It was the comeback story no one wanted. Well, some people must have wanted it, of course – a sizable proportion of the Recording Academy’s voting body, at the very least. But nonetheless, for many people, Louis CK’s controversial Best Comedy Album win at Sunday night’s Grammys was a jarring reminder of just how short-lived public outrage can be. Less than five years after admitting to a number of sexual misconduct allegations, the comedian born Louis Szekely was back on top. Far from the Siberian exile he was sometimes said to be in, it turns out CK was “cancelled” with all the finality of a drunk being ejected from a nightclub and told to walk it off.
The Recording Academy has been lambasted for the decision to give CK the award, and rightly so: celebrating CK sends all kinds of wrong messages about the severity of what he has admitted to, about how willing we, as a society, should be to overlook these transgressions. But there is more to the issue than just this. CK’s win has forced us to confront one of the big dilemmas at the heart of contemporary so-called “cancel culture”. Are we afraid to admit when a bad person has made art that is genuinely worthwhile? How do we reconcile art with its problematic artist?
