Chris Brown vs John Lennon

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Cajungal

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To say that they want those things from Chris Brown?
Yes. I can't understand it. There was never a time--even in the most psycho moments of adolescence--did I ever feel that way about a guy, especially not a guy that disgusting. Even if they're being hyperbolic, they sound idiotic.
 
I don't understand either. I would be horrified if my daughter ever said anything like that. I have a hard time seeing my younger relatives post stuff like that. I just hope that they don't really understand what they're saying.
 

Necronic

Staff member
The patriarchy
Not just that, it's also because people get irrational when they are in love (or think they are).

Hence your excusing John Lennon's abuse "because it was a different time"

edit: Not picking on you here, lots of other people feel the same way. They care about Lennon and there are a lot of things about him they like, so they try and rationalize away the thing that they don't.

Not that different from an abusive relationship really.
 
Lennon was an entertainer, and knew how to play an audience. He had little need or reason to live according to what he presented, and so he didn't.

The only difference between Lennon and Brown is that Browns private life is in the public eye, and one can no longer be an entertainer and have reasonable expectation of privacy, and behave badly without damaging their career.

Some types of damage are expected and acceptable, but abuse is not.

If Lennon lived at this time, he would be playing the same game. "I won't do it again, blah blah blah" in order to keep his career and image as clean as possible.

Another big difference is that Ono was pretty much an obsessed stalker, and he could beat her as much as he liked and she wouldn't leave him, nor make a big deal about it. The culture at the time supported some amount of what today we would term physical spouse or child abuse.

While he and brown are both obviously spoiled children, the circumstances are different enough that we can't say with surety that had Lennon lived now he would have done the same things as he did then, or that had brown lived then he would have gotten away with it as easily as Lennon had.

Regardless, they both suck as musicians. They had a few good pieces, but Lennon had more simply because he was more prolific and he launched off a successful band. But if you take a thousand pictures, the best few might compare favorably to an Ansel Adams print, and that's what we see of the Beatles and Lennon. They produced hundreds of songs, and today we know a handful of them well. Some of the rest are ok, and the remainder are junk.

The reason Lennon was successful is not due to his music, but his marketing.
 
Regardless, they both suck as musicians. They had a few good pieces, but Lennon had more simply because he was more prolific and he launched off a successful band. But if you take a thousand pictures, the best few might compare favorably to an Ansel Adams print, and that's what we see of the Beatles and Lennon. They produced hundreds of songs, and today we know a handful of them well. Some of the rest are ok, and the remainder are junk.

The reason Lennon was successful is not due to his music, but his marketing.
I'm not really a music scholar, but this is laughably wrong.
 
I'd say you would have to find the extremely rare group with any decent volume of songs where most of them are awesome. IMO most music that's published is crap, and thus this is why as a whole they were so reluctant to have per-song purchases online for so long: they know that 90% of their income would go poof due to people not needing to buy the 80-90% of the songs on the albums that they don't like. You only need to pay $2-3 for what you want, as opposed to $15-20 for the whole set, most of which you don't like and won't listen to anyways.

So I'd say "this is no exception" in Lennon's case to having most of his stuff labelled as "crap" even knowing next-to-nothing about the percentage as a whole. I think it'd be a complete miracle for any artist to have even half of his/her stuff be "hits" or "good." "At least passable" is probably not a bad bar to have if you call yourself a professional, but I don't have a problem with them putting out 90-95% crap, as long as I only need to pay for the 5-10%.
 

Necronic

Staff member
Even if you are a big beatles fan (I am), I think it's fair to say that the real stars of the show were McCartney and Harrison
 
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