Society loves having heavy metal around as a scapegoat. Those dark and scary noises can be twisted any way you like to get people to believe that they led someone to commit some awful crime, or that someone who partakes in the music as omitting ‘bad energy’. It’s that same ‘bad energy’ that lead a Canadian landlord to deny a couple the lease to an apartment due to their afflictions to the genre.
Mike Crossley, bassist from Vilipend, and his new bride, Lara, received a letter from their then soon-to-be landlord, known only as Suzanne (according to Tone Deaf) who had done some research on the band, and didn’t like what she found:
“We were quite ready to make a decision in your favour the other night. However, upon investigation of the band Vilipend, it has brought forward some concerns for us. We are uncomfortable with the energy that this music manifests.”
It sucks that someone is so comfortable with making such an uneducated, real world judgement that will directly affect not only people’s lives, but her own business. Crossley himself responded to the rejection in a letter, raising a good point that this goes beyond music: “The point is not that a couple of twenty-somethings missed out on a decent apartment,” says Crossley, “if Lara and I were discriminated against as a dual full-time income, Caucasian, middle-class, heterosexual couple with good references and credit checks, imagine the difficulty somebody who doesn’t have those advantages must experience.”
Crossley’s wife also voiced her concerns with the decision, taking to her blog to comment on the “heartbreaking” drama, stating that “it is completely closed-minded and discriminatory…to pass judgement on us in this way.”
Hopefully the idea behind the decision, which despite not being logical in the slightest is totally 100% legal, doesn’t catch on here. What do you think? Do you agree with Suzanne? Or the snippet below?
