Is Music Finally Reckoning with #MeToo?

AFP/APP

New York: The music industry has long evaded a #MeToo reckoning like that experienced in Hollywood or the media, but the blockbuster charges against hip-hop magnate Sean Combs could finally prove an inflection point.

Federal prosecutors say the artist, known by various monikers including “Diddy,” ran a criminal sex ring that preyed on women and blackmailed them into silence—accusations that have activists and industry watchers hoping music’s moment of accountability has arrived.

Their hope has been bolstered by a massive class action suit that followed Combs’s federal charges, as well as a new lawsuit against country star Garth Brooks.

When an explosive series of accusations against R&B hitmaker R. Kelly went public five years ago, outlets including AFP asked if that was the beginning of a sea change in music.

Kelly was convicted and sentenced to more than 30 years in prison for child sex crimes, sex trafficking, and racketeering.

It was indeed a milestone for the #MeToo movement as the first major sex abuse trial where the majority of accusers were Black women.

But wider cultural shifts in the industry—long-clichéd as a bastion of sex, drugs, and rock and roll—didn’t seem to crystallize.

The shock rocker Marilyn Manson, the music mogul Russell Simmons, the DJ Diplo, the producer Dr. Luke—over the years, women have made serious accusations against these and many other powerful men in the industry. Few repercussions have followed.

“There’s this whole pass we give rock stars because of the rock star trope,” said Caroline Heldman, an Occidental College professor and co-founder of the Sound Off Coalition, which focuses on sexual violence in the music industry.

“A lot of survivors that I’ve spoken with from the music industry, they’ve internalized the rock star idea—that they should have expected” bad behavior, “because he was a rock star,” she told AFP.