About Cat Stevens

Like Bookworm, I loved Cat Stevens when I was young. Real young, like early to mid-teens. I had all his records, listened to him constantly. The first live rock and roll concert I ever attended was Deep Purple. The second was Cat Stevens. I was fifteen.

But I'd just about stopped listening to him by the time I was seventeen. To begin with, his musical descent had begun. After "Teaser and the Firecat" there wasn't much left for him to say, musically. "Catch Bull at Four" was a disappointment, even for my smitten ears. "Foreigner" was worse, "Buddha and the Chocolate Box" a disaster. I stopped buying his records then, and my musical taste began to evolve, to say the least. Listen to him now, the early, good stuff, and the songs sounds like cute jingles, with tender, obscure lyrics only a sensitive teenager could appreciate. He had talent, for sure, but somewhere along the line - around 1972 - he stopped growing as an artist. Years later, with his albums stored somewhere down on the bottom right-hand shelf of my record collection, dormant for years, I heard of his conversion to Islam. I thought it was weird - Islam was even more foreign to me then than it is now - but it didn't matter much to me. Cat Stevens was just a passing phase in my musical growth. He's stopped mattering to me long before that.

The point is, I outgrew Cat Stevens' music. It was, is, music for children, no matter how catchy the tune. I haven't thought about listening to Cat Stevens' in thirty years. So I don't have Bookworms dilemma about listening to his old music. The question for me is, would I listen to him now if he were still making good music? If he'd grown up too, and were making adult music? No, I wouldn't. To begin with, as I said, Islam is foreign to me. It's no more possible for me to listen to Islamic-based music and understand it than to watch a Japanese film without subtitles and understand it. Cat Stevens entire world view is seen through the prism of Islam. If he were making music today it almost certainly would reflect Islamic thought and musical traditions. Me, I'm a child of the west, of western music, western art, western political thought, western religion, and I make no apologies for it. I listen to western music exclusively because it's what I get, what I understand. Give me a Palestrina mass from four centuries ago, a Bach cantata from three centuries ago, and I'll understand it and possibly love it. Give me any recent popular Islamic music (is there such a thing?) and all I'll hear is noise.

The second reason, however, does coincide with Bookworms thoughts. Cat Stevens, in his current persona, is a jihadist (follow Bookworms links for more) whose views should not be given legitimacy. He should be a social outcast in a open society that believes in free speech and freedom of religion. I've said many times on this blog that if I only listened to music produced by people whose political and moral stances I agreed with, then I'd listen to almost no music at all.  The same goes for movies, books, etc. You have to learn to separate the art from the artist. But you also have to draw the line somewhere. I draw a line at Cat Stevens and his abhorant views.

By the way, please don't give me any grief about my statement above that Stevens should be shunned in an open society. It's not hypocrisy in any way. I don't advocate any laws against Cat Stevens' free expression, or anyone else's. Social shunning is the perfect way to express our own beliefs that his way is wrong and our way is right. And I'm in no way saying that we all have to believe the same things or live the same way. To each his own. But some opinions are beyond the pale, and should not be legitimized.  Giving Cat Stevens an audience at the Lincoln Memorial yesterday only lends the man and his jihadist views social sanction. His hosts, and most in the crowd, didn't seem to realize that.