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Comment by dang | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't have thought the article was very good, and the title is neither an accurate representation of what Dylan said, nor really what the article is about. But this thread is surprisingly pretty good!

As a gloss on what Dylan is saying about race and the music business, this clip where David Bowie turns the tables on an MTV interviewer in 1983 is worth watching, in a high-tension sort of way. He's pretty impressive as an investigative journalist: cool as steel, conceding nothing, and charming even as he drives the knife in deeper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3i53rjh-PA#t=11m3s

(Edit: As a performer, at least,) the man ages well. (If you watch to the very end, he makes the same point as Dylan: "yeah but let's face it, somebody laid the ground rules down in the beginning".)

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Yeah, this is a really great video, thanks for sharing "woke" Bowie.

As you say, he ages well, except for his molesting young girls in the '70s. There's at least two 15 year olds that admit having sex with him.

I'm a Bowie fan but it's difficult to separate those unacceptable acts from the great things he did.

If that's true, you're right—that has not aged well. I meant that he has aged well as a performer, which is what that interview was. I've added that qualifier to my comment above.

Generally though, I don't think it's that hard to separate. Everyone is a combo of good and bad–that's how humans are. It's childish to expect otherwise. The fashion of denouncing historical figures by anachronistic standards is especially lame. No one who ever lived would pass such a test.

The related internet habit of saving the worst thing one can say about anybody in a big hash table [1] and then looking it up and repeating it every time the name is mentioned, is also a bit silly. What are we doing when we do that? certainly nothing interesting. But I rant. I take your point that "ages well" needs a qualifier!

Edit: I noticed something else that's mildly interesting—calling this "woke" is also an anachronism. The word that Bowie uses in the interview is "integration". That places him ideologically as a civil rights moderate, and of course wokeness (whatever it may mean) didn't exist yet.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I'd imagine plenty of people didn't rape 15 year old girls in the '70s even if it was more "acceptable" back then.

Using your fame to exploit young, impressionable women is pretty awful and was awful 50 years ago. Even if "everyone did it!"

Could you please stop taking HN threads into flamewar? You've been doing it a lot, and it even looks like your account has been using HN primarily (though fortunately not exclusively) for political and ideological battle. We ban that sort of account on HN [1] because it's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. Also, definitely please don't create accounts to break the site guidelines with.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

> his molesting young girls in the '70s

Where is this evidence he molested girls?

> There's at least two 15 year olds that admit having sex with him.

That in and of itself isn't molestation. Love the hyperbole though.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar hell. Of all the things we don't need, definitional disputes about molestation are really up there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You're right it wasn't molestation, it was rape as defined in the California penal code where age of consent was and is 18.

He raped two 15 year old girls. And likely many more that haven't came out publicly.

Getting downvoted for pointing out the fact that David Bowie raped teenagers.

Great job HN!

Please don't post this sort of flamewar dross to HN. We're trying for something a little better than that here.

If you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to (almost) the end, you'll see that comments like this are explicitly off topic.

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