When Nostalgia Gets a Criminal Record

I hate this timeline. No, really. I’m tired. I'm tired of opening some random article or YouTube recommendation, only to find out that the band I used to blast on my mp3-player, or the actor I had a poster of on my wall, or the YouTuber I followed religiously for years, turned out to be a predator, a manipulator, or something way, way worse...

Like, how is it that half the cultural icons from the late '90s and early 2000s now have mugshots or entire docuseries about how awful they were behind the scenes? I didn’t sign up for this emotional whiplash. I just wanted to feel good about my nostalgia, maybe cry a little over an old album or rewatch a cringey video from the early internet era. Not question whether my childhood favorites were secretly monsters in low-rise jeans and chunky highlights.

It’s not even just "problematic" behavior. It’s not just the petty stuff you can roll your eyes at and move on from. I’m talking about the big, ugly, irreversible crimes. Child abuse. Grooming. Assault. Stuff that turns your stomach. Stuff that makes you feel dirty for ever admiring them. And then what do you do with the art they left behind? Can you still love the music? The videos? The movies? The characters? Or do you just shove it into a dark mental closet labeled "DO NOT TOUCH" and move on like it never happened?

I hate that art is so tangled with the people who made it. I hate that some of the most formative pieces of media from my youth now feel like emotional landmines. It's unfair. It's infuriating. I shouldn’t have to do mental gymnastics to figure out if it's okay to still like a song that helped me survive middle school because the singer turned out to be a literal monster. And yet, here we are. Stuck in a culture that constantly lets abusers thrive until they don't, and by the time we find out, it's already too late. We've already attached memories, meaning, and identity to something now tainted.

And yeah, I know some people can separate the art from the artist. "Just enjoy it for what it meant to you at the time", they say. But it’s not that simple. Not when the voice in that song or the face in that video isn’t just entertainment anymore. It’s a reminder of betrayal. It’s nostalgia laced with rot. And that sucks. That really, really sucks.