Cancel culture isn’t a new thing. Just ask Galileo or any other famous personality who ran afoul of contemporary social mores – their careers were all destroyed with no chance of rehabilitation, and sometimes they lost more than their livelihoods.
Some have also courted disaster by saying or doing cancel-worthy things, but for whatever reason, they got off scot-free. Here’s a list of 10 great luminaries who you’d think would have gotten canceled but either managed to wiggle out of it or were never held to account in the first place.
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John Lennon
In 1966, John Lennon said on the subject of Beatlemania that his band was “more popular than Jesus.” Religious conservatives in the United States took significant exception to his comments, and some took to throwing Beatles records on bonfires. Still, it did nothing to compromise the popularity of either Lennon himself or of the group.
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Kanye West
Ye – otherwise known as rapper and entrepreneur Kanye West – could have been canceled for any number of things, yet so far has managed to escape this terrible fate. The first such thing was probably when he Interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, took the microphone away from her, and said that Beyonce’s video was better.
His actions were widely condemned, and even former president Barack Obama weighed in, but ultimately, it did nothing to slow down his career.
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Justin Bieber
Initially, the image of singer Justin Bieber was as pure as the freshly fallen snow, unhindered by any questionable behavior. That changed in 2014 when he was arrested in Florida on multiple charges, including driving under the influence. Some predicted that this would forever tarnish his image as a boy you could bring home to mommy, but it was forgotten pretty quickly, and he’s still out there today, being a beloved celebrity.
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Chris Brown
When R&B singer Chris Brown was arrested for physically assaulting his then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009, it seemed like the end of his career at a minimum. However, not only did he get a slap on the wrist from the legal system, but the incident had no effect on his career whatsoever, and he released a new album just last year.
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Cardi B
In 2019, a video re-emerged of rapper Cardi B in a 2016 Instagram recording, in which she described in quite colorful language how, in her earlier years as a stripper, she would drug and then rob men who had intended to pay her to engage in the physical act of love. This might have done some damage decades earlier, but by 2019, no one batted an eye, and she went on to have great success alongside Megan Thee Stallion with the song ‘WAP,’ which healed the souls of a world in the grips of the Covid-19 pandemic.
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David Bowie
In 1972, the “Thin White Duke” himself told Melody Maker that he was gay, and in that year, it was a lot easier to send people to the fainting couch over that than it is today. If it cost him any fans, he more than made up for them with the legions of adoring new ones who loved his music and went on to idolize him, even after he said he was heterosexual in 1983.
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Ozzy Osbourne
Heavy metal singer Ozzy Osbourne could have been canceled over dozens of things, but the closest he ever came was when he got a decade-long ban from the Texas city of San Antonio in 1982 for drunkenly taking a tinkle on a monument outside the Alamo. He had to apologize and made a charitable contribution of $10,000 to the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, but he lost no fans. If anything, it helped bolster his credentials as a rock and roll wild man.
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Jimmy Page
Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page was 28 years old when he had a yearlong dalliance with Lori Maddox, who was still very much a teenager. It happened during the Quaalude haze of the 1970s and had been mostly forgotten until the #MeToo movement pushed it back into the spotlight, but Page was never called to account for it, and those Led Zeppelin records keep selling anyway.
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Eric Clapton
During a 1975 concert in Birmingham, England, guitarist Eric Clapton took to the microphone to speak in support of British politician Enoch Powell, and you can Google the incident yourself and see all the appalling things he said about “foreigners.” He condemned his comments in 2018, which you can’t say he did to stop an exodus of outraged fans, since there weren’t any. He was not canceled in 1975 and is not canceled today.
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Madonna
Like a few people on this list, Madonna has multiple events in her history that could have gotten her canceled, but most of the time, those events only helped her sell more records. One of the finest examples is the music video for her 1989 song ‘Like a Prayer,’ which featured burning crosses and the singer getting stigmata, even though she was holding a knife lengthwise. It may have cost her a lucrative sponsorship by Pepsi, but she didn’t lose a single fan.
This article was produced and syndicated by MediaFeed.
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