rolling #metoo thread for sexual harassment in the music industry so no one misses out when artists we don't give a fuck about like Tim Westwood and Bassnectar get caught

It seems like a lot of the sexual harassment news of the last few years has either ended up in Weinsteins step down as Miramax CEOs or in individual artist threads like Ryan Adams and Swans: Classic or Dud? and Warped Tour 2004 and probably many more.

I just think it would do well to have a catch-all thread just for ILM. It seems like the news stories on this topic come and go and we don't get to see the full size of the issue. We could post news here or links to older revives in individual artist threads.

If this is a bad idea, feel free to let me know.

Anyways, here's Bassnectar:

No, I Do Not Want To Interview Bassnectar.

Here's Tim Westwood:

Tim Westwood = AWESOME

good idea!

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/fifthgear/images/7/70/Tim_westwood.PNG/revision/latest/top-crop/width/360/height/450?cb=20180520153702

let's not forget that Tim Westwood is only one year younger than Theresa May (another child of the clergy) and uses a lot more grecian 2000. The real tragedy is he when got shot, the bullet didn't go right through his testicles. It all seems to have gone quiet about him and his grooming game. What an utter stain.

Whippin hard! What's my ride out music? pic.twitter.com/znI67xOcLO

— TimWestwoodTV (@TimWestwood) June 10, 2020

he's supposedly got knocking on half a million followers yet his "whipping hard" tweet gets him 11 retweets ..hmmm

the Minneapolis hip hop scene had a crazy week of blowing with all sorts of abusers getting outed

https://www.brooklynvegan.com/doomtree-prof-others-respond-after-members-of-minneapolis-hip-hop-scene-accused-of-abuse/

pretty glaring free pass still given to surviving classic rockers about this, feels like a conversation people want to postpone indefinitely

yeah the independent radio station i used to do a show for would send out emails about not playing music by the ducktails guy (for example) when sexual abuse allegations came out, but then people would still play james brown and led zeppelin all the time

does listening to someone's music = giving them a pass? asking for a friend

not necessarily but fandom tends to do that especially when it gets loud enough to shout down critical voices

Prince is a big one no one wants to touch

I still fuck with Prince, David Bowie, Motley Crue. Nugent, Zeppelin, Aerosmith to lesser extent. I don't know why this is, but some of the songs are so emotionally resonant to me that I can't divorce myself from them. I honestly haven't even looked into what Prince has done.

idk if it's a specific one thing, or just the general consensus that he was a humongous asshole, often abusive. but i'll let ums confirm

I'm sure that Prince was a terrible asshole in many facets of his life.

including the time when he was the symbol that he told the press they had to use the special font he gave them when writing about him, send them the special font in a file, then tried to sue people for using it in articles anyway.

https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/1117-heres-every-battle-prince-waged-against-the-internet-and-the-music-industry/

The Tim Westwood thread shows that a whole lot of ILXors really did give a fuck about him.

idk if it's a specific one thing, or just the general consensus that he was a humongous asshole, often abusive. but i'll let ums confirm

― I hear that sometimes Satan wants to defund police (Neanderthal), Thursday, July 9, 2020 5:45 PM (fifty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

No I mean grooming underage women

In 1990, 16-year-old Garcia met Prince backstage in Barcelona after he saw a tape of her dancing. After she graduated high school in Germany at the age of 17, Prince became her legal guardian.[14][4] Upon moving to Minneapolis, Prince and members of his team helped set her up with her own apartment. "At first, I stayed at the Sofitel, then they moved me to a nice little prairie house at the Country Suites, but I couldn't even make a cup of tea there, so they got me an apartment and rented furniture," she said.[15] At the age of 19, Prince instructed her to get on birth control thus beginning their sexual relationship.[4] After a four-year courtship, they married on February 14, 1996.[16]

After she graduated high school in Germany at the age of 17, Prince became her legal guardian.

Ted Nugent pulled this same trick.

Oh, well...that part I didn't know. fuck!

xpost

xps to Tom

he is like funk flex yes, but singular and glorious in a way only england can be
― bob zemko (bob), Monday, 14 October 2002 07:27 (seventeen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

just imagine how singular and glorious funkmaster flex could have been if he was an upper middle class white English pedo still "doing it" at 62!

Nona Gaye was 18 when they started dating (allegedly started)

A woman I know knows a lot of people from Prince world, an R&B singer told her the story that Prince was producing her debut solo album in the early 80s

She had done vox on the Lipps Inc project and other things

Anyway

Prince demanded a blow job in the studio, she refused, he walked out, end of her solo career

re: Doomtree, this is 100% shallow but my reaction to them after their set at the first Eaux Claires festival was “these people are terrible and I wish them all nothing but ill fortune”; I’m just sorry that their implosion is built on so much abuse and suffering.

I'd prefer to keep Bowie, James Brown and Prince out of this not because they're too beloved, just cause they're dead that seems like a different category of queasiness. unless someone here is a necromancer-for-cancellation? surely we already have a "separating the art from the artist?" thread already

but obv I'm not gonna make an actual effort to thread-police

I hear that Gesualdo guy was an asshole.

and yet he's still being played every hour, on the hour, on classic rock radio, sickening

'Moro, lasso, al mio duolo' is an undeniable jam, though.

Do these kids walking about with his face on their t-shirts even know though?

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.786988743.1102/ra,unisex_tshirt,x1860,101010:01c5ca27c6,front-c,336,366,600,600-bg,f8f8f8.jpg

Part of it is living in the middle of Minneapolis' Prince Industrial Complex and the endless hagiography gets old

Gesualdo is obviously cancelled in my book

didn't actually know any of the bad Prince stories, surprised i didn't see anyone make a lot of noise about them when he died

we all know rock n roll was partly built on this but it would be nice if we didn’t have to wait for the people to die, then wait for the mourning to die down, before any kind of minor reckoning with them. even nicer if it was their peers calling them out but that’s not happening & who else wants to deal with the threats

obv this is still going on in every genre/industry & statistically some of the ppl I like now are going to be creeps. which is shit but I’d rather know about it. lot more stuff is surely coming out soon, whether it will change anything idk. kids still love certain soundcloud dudes we knew about already. I hope they grow out of it

Worth noting that Rodney P and Ty (R.I.P) relentlessly told us of Tim Westwood’s predatory nature...no one listened. #SurvivingTimWestwood pic.twitter.com/FWGxLABWMQ

— Michael Morgan (@mikewhoatv) June 22, 2020

I'd been wondering how Westwood managed to stay so protected - from the viewpoint of 2020 it feels weird to think of the extent to which he was the biggest and pretty much only gatekeeper for any British MC (and the only person playing most rap music in the UK full stop). We're talking about a 20-30 year period of dominance here.

The even grimmer conclusion is that because he was primarily targeting young black girls, no one really cared.

I'm surprised there isn't more concerted anger directed against him from some of the bigger grime stars (unless I've missed it) because he needs dragging down, what he gets away with is outrageous.

mind you as a much as a joke character as he he seems, he still obv wields a lot of power and influence

seeming like a joke character seems to help many people who wield a lot of power & influence

Prime Ministers, for instance.

The Prince stories, while unsurprising, are really bumming me out.

yeah it's depressing
I did watch Purple Rain for the first time in probably 20 years on Netflix and that whole movie is a real grab bag of red flags though, yikes I was kinda shocked at how horrible The Kid came off

to your Doomtree post, I think those guys (except Dessa, I think she was in a different lane) were super hard drug abusers

I always felt like The Kid was supposed to look half horrible and not a model for behavior recommended by prince

but purple rain aside, djp otm. He was one of the few figures i would call a personal hero

its hard to process when a huge part, maybe the hugest part, of an artist's project is how sexuality fits into the universe they constructed

Yeah, my reading of Purple Rain was that The Kid was well on his way to becoming a piece of shit in the same vein as his father but music and Appolonia opened his eyes to his mistakes and gave him the strength to set his feet on a different path.

Also I don't mean to keep harping on this in the context of this thread but the Doomtree set was SO BAD, like half a step removed from Edina-Christian-youth-group-rapping-for-Jesus levels of bad

its hard to process when a huge part, maybe the hugest part, of an artist's project is how sexuality fits into the universe they constructed

I wouldn't say it's hard, rather that my take on it was that he was projecting a stage persona most of the time and I hoped/assumed he turned it off when it wasn't appropriate (which is of course naive when actually considered but still).

i'm starting to think that being a sexual predator / sexual power dynamics are like the quiet part of what being a successful pop star is or has always been about - the open secret. some people really seemed to relish it / some people were reluctant participants but obviously that doesn't change the end result - the pain of countless women (and queers) who suffered abuse.

'pop star' but also music industry exec etc.

this is a little out-of-bounds of this thread but i have my theories about why sexual abuse is so commonly done by people in these positions of power. part of it is the alienation of being an industrial exploiter in an exploitative capitalist framework - that very easily translates into sexual exploitation.

My wife's best friend is a huge Michael Franti fan, travels to see him on the reg, has been on the cruise, etc and I got to say all of her descriptions of the cruises and interactions with Franti, etc always made my hackles stand on end and just creeped me out.

She got her cruise tix refunded this wknd and was completely blind-sided by the whole thing.

during covid I got real into his first industrial project, its righteous political edge is now more difficult to hear the way its intended

Yeah, I first heard him/of him in 1989 during that phase. And here we are.

Hypocrisy is indeed the greatest etc.

I mean it's to the point now where if someone is politically righteous and/or attracts a cult-like following that they encourage, I halfway expect it.

That should reveal to you/one how many men (sorry) have predatory tendencies.

Damn, Rono Tse out of nowhere on Franti! That REALLY takes me back.

LOL for the title thread.

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2025/08/25/court-docs-indianapolis-teacher-composer-sent-crypto-to-dark-net-site-julian-wachner-invent-learning/85814971007/

This guy was the toast of Boston and had one of the most prestigious church music positions in Manhattan as well as a teaching position at Juilliard until he was accused of sexual assault. We existed in the same general orbit but were not pals.

Invent Learning Hub conducted a background check on Wachner and offered him training before the school hired him as a teacher on Sept. 30, 2024, according to the statement sent to parents..

They were okay with him being accused of sexual assault??

Yeah that did not escape me, either

This is the first time dude has admitted culpability in any of the shit he’s been accused of and he had (has?) a posse of defenders who have vociferously denounced the women who made the original allegations against him. Even with this news I saw someone saying “this doesn’t mean the original allegations were credible” and I’m just like, wtf are you doing, if there ever was a time to get off the boat, it’s now

It’s just kinda nuts that these dudes don’t envision the google search results for them with their promo headshot next to “charged in child sexual abuse imagery case” and then y’know … don’t do the thing

Like this dude in the local music scene who was a high school teacher who got arrested for having a sexual relationship with a female student at his school … like the inability to consider the horrible consequences of potential actions and then not act … he’s not a stupid guy. Idgi

Thinking with the little head.

Everyone thinks they’ll get away with it and with some reason

Because to a large degree they do!

Well, that’s why I said “with some reason”

I realized that once I read it again. Sorry!

Rape culture is so deep and so insidious. I was thinking about the whole framework of “he said/she said” — that is, to put it mildly, an insufficient framework for discussing power disparities and obvious cases of abuse. Yet somehow it still flies in court??!!

See also this recent story:

https://news.stv.tv/west-central/jazz-professor-tommy-smith-dismissed-from-role-at-royal-conservatoire-of-scotland

You’re good LL 👍🏻

But when it comes to underage girls… like, the dynamics are different because of parents…

Franti is extremely unsurprising, that guy oozes skeeze

D4VD?

uh no I would say that's out of scope here, maybe there's a "famous people doing creepy murders" thread

yeah "sexual harassment" is not at all what this is. the extra fucked bit for me is his fan discord where everyone knew and was cool with him being into young girls and "addicted" to gore videos.

Never heard of this person — sounds disgusting!

Next on Dateline...

the extra fucked bit for me is his fan discord where everyone knew and was cool with him being into young girls and "addicted" to gore videos.

We’re deep into the era of people doing the most fucked up shit and the only response from their fans being “omg based”

Tix for his show tonight were still on sale this morning but just now have been canceled:

https://www.axs.com/events/943248/d4vd-tickets

Unless I’m mistaken, it should be emphasized that the girl who was found in that car would be 15 now, more likely 14 when she disappeared, and from some things I’m seeing online he started talking to her when she was a couple years younger than that.

Jesus Christ

https://www.reddit.com/r/d4vd/comments/1nl8bo1/wearing_her_bracelets/

If this guy is the killer he's either excruciatingly dumb or asking to be caught

I’m scared to look into this further as it sounds dangerously close to the d**th dr**e thread and that is legit still haunting me.

yeah I def don't need to know more here

I think what’s worse is this was all in plain sight. There’s no need to really get beyond this level and go deep deeper. Except to say this is a kid who was failed by everyone in her life.

xp
I read the wiki on this guy and that was enough

I think what’s worse is this was all in plain sight.

― omar little, Friday, September 19, 2025 2:28 PM (three minutes ago)

i think i know what you mean insofar as people are digging up evidence of them two having been together, her family was in some way aware of the situation etc. but my takeaway is somewhat different -- culture is so siloed via fandoms that you have things like this happening "in plain sight" except nobody outside the fandom is aware of what's going on because it's playing out on discord, twitch, reddit etc places that basically exist to create millions of little bubbles. from the outside you can look inside these bubbles and see people moving around in familiar ways but unless you're inside the bubble you can't possibly know the full story of what's happening in there. d4vd's backstory is that he started making music on his own so that he could soundtrack his fortnite highlight montages w/o using copyrighted music, his whole life has basically played out in the online netherworld of "community" where everything is both technically public and still largely unseen by outside eyes. he's a perfect avatar for a certain kinda modern celebrity, he got popular enough inside his bubble to be able to tour the world and even tho some of his work bled slightly into mainstream culture he is still almost completely unknown to the average person

I have never heard of him at all

yeah actually j0rdan i was going to say something about how within the community, it seems like so many people were completely aware of the backstory of this, without knowing it would ultimately be a backstory to *this* kind of thing, but with the world of modern music fandom you can have these massive stars who are somehow completely anonymous. you said it better than i was going to however.

Definitely explains how I feel when I see a lot of headliners coming through town at the bigger theater venues. A whole lot of 'never even HEARD of this person,' and it's not just age and my expectations at play there.

this person is only 20 years old -- how to be so morally curdled at 20?!?!?

because the internet

urgh

what now?

i'm assuming this is not just A Music War?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/oct/09/former-bbc-radio-1-dj-tim-westwood-charged-rape-sexual-assault

I thought this might have been a response to Craig Jenkins' paean to Chris Brown.

Never heard of Electric Frankenstein, but their bass player just got caught.

https://www.punknews.org/article/86827/bass-player-of-electric-frankenstein-charged-with-sexual-assault-of-11-year-old

terrible

they are (were?) a pretty big garage rock revival band