Like Johnny Depp and Chris Brown before him, Homme has got past his chequered history to retain an adoring fanbase. Almost a decade post-#MeToo, audiences no longer seem to care
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. “No bitching too big, no whiny too tiny,” it promises. 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. “It’s good to be back,” Depp-as-Scrooge tee-hees in his first spoken scene. 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. “For years, traditional media has been tiptoeing around the popularity of Chris Brown, and in reality, that benefits nobody but him,” critic Alphonse Pierre wrote in a pan of Brown’s latest album, Brown. “The lack of critical engagement with his music has allowed him to contextualise his own redemption with statistic and sob stories.” And yet, as Doreen St Felix wrote in the New Yorker, the tour’s audience is full of adoring women.
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.
Last month, Homme made headlines during a Detroit show where he flouted the venue’s smoking ban, risking a $10,000 fine to take a stand against “fuckin’ corporate assholes” who “tell you what to do” (while his band, um, voluntarily play those corporate assholes’ corporate venue for a fat pay cheque). This sort of limp rock’n’roll cosplay is just as cosy in its own way as reviewing crap British TV on primetime Channel 4: vanilla rebellion figures offering the comforting reassurance that rock stars still walk among us, boldly reminding us that rules are made to be broken.
The notion of so-called rock’n’roll behaviour, many have theorised, was partly why music never had much of a “#MeToo moment”, that hopeless relic of a phrase. When bad behaviour isn’t just accepted but venerated, real wrongdoing can be brushed under the same whisky-stained rug. Blind eyes are turned, offenders are remade as outlaws, myths are upheld, party lines toed: “It’s so safe to play along / Little soldiers in a row,” as Homme sang in Go With the Flow. The jokey complaints hotline might be the most honest part of QOTSA’s return: a grim reflection of the fact that nobody is taking this shit seriously any more.
