Has cancel culture finally met its match? Have the new blacklisters who hasten to erase anyone who gives voice to a view that displeases them finally had their comeuppance? The roaring success of Róisín Murphy’s new album, Hit Parade, suggests it’s possible. The digital inquisitors tried to silence the queen of new disco over her sinful utterances on puberty blockers, and yet she’s soaring up the charts. Meet Róisín the Uncancellable.
It is wonderful to see elitist intolerance of wrongthink crash against the shores of decency and liberty
All sorts of mud and insults were hurled at Murphy when it was revealed she is sceptical of puberty blockers. Pumping gender-confused kids full of hormone suppressants is… absolutely desolate’, she said on her private Facebook page.
Millions will nod in agreement with her fruitily expressed, eminently sensible comments. Not the trans lobby, though, or its legion allies among the bourgeois left. In their eyes, it is blasphemy to question the synthetic prevention of puberty in bewildered youths, and anyone who does so must be sent packing from polite society. Murphy was given her marching orders.
Her metaphorical tarring and feathering was as swift as it was brutal. Virtual mobs declared her finished. They swore not to buy her album. They damned her as a phobe, a bigot, a traitor to her LGBTQ fanbase. Her record company reportedly called off all promotions for Hit Parade. Some of her public appearances were cancelled.
Then there were the reviews. They gushed over her album – it really is as good as everyone says – while shaming its maker as a possessor of wicked beliefs. This record comes with an ‘ugly stain’, said the Guardian, sounding for all the world like a neo-religious crackpot. One reviewer branded Murphy ‘cowardly’ and ‘disappointing’ and suggested she ‘unlearn [her] ignorance’. It was bleak stuff.
Now the BBC has been dragged into the ‘Get Róisín’ hysteria. Two five-hour shows of Murphy’s songs and interviews were put together by its 6 Music radio channel and were due to go out next week. But they’ve been scrubbed. Instead, in a switcheroo that will dishearten music lovers everywhere, ‘new shows have been made to feature woke rapper Little Simz’, says the Mail.
The BBC denies that its replacement of Róisín is an act of cancel culture. It is normal in 6 Music’s ever-changing schedule that things get shifted around, it says. Let’s give Auntie the benefit of the doubt. But if there is so much as a speck of truth in the concern that the Beeb sidelined Murphy because of her views on puberty blockers, it will be the final straw. The corporation is meant to be impartial. It cannot be allowed to punish artists for their beliefs. Some kind of action will be required if the unscheduling of Murphy turns out to have been in any way ideological.
Now here’s the hilarious twist in this tale: the cancellers have failed. Far from being banished beyond the pale, Murphy is enjoying the greatest success of her career. She has shot to number two on the UK album charts. Her album is being raved over. Some say it’s the album of the year. Both old fans and new fans are doing the thing we were severely warned not to: listening to Róisín Murphy.
The mob’s pitchforks have been blunted by the public’s common sense. The bitter howls for the censure of a disobedient woman have failed to break beyond their own tragic little echo chambers. A combination of a public love of good music and old-fashioned solidarity – witness the armies of gender-critical women who said they would buy Murphy’s album as a screw you to her pointy-fingered denouncers – has ensured that Hit Parade is a hit.
It is wonderful to see elitist intolerance of wrongthink crash against the shores of decency and liberty. Of course we should not be complacent. The very attempt to cancel Murphy, however forlorn, confirms the censorship instinct is alive and raging. To my mind, Murphy’s witch-hunting was one of the worst of recent times. Even for a privately stated comment, and a perfectly rational one at that, she had the guillotine of cancellation rolled out for her. This will act as a chilling warning to women everywhere, famous and unfamous.
It tells them that everything they say, privately and publicly, everything they think, is being keenly watched by the mob. Speak out of turn and they’ll darken your door. Murphy might have survived this menace – less well-known women might not.
We have seen, clearly now, the misogyny in today’s shaming campaigns against women who question any aspect of transgenderism. Some self-styled LGBTQ activists even gloated that they could bring Murphy down. We’re your biggest fans and now we’re going to switch off your income and stardom, they effectively said. It’s like these men – they were mostly men – think they own her. They have no idea how much they sound like those brutes of Old Hollywood who loved to remind their starlets, ‘We built you up and we can knock you down’.
They can’t knock down Murphy, though. The rest of us have seen to that. Murphy’s success is proof that cancel culture can be held at bay by solidarity, reason and a love for art. Let’s keep it up.
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