#i hesitate to tag this but i'm going to for organizational reasons

[septembersghost]

The stigma specifically around E and how embarrassing it is to love his music or care about him as a person is so sad to me :(

i know, i was just reading someone on twt coping with this today, and she said how people will talk about showing love/kindness to others and then make the most insensitive jokes imaginable when it comes to him. it's...unfair and there are a lot of reasons for it, from the way he was treated and viewed while living, even with the (glow and burden) of that idol status, to the cruelty and parody in how he was discussed and often satirized after his death. the trouble with the concept of an "idol" itself is the erasure of humanity and depth, and how easily that becomes flattened and static. steve wrote this in his book about the '68 special:

because he was treated like a bit of a sideshow by the industry, that specter of mean-spiritedness has been hard to shake. it settled in to the cultural idea, no matter how that's fabricated. even people who might be aware of the harm of ableism and classism, or the damage of shaming mental health and addiction, there's this jadedness because e's been parodied so often that it's become a disconnect from understanding what was going on in his life, what he represents as an artist, and the human being at the core of it. there's too much of this tangle to even unweave. it's part of why the film restoring that is so valuable, but obviously...it's not going the reach the people it's not going to reach, you know? it's rather bizarre that there's still even a certain judgment/farcical attitude towards anyone who cares, as you mentioned, and it's so multilayered in its dismissiveness, having to do with such an array of aspects (his background and stereotypes of the south, the persona and image, the movies often as an albatross, the unkind jokes, the outright falsehoods, the myths) that are difficult to dismantle. and it's disheartening how easily people lean into that cruelty and shaming, and that there's nothing we can do about it except hope they learn better or that they'll just go away/not be in our space. it's hard and i wish we could change so much of that for him altogether, but we can only hold onto what we know, what we learn, what we feel, and the truths and love (or comfort or interest or understanding or happiness) we find there.