Okay… so I can relate. You have a political view you want to share with your audience. Great. A lot of artists do this by posting online diaries on their websites. Post it there all you want.
But… as an entertainer, such as Linda Ronstadt, you still have a job to do. You still have to sing the songs, and put on the show, and leave the politics out of your music. Music is something that crosses party lines, and to be brutally honest, ninety percent of your fans don’t give a damn about your political views. They just want to hear you sing, and they paid money for that at the Aladdin. Instead, what they got was the childish behavior of a woman who has clearly not gotten her way, not all that dissimilar from my daughter when I refuse to buy her candy at the grocery store.
Even more sad is expressing your political views so loudly and then not understanding why you got dropped by a company that had you representing their product. Yeah, I’m talking about Whoopi Goldberg getting dropped from Slimfast like a hot potato because she came out against the war.
Here’s the problem with this folks: Half of your audience supports the war, the other half doesn’t. If you come out and state a political view like that, you’re only going to reach half of the people (those who agree with you) with any other message you are trying to send. The other half is simply going to tune you out. Slimfast is trying to reach a much larger market share than 50%. Slimfast is trying to get their product out there to the world, and because Whoopi represented their product, Whoopi had to act as though she were a representative of that product in the public eye. She failed to consult the marketing execs at Slimfast before she made her statements. She made statements that they felt cut their product out of 50% of the market, so they dropped her rather than lose those customers.
I don’t blame them for that anymore than I blame the Aladdin for throwing Linda Ronstadt out.
