Column: Eric Clapton’s not God, just another vile anti-vaxxer

The music people adore when they’re young often crystallizes their identities and unlocks oceanic feelings. In Clapton’s case, the music and the man are one and the same — arrogant performances of “iconoclasm” that appeal chiefly to young, self-doubting minds eager for outlaw heroes. Nearly from the start, Clapton revealed himself as racist, violent and now anti-science, and you can’t separate that from the “Clapton is God” package. There was that time in 1968 that Clapton damned Jimi Hendrix in Rolling Stone, using a casual racist slur and citing vulgar racist nonsense as the source of Hendrix’s appeal as a sexual fetish object. In the Guardian in 2018, critic Neil Spencer praised Clapton’s music as “dazzling” and full of “caustic brilliance,” cautioning against putting too much stock in his “poor behaviour and assorted addictions.” “One must trust the art, not the artist,” Spencer wrote.