I Would Like To Officially Apologize for Praising Corey Feldman's Music
One of my many, many failings as a human being and a writer is that I want to believe the best about people and institutions. I want to believe that people are fundamentally good even if they’re Corey Feldman.
I was in a very weird place six or seven years ago when I became weirdly invested in the life and career of the surviving Corey. That’s weird enough on its own but I became particularly fascinated by an element of Feldman’s life I can confidently say that no one other than Feldman himself is even remotely interested in: his music career.
In 2016 I wrote up Feldman and Corey Haim’s The Two Coreys for My World of Flops. The tragicomic reality show was unique in that its first season was a cutesy, clearly scripted goof on the lives and legends of The Lost Boys stars that posited Haim as a goofy but hapless pal forever intruding on the orderly life of Feldman and his wife while the second season was a harrowing, painfully candid examination of Haim’s bleak, steep personal and professional downward spiral, one that would end only with Haim’s death in 2010 at thirty-eight.
I would have been fine if I’d stopped there but being an inveterate masochist I felt the need to delve DEEP into Feldman’s music career for another My World of Flops piece that ran in late 2016.
For reasons even I can’t quite comprehend, I deemed Feldman’s musical career a “Secret Success.” Six months later I got an email on Friday explaining that after a solid decade, My World of Flops was being cancelled.
Was there a cause and effect relationship between me publicly praising Corey Feldman’s albums in my capacity as a columnist for The A.V Club and a site where I worked for eighteen years, primarily as its head writer, no longer wanting to pay me modestly to express my opinions on their behalf? Possibly!
Incidentally, when I clicked on the link for My World of Flops while researching this piece I got a “404 Error” message for a column I wrote from 2007 to 2017. Did that feel great? No, it did not.
When the editor who killed My World of Flops talked about declining page-views, they very well could have been talking specifically about the reception to the My World of Flops piece where I depicted Feldman’s musical output as somehow misunderstood and underrated, and not an unlistenable abomination.
When I started up the Happy Place in 2017 I took my weird obsession with Feldman even further. I devoted an entire theme month to Feldman, possibly the first in the site’s history, where I wrote up his movies, of course, but also his compelling, bracing, horribly titled memoir Coreyography and even, god help me, his career as a live performer.
As the climax of Corey Feldman Month, I went to a Corey Feldman concert in my home town of Atlanta where he and his all-female backing band Corey’s Angels performed for over two hours and had a fucking blast.
Did the drugs help? Of course. Should I stop asking so many rhetorical questions? Probably.
I looked at Feldman the same way I saw Phish and Insane Clown Posse: as a popular punchline that people laughed at derisively without even attempting to understand.
I saw Feldman as someone who had suffered in a way most people can’t begin to fathom but who came out the other side as a survivor with an important, timely message about the sexual exploitation of children in show business.
In order to be pro-Corey Feldman I had to overlook a lot, including his terrible music. But over the past few years I’ve come to realize that my take on Feldman was both ridiculously generous and misplaced.
You can be both a victim and a victimizer, the abused and an abuser. Feldman’s spectacularly embarrassing appearance on Wife Swap, where he swapped lives, homes and family with Tommy Davidson, illustrated what should have been painfully apparent to me all along.
Despite what Feldman might insist, Corey’s Angels were less an opportunity for Feldman to give a step up to ambitious young musicians than a sex cult with Feldman as the creepy overlord.
In the years that followed, a number of Corey’s Angels went forward with stories of being exploited, sexually harassed and emotionally abused by Feldman.
Feldman is many things, a creep and an abuser among them.
The quintessential former child star is a worse human being than I deluded myself into thinking. He’s also, somehow, an even worse musician than the world thought, and he already has a reputation as the worst of the worst.
I recently suffered through Feldman’s ironically named new single, “Comeback King”, and it’s so painful and god-awful that I would like to take this time to officially apologize to the world for praising Feldman as a man and a musician.
My heart was in the right place but with the benefit of hindsight, I clearly could not be more wrong about Feldman being, if not a good musician, then at least an interesting artist.
I was wrong about Feldman and his music. Thankfully I won’t be wrong about anything ever again.
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