Music is physical: We take it into our bodies, we allow it to vibrate our skulls. In this way, it is far more intimate than visual art; after all, we respond to sound in utero well before we respond to sight. We store memories of music in our limbic system, next to all of our most treasured and traumatic experiences. It moves within us.

This is the realm of the subconscious, and listening to a recorded song is not unlike a lucid dream. In both states, your brain waves even out and you become pliant and suggestible, a wide-open expanse of receptivity. Our primal reactions to both happen deep beneath our “good” and “bad” sorting mechanisms. This makes us easy marks, ripe for subtle manipulations—and to all the confusions and private torments that result from them.

Right now, I have an abuser’s song stuck in my head. It feels a bit like a violation, the presence of this song and everything it brings with it. But the fault is all mine: I opened the door, invited the song in, showed it around. I had all the warnings you would need, but the song was there on my phone screen—all I had to do was touch it, so I did. And then, just like that, the song took up residence in me. Now it follows me around.

By now, most music listeners know this experience: The song suddenly hurts to hear, the sweet voice in our heads turns sour, a song that pleased us now haunts us. Everyone’s fulcrum is different, set off by their own experience. But the effect is the same: Something you thought you knew about an artist, or something you knew without fundamentally acknowledging, explodes from the periphery into full view. Suddenly, the uneasy space you maintained between the sounds an artist made and the life they lived crumples, forever and finally.

Most of us don’t know what to do when this happens, but we fervently pretend that we do. We flood social media channels with our late-breaking outrage, we declare the artist “cancelled.” Some of us hug the artist closer, taking it upon ourselves to defend them from perceived attacks, even if this means stepping around obvious facts about their behavior like shattered glass. In the past two years, as the cultural flames around artists and their art have burned hotter, our reactions to transgressions have grown increasingly convulsive.

Leaving aside, for a moment, the question of what society does with the people—questions of restorative justice and justice for survivors, the virtues of de-platforming, or a million other debates that slip far outside the private arena of headphones—where does this music go once it has entered our lives? It doesn’t simply leave us. It can’t.

Whether it’s XXXTentacion, the late rapper who was charged with domestic battery and assault, or R. Kelly, who was tried and acquitted on child pornography charges in 2008 and has been accused of soliciting sex from minors and keeping women in his home against their will; whether it’s former Real Estate guitarist Matt Mondanile, who was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct and emotional abuse; whether it’s Jesse Lacey of Brand New, who allegedly sexually exploited his underage fans, or former Das Racist member Kool A.D., who was recently accused of sexual assault by four women—living with music in your mind from an abuser sometimes feels like being saddled with someone else’s bad dreams. How do we make peace with these bad dreams once they have become ours?

Of course, the dream analogy only goes so far. Dreams happen to us. We have no agency in them, which is partly why we are considered blameless for their content. If you had a disturbing dream, you would probably have no trouble confessing it to a friend—perhaps the two of you could take turns decoding what it meant. You might both marvel at the lawlessness of the subconscious.

But music doesn’t happen to us. We choose to take it in. Music is a consumer choice even when it doesn’t feel like one—even though it perhaps uniquely doesn’t feel like one—and it is best-suited to the subterfuge of implication-free engagement. You are listening to trapped air, rendered into code and recreated in your brain. Home listening feels so private; how could listening to this song have any ramifications for anyone, anywhere else?

Most of us manage to avoid thinking about our music as a consumer good, at least most of the time. Part of this has to do with the nature of internet commerce, which has proven extremely adept at sanding away friction points until your purchasing decisions have all the forethought of a sneeze. Spotify, Apple, and Amazon move mountains to ease consumption, and they do it so effectively that it’s frighteningly easy to pretend that this friction—carbon footprints, packed warehouses, unprecedented monopoly, pick your late-capitalist poison—never existed.

But music in particular has the trickiest relationship to commerce. Amazon may have eroded the value of a book, but ebooks didn’t completely replace physical ones. The music industry, meanwhile, never quite convinced listeners that stealing digital music was harmful. So they abandoned the sale of discrete units and remodeled themselves around streaming, a model that looked and felt exactly like the stealing customers were already doing. In other words, they removed ownership entirely. We rent our music now, and then give it back to the cloud when we are done.

Music listening has always been private, but in another era, you might have at least had to venture outside to procure it. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to buy the music made by a known abuser at a store, you would have risked some hot, focused shame. Streaming, meanwhile, with its blend of radio dial and kitchen faucet, removes shame from the equation. You touch a song title, and it starts playing for you—and only for you. Turn off the sharing features on Spotify and you are free to move about cultural infinitude in silence, without fear of judgment. As as result, the gap between streaming an artist and purchasing their music directly feels enormous. It is the difference between liking a political candidate’s post on Facebook and knocking on someone’s door to canvas for them.

This makes the insolubility of the art-versus-artist problem even more difficult in music. When you choose to expose yourself to the songs of an abuser, you are also subjecting yourself to a sustained whisper campaign for their inherent virtuousness, for the empathy, the tortured humanity, lying within them. Seeing humanity in all humans, even murderers and abusers, can be a powerful and clear-eyed practice. It might be what some have called “radical empathy.” It may even be music’s highest function, if we allow it to happen—permitting the existence of beauty within deep ugliness, persuading us to remember that all humans share the mystic and strange impulse to make music, or to partake in it.

And yet, passively accepting abusers’ songs about themselves when their victims are given no voice at all—and more, when their victims usually disappear into the cracks of society, often hounded by death threats from the artist’s massive fanbase—might also be a form of enabling, or even empowering, toxic behavior. We cast votes for artists with the invisible flow of our attention spans, and their implications are nearly impossible to track. Deciding where to draw or redraw our lines is always messy, retconned, and incomplete. It is murky right up until the point it suddenly seems crystal-clear and undeniable.

Take Spotify, for instance, who are in the actual work of pricing these assets, of grouping and monetizing cultural goods. Earlier this year, they tried to half-extricate themselves from that marketplace with a widely criticized removal of R. Kelly and XXXTentacion’s music from playlists. The widespread approbation they won is a good sign of just how clumsy and messy decisive action can look in practice—XXXTentacion’s publicist famously asked if and when the streaming service would take similar actions against Dr. Dre, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and others who had once been accused of misconduct. Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wound up apologizing for the move—we “rolled this out wrong,” he told a conference gathering, and the streaming service hastily restored XXX’s music to one of their major playlists, making his music seem both radioactive and indispensable in the process.

In treating R. Kelly and XXXTentacion’s music like so much tainted lettuce to be recalled, Spotify underlined just how hard it is to regulate cultural goods. Marketplace regulation presumes a shared understanding of what those goods are supposed to do—food isn’t supposed to make us sick, brake systems aren’t supposed to suddenly cut out on the freeway. But what does music do? It moves us, we crave it. But scientists have even less idea why we need music than painting or writing, which at least point to basic societal functions. Some studies diagnose music as a fragment from our religious impulse, while other theories diagnose music as a neurological twitch in response to our fear of death. No one knows what this stuff is for, exactly, but we all agree that we need it.

As a result, finding ethical ways to consume music is confounding. In the end, aesthetics and morality simply don’t talk to each other. One can spoil the other, the way acid curdles milk. But music makes a terrible container for ethics. It leaks, it loses specific meaning, it can be conscripted by anyone to mean anything. Music made with beautiful intentions can easily be made to serve evil, and songs that seem to drip malice can also find their way into the most unlikely redemption narratives. Stripped of context, a sound can be tender, gentle, beautiful, soothing; the person making it might have none of these qualities.

This slipperiness means there are precious few ways to “regulate” the world of art, or the behavior of the people who make it—the reforms that might have a true impact on their behavior lie far, far outside aesthetics: Readily available resources for mental health and for domestic abuse survivors would be nice; reform of the carceral state even better. It’s not hard to imagine that, given a few years, reforms like these would make themselves felt in the world of the artists who capture our ears, and who invade our dreams. But these are questions of legislation, and they disappear when the music envelops us.

The only thing that we can be certain of is that this will happen again. Two years from now, or two weeks from now, or in two hours, we will learn, again, that we are in an intimate relationship with a piece of music made by someone who has done or said things we cannot abide. Once that happens, we will again feel the panic of implication, the disorientation. We can take arbitrary actions, if they make us feel better: We can choose to not play their music anymore, we can decry their actions for our friends and family to see. But the music itself will not stop whispering to us. We will keep these bad dreams. Perhaps we should learn to be alive to their presence, to acknowledge the ways they have moved and changed us. Proximity to these bad dreams, and our refusal to divest ourselves completely of them, might help to remind us of the messy ways we are connected, even when we feel that we could not be more alone, encased in headphones, in a cavern of our own making.