Phil Spector and the harmful myth of male creative genius

To know him was to hate him.

At least that’s the impression you get from paying attention to the accounts of many who worked with Phil Spector, the legendary music producer who died on Saturday at the age of 81 while serving a prison sentence for the murder of actress Lana Clarkson in 2003.

His conviction for this crime solidified Spector’s reputation as a monster. But for years before that, artists in their orbit – Darlene Love, Leonard Cohen, the Ramones and especially his ex-wife, Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes – spoke of their abuse and manipulation; others simply hated what he did with their music, including Paul McCartney, who re-released the Beatles’ “Let It Be” without Spector’s trademark embellishments.

And yet, leaving McCartney’s contempt aside, Spector is widely – and rightly – considered one of the most important figures in pop history: a sonic visionary whose so-called sound wall has vastly expanded the dramatic scope of the three-minute love song .

In a successful producer career that spanned the late 1950s, when he scored his first No. 1 with “To Know Him Is to Love Him” ​​by Teddy Bears, until the early 1990s, when his classic singles received the luxurious treatment of boxing, Spector took the thrill of his music further than anyone else thought possible, accumulating voices and instruments in songs like “Then He Kissed Me” by the Crystals and “Be My Baby” by the Ronettes in one attempt to capture the exquisite agony of young romance.

That he was successful is obvious to anyone whose pulse quickens when they hear the iconic beat that opens “Be My Baby”. What do these four strokes bring to mind? Any pictures you’ve seen of a band of musicians packed into Hollywood’s cramped Gold Star Studios – or, even now, your first encounter with love?

Listen carefully to Spector’s things, however – the trembling strings, the howling vocals, the multiple guitars hitting an incomparable itch – and you too hear the fear. Spector, who allegedly titled “To know him is to love him”, according to his father’s headstone epitaph, probably attributed this to his “Wagnerian” approach; these were tragic-ecstatic love songs that consciously embraced the terrible certainty that nothing good lasts.

But what if the terror in Spector’s music – like “sugar-coated violence and candy”, Bruce Springsteen once described, years after adopting the sound wall for his own “Born to Run” – was really just documentation of the way how did he intimidate his musicians?

Our reluctance to think of Spector’s music as a type of torture pornography solves the problem with the moral freedom we allow when we anoint artistic geniuses. Abuse, when it occurs, becomes inseparable from art; in fact, art serves to rescue abuse, often even among the abused.

“He hit me and it was like a kiss,” sang the Crystals in a now infamous single that Spector produced in 1962, and the comparison applies beyond the narrator’s toxic relationship: It’s not that she (or we) can’t see what is happening; is that she is convinced that this is acceptable, and so are we.

Spector emerged at a time, of course, when audiences were eager to sweep horrible behaviors, mostly from men, under the carpet of creative achievement. And things have certainly changed since then. It was fascinating to watch over the weekend as news organizations struggled to figure out how to frame Spector’s complicated life in headlines and tweets.

Rolling Stone was criticized on Twitter for saying that Spector’s legacy “was marked by a murder conviction”, while the New York Times adjusted the first line of its obituary, which initially said that “the producer’s life was overturned” by his prison sentence after readers opposed the language that centralized his experience at the expense of the woman he killed. (The Los Angeles Times was no exception – the newspaper deleted a breaking news tweet that did not refer to Spector’s conviction.)

But if we improve in the identification of transgressions committed by a position of privilege, we hardly learn to avoid building this privilege for artists who hurt other people – or, more sympathetically, themselves – as a result. At the time of Spector, Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys, who called “Be My Baby” the greatest song of all time, collapsed under the weight of being considered a genius; half a century later, we’re probably seeing the same thing happen with Kanye West.

When we tell someone, over and over, that their talent differentiates them so much from us, can we be surprised when they start acting like they believe it?