Beauty Made By Monsters
One of the things I learned when I was a music business major, before realizing I was a mediocre talent and there was too much music theory required for my taste, is that genius leaves fingerprints. Analyze great music and you see its architecture: the thousand small choices that build transcendence. You can also see the person behind it: their obsessions, their limitations, their way of hearing the world.
Lately I’ve been thinking about Wagner. Not because I enjoy opera (I don’t have the patience for it, honestly) but because when you study music history, you can’t avoid him. Wagner fundamentally changed how we think about harmony, leitmotif, and the relationship between music and drama. He invented techniques that every film composer still uses. John Williams is essentially writing Wagner for space operas.
Wagner was also a virulent antisemite who wrote essays arguing that Jews were incapable of creating true art. His writings helped seed the soil in which Nazi ideology took root; Hitler and the regime loved him back, making Bayreuth a cultural shrine.
This creates a problem.
In school, I learned that a composer’s choices reveal their worldview. The way they resolve tension, the patterns they return to, what they call beautiful: it’s all there in the notes. Which means that when I listen to Wagner now, I can’t unhear the question: is the antisemitism in there too? Not explicitly, of course, but in the vision of the world he’s creating: who gets to be noble, who gets to be degraded, who gets to be heroic?
I don’t know. And that’s what keeps me thinking.
There is an easy answer: art exists independently of the artist, and once it enters the world it belongs to the world. True, but incomplete. Because when you really analyze music, you see it isn’t some abstract object; it’s a series of choices made by a particular consciousness, shaped by commitments, many of them unseen.
The same dissonance echoes across centuries: Wagner’s obsession with racial purity, Kanye’s antisemitism dressed as provocation. Different art forms, same question: what do we do when the thing is beautiful and the maker is indefensible?
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a masterpiece. The production choices, the layering, the vulnerability, the ambition: it’s all there. I also know Kanye West called slavery a choice, praised Hitler on camera, and turned antisemitism into spectacle.
What am I supposed to do with that knowledge?
Once you’ve learned to hear, you can’t unhear. Once you understand how a suspension resolves, you notice it everywhere. Once you know what someone has done, you can’t unknow it. And if you’re listening carefully, you must ask whether that knowledge should change how you receive their work.
Even apart from scandal, music gives us a grammar for this problem. Listen to Adele’s “Someone Like You”: the piano accompaniment around the verse cadence lingers for a heartbeat before settling. That tiny suspension (the note held just too long before sliding into consonance) creates the song’s catch, that ache of yearning before release. It’s the same ancient rule: dissonance prepared, held, and resolved by step. A Renaissance 2–3 suspension translated into pop harmony. That repeated gesture gives the song its sense of longing and inevitability.
Maybe that’s the problem with how we think about art and morality: we want resolution. We want to know whether we can keep the music and discard the monster, whether we can separate the art from the artist, whether there’s a formula that resolves the dissonance.
But some tensions don’t resolve. Some dissonances are meant to hang in the air, unresolved, creating discomfort that won’t let you rest easy.
The problem isn’t just that we can’t separate art from artist; it’s that we’ve sacralized art itself. We’ve created a priest class (the genius artist) who operates outside the moral laws that bind everyone else. Talent becomes absolution. Brilliance becomes a kind of indulgence.
The question isn’t whether we can separate art from artist. It’s whether we should stop pretending that experiencing art is morally neutral. Every time we engage someone’s work deeply, we enter into relationship with their vision of the world. We let them shape how we see, how we hear, how we think.
When you analyze music, you hear the choices: the key, the tempo, the instruments, the harmonic language. Every choice shapes the emotional and intellectual experience of the listener. You can’t have the experience without the choices, or the choices without the chooser.
So we should stop asking, Can I enjoy this? and start asking, What am I becoming by consuming this? What vision of the world am I keeping alive by giving it room in me?
I don’t have answers. Recently I listened to Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, written by a man whose hatreds would have placed people I love outside the circle of human sympathy. I still have Michael Jackson in my playlist, though the allegations around him make that fact harder to defend than I would like to admit. I can tell you why both are brilliant, and I can’t escape the fact that brilliance and monstrosity coexist in the same human heart.
The discomfort is the point. The moment I make peace with it, I’ve lost something essential.
I’ll keep listening to music made by broken people. I may keep watching films made by morally compromised people. But I’ll stop pretending it doesn’t matter. I’ll sit with the discomfort, let it trouble my conscience, remind me that beauty and evil can coexist in the same heart, including mine.
In music, an unresolved dissonance demands attention. It won’t let you settle. It keeps you listening, keeps you engaged with the question even when you’d rather move on.
For now, that’s enough: not resolution, but recognition; not answers, but attention to the questions that won’t let us rest eas
