As part of the promo for Queens of the Stone Age’s new album Perfecth, the band has set up a novelty complaints hotline for fans to call. I’ll bite: how about the fact that frontman Josh Homme’s ex-wife Brody Dalle testified in court that he head-butted her so hard that she “saw stars” and said he had fantasised about killing her? Or that he kicked a female photographer in the face?
It’s certainly not what anyone’s talking about as part of Homme’s friendly neighbourhood rock star image rehabilitation: duetting on Shania Twain’s new album, taking the couch on Celebrity Gogglebox, teatime BBC 6 Music interviews. Homme and Dalle clearly had a complicated relationship: he allegedly tried to throw her boyfriend off a balcony; he claims that she was violent towards him; both have taken out restraining orders against one another; Homme has full custody of their kids after Dalle’s boyfriend was found to have forged her signature on an application for a restraining order. Homme has recently talked about coming through a dark period, including successful treatment for cancer, and getting a handle on his vices.
Nevertheless, there is clear footage of him brutally kicking the camera of photographer Chelsea Lauren back into her face, which he acknowledged in an apology video, and court testimony from Dalle alleging that a drunk Homme told her “I want to fucking strangle you right now” on one occasion, and head-butted her on another. Their situation shares resonances with Johnny Depp and Amber Heard’s messy relationship breakdown, which prompted a British judge to deem that the Sun was in fact accurate in labelling Depp a “wife-beater” despite his libel claim against them; although a US jury ruled in his favour against Heard, who was found guilty of defamation. You only have to see the grim trailer for Ebenezer, Depp’s forthcoming Scrooge trauma plot movie, to see how much any of this really damaged his career.
Subtext, as Garth Marenghi told us, is for cowards. Text appears proclaiming “the master of misfits returns”; the entire aesthetic seems skimmed from former Depp hits Sweeney Todd, Pirates of the Caribbean and Edward Scissorhands. As someone says in the comments: “This entire trailer is just, ‘You like Johnny Depp right?’” You could sum up most of the rest of the comments as: we sure do!
Nothing says future Christmas classic like big-budget reputation laundering. You get the hopeless feeling that none of this matters any more. Chris Brown is currently on a high-profile US tour with Usher that has had guest appearances from trailblazing female artists such as Alicia Keys and Mary J Blige – despite him beating then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009 and another ex being granted a five-year restraining order after he threatened her.
Almost a decade after the mainstream #MeToo movement, it’s clear that audiences’ nostalgia for artists who made art that meant something to them at a formative age overrides the inconvenience of violence against women. Couple that fondness with an expensive publicity campaign and the counternarrative never stands a chance, easily dismissed as the shrill cries of cranks. I believe firmly in rehabilitation and second chances, but haven’t been able to shake a sense of horror that millions of people can apparently look past allegations and evidence of violence against women when engaging in supposedly feelgood pop culture.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
