As we reported earlier yesterday, bearded troubadour Bon Iver took home a pair of awards for Best Alternative Music Album and-far more controversially-Best New Artist this past Sunday night at the 54th Grammys. The latter was considered a major upset for the songsmith from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, spoiling what was widely predicted to be a surefire victory for Nicki Minaj. The award was accepted as graciously as possible, a speech was awkwardly delivered, and slighted fans of the losing artists took to social media to express their dissatisfaction at length and usually without spellcheck. For at least one blog out there, this is the greatest thing that has ever happened.
Bon Iver’s victory represented many things: A sign that the Internet may be leveling the playing field between major and independent labels. A mild humbling of an outspoken critic of the Grammys themselves and the largely meaningless charade that the award ceremony has devolved into. More disturbingly though, the overwhelming amount of attention it has garnered has also somewhat overshadowed something more pressing. While the media has fallen over itself to cover the public’s fascination with a mostly ordinary guy coming out of nowhere to win a pair of small trophies, less attention has been paid to how convicted domestic assailant Chris Brown was also named an award winner and allowed to perform on the same stage as his victim just three years after beating his ex-girlfriend Rihanna.
I have managed to go most of my adult life without paying attention to the Grammys, and I imagine the same goes for most of our readership here at The 1st Five. In fact, I never paid much attention to Bon Iver either until I saw them on Saturday Night Live a couple weeks ago. However, if there’s only one thing that should be drawing the attention of otherwise disinterested people toward anything that happened this past Sunday night, I think we can agree that celebrating a man with a history of viciously beating a woman with his fists over a text message from a girl he was cheating with is of greater significance than a reasonably talented songwriter pulling out an upset victory for an award he didn’t even want. The latter is an interesting story for its novelty, whereas public indifference to the former is symptomatic of a nation with misplaced priorities and a depressingly naive view of the reality of domestic violence.
Such statements should be obvious enough to be an insult to people’s intelligence; domestic assault is bad and you’d be hard pressed to find anyone willing to argue otherwise. However, the real insidiousness of the Grammys willingness to accept Brown’s presence at the ceremony just three years after his crime (and without any appearance of actually being a changed man) lies in how common domestic violence is, and how rarely its perpetrators are ever deservingly reprimanded. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (N.C.A.D.V.), one in four women will be the victim of domestic violence in their lifetime, almost always by someone they know, and most cases are never reported to the police. The fact that Brown is on stage dancing and winning awards further reinforces the notion that if you’re a man and you want to punch a woman in the face, there aren’t going to be many consequences. You probably won’t be caught, and even if you are, you only have to wait a short while before no one cares anymore. Hell in some parts of the country local governments are looking at decriminalizing domestic abuse to save money. This is terrifying precedent.
What makes it worse is how some women evidently accept this. Buzzfeed has compiled several depressingly ignorant examples here, while Salon has provided at least one possible explanation for this kind of attitude here. I’m not a woman or a sociologist, but if I had to guess I’d say it probably stems from being brought up in a culture that doesn’t fully recognize the seriousness of the issue. Buzzfeed hit the nail on the head with their subtitle “Yikes. Looks like we have a really big problem here, society.”
That isn’t how the Grammy producer Ken Ehrlich sees it, who was quoted saying “people deserve a second chance.” Let us pretend for a moment that isn’t an asinine statement given the circumstances and try to understand what point he could have to make. Granted, people make mistakes, and you don’t necessarily take away someone’s ability to create art (no matter how much it sucks) or earn a livelihood just because they’ve done reprehensible things so long as the law says they’re free. One could also try taking the position that the value of a piece of music should be separated from the character of the individual who produced it. Fair enough. (Editor’s Note: If we’re going to ignore people’s actions how the hell hasn’t Burzum won a best metal Grammy? One little murder and a few racist rants and you write off a guy’s whole catalog?)
However, these flimsy defenses (and it’s being overly generous to offer Brown or Ehrlich a defense at all) quickly fall apart in light of the fact that Brown hasn’t shown any sign of remorse and hasn’t been duly punished for what he did. Not only that, but he’s now being hailed like a hero for not realizing all the lessons he didn’t learn from the crime he was scarcely punished for. Five years of probation and six months of community service and no jail time is not adequate for having beaten a woman to a pulp because she caught you sending sexy texts to another woman.
To be fair, media response to the Grammys completely bizarre decision to welcome Brown back hasn’t been a complete failure (see examples here and here), but it hasn’t been overwhelmingly praise worthy either (a number of outlets have just republished the same AP story which has gotten buried amongst about 10,000 other stories that don’t mention anyone hitting anybody). HelloGiggles posted a sharply articulate piece here, which Gawker picked up on here, but beyond this, negative criticism from any major media outlet has been less than what I’d expect.
So, what’s the point? The amount of uncontrolled rage directed at Bon Iver has far surpassed the amount of anger directed toward Brown for punching a woman in the face, and something about that is horribly off. What it shows is that, as a culture, we will divert our attention toward something that ultimately doesn’t mean much (a man unexpectedly winning a couple pieces of wood and metal that will probably end up on a mantle in a log cabin in Wisconsin), but be generally apathetic while another man who punched a woman in the face is glorified in the same room as the woman he assaulted without apology. Everything I’ve just written here should be obvious to most people, and this kind of coverage of mainstream pop culture isn’t a road I imagine we’re likely to travel down very often in the future, but general ignorance toward widespread violence against women is a serious issue. If we can take the time to laugh at reactions from those who didn’t know who Bon Iver was until about two days ago, surely we can take the time to examine the underwhelming lack of reaction to a greater problem hidden in plain sight.
Assault, rape, and abuse toward women are allowed to happen at extraordinarily high rates due in part to a general lack of societal awareness, which this entire Chris Brown debacle has amply demonstrated. Let’s help change that. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to step down off my digital soapbox and chill out to some Bonnie Bear jams.
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