mood to go looking on YT right now, either.
BAM
@peaches
While Kathleen Hanna is a pretty cool performer I do think she has done some not cool stuff in the past such as playing at Mitchfest.
On subject for the most part the music I listen to tends to be 80s underground stuff where most of the time people were just assholes to each other rather than predators. Though im very aware with separating art from artists though. Ive always loved Steve Albinis music but the man was an absolute total douche to everyone for the longest time and some of his writing at the time comes off like a proto reddit edgelord. He seems to have largely mellowed out with age though.
I think that a song can be a good song, as a piece of work, and still have troubling lyrical content. “Under My Thumb” is an example that comes to mind for me. It’s a good song with a creepy, cruel persona in the lyrics. To put it another way, I don’t think that a song has to have a positive, healthy message in its lyrics to be a good song.
Whoever brought up Iggy and the teenage girl: I remember reading about that situation, too. Her name was Betsy and her parents, insanely, were apparently supportive of the relationship (Iggy met them, at least).
@peaches: When I read stuff about 1970s rock culture, it’s like reading about life on another planet. I just don’t get it.
So THAT’S what Donovan was saying! I had no idea! I assumed for years that he said, “….I’m just mad about saffron. She’s just mad about me…” and I just assumed it was some weird stream-of-consciousness thing as well.
Saffron’s yellowy, perhaps “Saffron’s” the girl’s name or nickname….saffron robes….Eastern mysticism….psychedelic stream-of-consciousness….usual, colorful, random, hippy-dippy stuff….
….Instead, it’s a sixteen-year-old having fun with a yellow vibrator (with Donovan speaking from the vibrator’s perspective….I hope….)
Understandable. It would be almost impossible to enjoy a variety of good music while avoiding every musician who is/was a total sleazo.
It only takes a severe case in lyrics/persona to thwart me.
Casual sexism is awful but, depending how it’s expressed, I can more-or-less ignore it a bit (if the wording is still somewhat complimentary to the woman or the language isn’t overly hateful…in other words, something vaguer or *meh*).
However something blatant like Todd Rundgren’s “Gotta Get You A Woman” or Rolling Stone’s tunes like “Under My Thumb” or “Brown Sugar” (Sexism and black slavery!) literally disturb the heck out of me. Then there’s Question Mark & The Mysterions’ “96 Tears”….sounds like the plot of “Under My Thumb” (I have a girlfriend who was too spirited but now I dominate her).
“Treat Her Like A Lady” kind of weirds me out too (….Treat her like a lady….and she’ll give in to you….). Sadly, that tune has what I call, “The ‘Blurred Lines’ Effect”….The lyrics are awful but the music is so awesome! Same with The Beatles’ “Run For Your Life”.
Thankfully, I never actually listened to “Blurred Lines”. I only know Weird Al’s “Word Crimes”, which is awesome….and educational.
Sorry for the two consecutive posts but the edit-time ran out on the first one.
Well. Looks like I learned a few things about a few celebrities. What. The holy. Fuck.
Exactly this. When I read about people saying 13-year-old girls are sexually mature and thus men should have “access” to them, it’s not only creepy as hell, but their premise is wrong. And some manosphere types do this while claiming to be all sciencey.
A memory: I got my first period at age 13.5 and had to ask my mom for a pad thingy. She said, deadpan, “Congratulations, you’re a woman now” to lighten the mood (me being embarrassed and all) – and we both laughed because even I knew that was far from true.