Action Bronson says he didn’t mean to be misogynist when he wrote a song about a gang rape and starred in a music video wherein he brutally stabs a woman to death. It’s just “artistic expression,” the rapper wrote Thursday in a Facebook post responding to the news that he’d been banned — again — from appearing at a public concert.
But some students at George Washington University, where Bronson had been scheduled to perform Saturday as the headliner of the school’s annual Spring Fling concert, said Bronson’s hateful lyrics and video — as well as his history of mocking transgender people on social media — had no place on their campus. And on Thursday, the concert’s organizing committee agreed.
“We apologize to the GW community for causing distress over the past few days and for attempting to bring an artist who is not consistent with our values of diversity and inclusion,” the GWU Program Board said in its announcement that Bronson had been removed from the lineup.
It’s not the first time Bronson’s lyrics and public remarks have prompted outrage. Last year, he was cut from Toronto’s NXNE festival following a public outcry over his 2011 song “Consensual Rape,” which references drugging a woman and having violent sex with her. His critics also pointed to the video for his song “Brunch,” which depicts Bronson rolling a half-dead woman in a rug, shoving her in the trunk of a car, and then stabbing her repeatedly when he later realizes she’s still alive.
In an editorial for the George Washington University student newspaper, The Hatchet, opinion editor Sarah Blugis wrote that the decision to feature Bronson — a “blatant misogynist” with “a history of public transphobia” — at a campus concert was inexplicable.
“I have a hard time understanding any possible justification for bringing Bronson to GW, especially given the importance students here place on progressive advocacy,” Blugis wrote. “Sexual assault prevention and LGBT inclusivity are two of the most prominent issues on campus, yet Bronson is the antithesis of those two causes.”
After Bronson was scrapped from the Toronto festival, he didn’t exactly take it well, Blugis noted. Instead of apologizing or expressing compassion for sexual assault victims, he tweeted, “It’s so funny the song that is causing these Torontonians to have their panties in a bunch literally has never been performed (live in concert), ever.” (He later deleted the tweet.)
Bronson took a somewhat more contrite tone in his response to his removal from the Spring Fling lineup. In a lengthy statement on Facebook, he said his work was “never meant to represent who I am but rather to depict a story,” adding that “I don’t always intend the stories that I tell, the characters that I play in them or the lyrics I lay down to be taken literally.”
His art doesn’t reflect his personal views, he said. “I think rape and acts of violence toward woman (sic) are DISGUSTING,” he wrote.
He also apologized for an “insensitive Instagram post” wherein he mocked an apparently unconscious transgender woman — he referred to her as “it” — and wrote: “If u don’t wanna get pissed on spit on and put on Instagram DONT GET DRUNK TO THE POINT U CANT STAND OR TALK.”
Bronson says he now knows that was “not OK.”
“I have sat with members of the LBGT community recently in an effort to understand how to avoid being hurtful and insensitive towards these issues moving forward,” he wrote.
He ended by acknowledging that he’s “far, far from perfect” but promised to try to “be a better human.”
Some GW students think he’s just fine as he is: A group called “GW Students for Common Sense” launched a petition, signed by more than 600 students, that calls for Bronson’s reinstatement on the show’s lineup. “Don’t allow a vocal minority to ruin Spring Fling for the majority of students,” the petition says. “By removing Action Bronson we are limiting free speech and free artistic expression.”
As for those who don’t like his lyrics, the petition says, they “can simply not come.”
