Censorship in the Recording Industry

Definition: The corporations responsible for the recording, manufacture, distribution, and sales of sound recordings

Significance: Commercial sound recordings have been censored most commonly for obscenity, but also for promoting drug abuse, radical politics, and racial mixing

Indirectly regulated by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates the radio, the recording industry is largely self-censored—often leading to confused and arbitrary policies. Commercial sound recordings have generally been difficult to censor. The recording industry is a network of independent producers, record labels, distributors, retailers, broadcasters, and artists. There has been no one point at which to halt the flow of controversial product. In fact, a ban on broadcast of a particular song or album has often translated into retail sales. This type of success has been commonplace in popular music. A radio ban on the Rolling Stones’ 1965 single “Satisfaction” seemed only to have lifted sales and to have prompted the band to repeat the tactic, less successfully, with their 1966 release “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” Even a ban imposed by large retailers cannot prevent the flow of controversial product. In 1992 retail giants Wal-Mart and Kmart refused to stock Nirvana’s In Utero , whose cover art pictured human fetuses; nevertheless, the album entered the Billboard charts at number one.

Indirect Censorship

The FCC is responsible for licensing radio stations and hence exerts indirect control over the content of sound recordings. Rather than directly censor controversial material, the agency has more often issued warnings, imposed fines, or withheld license renewals for offending stations. Yet even with such powerful means at its disposal, the agency’s practical censorship powers are limited. In 1971, for example, the FCC attempted to sanction New York’s WBAI for broadcasting a recording of George Carlin’s famous monologue on the dirty words one cannot say on the radio. In Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation (1978), the Supreme Court upheld the FCC’s right to declare such material indecent; however, the controversy had taken seven years to be resolved.

Unlike its British counterpart, the British Broadcasting Corporation, the FCC is unable to impose nationwide bans on controversial recordings. Instead it must adhere to the doctrine of community standards in determining obscenity. Thus, a song that might have serious literary or artistic merit in New York City might be declared obscene in Bible Belt. Furthermore, the amorphous notion of community standards makes the FCC’s role in censoring material largely reactive as it responds to citizen complaints.

Given the lack of consistent federal regulation, most censorship in the recording industry has been self-imposed by producers, record label executives, and artists. For example, in a typically haphazard move, Columbia Records initially included, then deleted the satirical song “Talking John Birch Society Blues” from the album Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1962). Moreover, what is acceptable for one record label may not be for another. RCA allowed the Jefferson Airplane to include the word “motherfucker” on their 1968 Volunteers; however, Elektra compelled MC5 to substitute the phrase “brothers and sisters” for the plural version of the same obscenity on their 1968 release Kick Out the Jams. At times record labels have created a censored version as a single release while including the uncensored version on the album. The single release of Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” substituted the innocuous line “laughing and a-running” for the album version’s “making love in the green grass.” Many rap artists still, in the twenty-first century, follow a practice of dual release, providing a cleaner version of a rap for radio airplay.

Sex and Race

In 1954 U.S. Representative Ruth Thompson proposed a bill to ban from the mails any sound recording deemed by postal officials to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, or filthy.” The bill’s explicit target was rhythm and blues, the sexually suggestive music of black America, which had become increasingly popular with a white youth audience. In response, crossover stations (stations playing black music for a white audience) began to ban suggestive rhythm and blues songs such as the Midnighters’ “Work with Me, Annie” and the Drifters’ “Honey Love.” Necessarily limited in scope, such measures were unable to cope with rhythm and blues’ even more popular derivative, rock ’n’ roll. Taking its name from a euphemism for sex, rock ’n’ roll extended the transgression of sexual mores and racial boundaries. For the first time, black artists such as Little Richard and Chuck Berry had direct access to the lucrative white youth market. Yet, a form of de facto racial censorship soon arose as white artists began to cover the songs of black artists and supplant them in the marketplace. Especially in the South, many top-forty radio stations played only white covers of black songs and many retailers stocked only the white product. Thus, Pat Boone had a far bigger hit with his sanitized remake of “Tutti Frutti” than the song’s originator, Little Richard.

Some white reactionaries, particularly in the Deep South, continued to see rock ’n’ roll as a threat to racial segregation. In the late 1950s the North Alabama White Citizens Council declared rock to be the result of a conspiracy, orchestrated by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), with the design of infiltrating and corrupting the morals of white youth. While most whites ridiculed such reactionary paranoia, the equation of moral corruption and race mixing went largely unchallenged even in the more racially liberated 1960s. Atlantic Records forced the British band The Who to change the line in their 1966 song “Substitute” from “I look all white, but my dad was black” to the nonsensical “I’m walking forward, but my feet walk back.” Janis Ian’s “Society’s Child,” a song about racial mixing, was too controversial for 1967’s Summer of Love and effectively banned across the nation.

A New Target: Drugs

From the mid-1960s to the early 1970s censorship groups shifted their focus from sex to illicit drugs. In 1966 The Gavin Report, an influential radio programming guide, published a list of current singles that promoted drug use. Included were the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” which the group defended as a description of a transatlantic airline flight, and Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35,” whose obscure title concealed the refrain: “Everybody must get stoned!” The fabled Summer of Love witnessed the birth of the first psychedelic groups such as San Francisco’s Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. Just as 1950s rockers had used code words to sing about sex, the 1960s groups relied upon code words for drugs. Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” describes psychedelic experience in the imagery of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). While record companies rushed to capitalize on the emerging drug culture, radio stations, prodded by Dallas communications magnate Gordon McLendon, moved toward a ban of all songs that celebrated drug use. This effort was soon undercut by the censors’ zealotry in alleging drug references in seemingly innocent material such as Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Puff the Magic Dragon” and the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.”

Somewhat belatedly, in 1971, the FCC issued Notice 71-205, which stated that radio stations must be aware of the lyrical contents—including any hidden drug messages—of all songs broadcast. Yet the era of the covert drug song was over. The notice’s first victim was Brewer and Shipley’s unabashed anthem “One Toke Over the Line,” which New York’s influential WNBC summarily banned, allowing stations around the country to follow suit. While the notice broadened the practice of printing lyrics on the album covers, critics derided its ambiguity since it made no distinction between songs which promoted drug abuse and those which depicted its dangers such as Bloodrock’s “D.O.A.,” a graphic account of a drug overdose. Later that year the Illinois Crime Commission published its own list of “drug songs”; however, the attempt to censor drug lyrics foundered in the 1970s. Eric Clapton scored a hit in 1978 with “Cocaine” and the 1980s saw the rise of rap music, which made an icon of crack cocaine.

Political Censorship

To a lesser degree than sex or drugs, radical politics have incited record bans. In the 1950s anticommunists targeted folk musician Pete Seeger. His group the Weavers, who had scored a hit with “Goodnight, Irene,” were suddenly blacklisted from commercial radio. However, politically minded censors were forced to use more subtle tactics in battling the 1960’s counterculture. In 1965 right-wing groups in California, including the John Birch Society, petitioned the FCC to ban Barry McGuire’s antinuclear jeremiad “Eve of Destruction” on the grounds that it violated the fairness doctrine. The song was effectively blocked from California stations, but the FCC never offered a definitive ruling which would have placed popular music within the authority of the fairness doctrine.

More commonly, political censorship has resulted from local politics. The Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man,” released in the weeks following the violent 1968 Democratic Convention, was banned by a number of urban radio stations in the fear that it might incite riots. Nor has political censorship always come from the Right. In 1989 Ten Thousand Maniacs enjoyed a top-ten remake of Cat Stevens’ “Peace Train.” However, on learning that Stevens, who is Muslim, supported the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s death sentence for author Salman Rushdie, the group urged radio stations to boycott its own single.

Cover Art Controversies

As often as not, censorship has concerned product packaging rather than the recordings themselves. The Beatles butcher cover to their Capitol release Yesterday and Today (1966) showed the group surrounded by raw meat and headless dolls; after retail protest, an unoffensive cover was simply pasted over the original. Atco was similarly compelled to offer a substitute cover for Blind Faith’s eponymous 1969 album: it displayed a bare-chested teenage girl. The same year John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s album Two Virgins, featuring a frontal nude shot of the pair, was seized by customs authorities at Newark airport. As recently as 1987 Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys was prosecuted for obscenity for including a sexually explicit poster in the album Frankenchrist. Even liner notes have been subject to censorship: Elektra quietly withdrew the revolutionary cant of White Panther John Sinclair from the MC5’s Kick Out the Jams.

Censorship of Music Videos

The popularity of funk and disco music of the 1970s saw black artists once again crossing over into the white market and seemed to spell an end to racially segregated markets. However, with the emergence of the Music TeleVision Network (MTV) in the early 1980s the racial divide seemed to reassert itself. Only through the pressure of Columbia Records was black artist Michael Jackson able to air his music videos, which proved to be enormously popular with the white youth audience. Even with the admittance of safe black artists such as Jackson, Prince, and Whitney Houston, MTV catered to a largely white youth audience and hence refused to program the controversial black urban music known as rap. In the mid-1980s MTV finally bowed to industry protest and audience demand and began to air rap videos.

In the twenty-first century, MTV has all but eliminated music videos from its programming, but the streaming video websites on which most music videos now appear have also occasionally attempted to censor explicit videos. Rap artist M.I.A.'s video "Born Free," for example, was banned from YouTube upon its release in 2010; the site later allowed the video to be reinstated behind an age block.

Rap Music

Rap music is unrepentantly transgressive of racial, sexual, and political codes, often combining a glorification of gang culture with a pornographic objectification of women. Its growing popularity in the late 1980s and 1990s gave rise to censorship efforts. The first reaction took the form of the Parents’ Music Resource Center (PMRC), founded in 1985 by then-Senator Al Gore’s wife Tipper. Though Gore’s group also attacked white “heavy metal” groups for their celebrations of teen sex, sadomasochism, satanism, and suicide, the PMRC took special aim at rap. At the PMRC’s suggestion, the major record companies voluntarily instituted a ratings system for its products similar to the MPAA code for films.

The work of the PMRC stimulated a wave of state and local legislation around the country, particularly in the South. In 1989 the city of New Iberia, Louisiana, passed an ordinance requiring that retailers place any “obscene” recordings out of plain view of unmarried persons under seventeen years of age. The following year state legislatures in Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and Florida required mandatory warning labels for any recordings judged to be excessively violent or sexually explicit. Antiobscenity activist Jack Thompson protested that Dade County, Florida, record stores were ignoring the new law by selling to underage buyers 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty as They Wanna Be (1990). Federal district judge Jose Gonzalez declared the rap album obscene and upheld the state’s restrictions on its sale. Gonzalez also ruled that local law enforcement officials had been guilty of prior restraint in attempting to control sales of the product prior to judicial review.

In a move that perhaps charts the course for future censorship efforts, censors have directed their efforts at the large communications conglomerates that have controlled the recording industry since the 1980s era of corporate mergers and acquisitions. A group of shareholders led by actor Charlton Heston pressured media giant Time-Warner into dropping distribution of Ice-T’s 1994 album Body Count which included the unrepentant single “Cop Killer.”

Censorship after September 11, 2001

Following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the broadcasting giant Clear Channel issued a list, later known as the 2001 Clear Channel memorandum, of 165 "lyrically questionable" songs that they discouraged radio stations from playing. The list included some songs that discussed violence, but also included songs where any suggestion of violence was metaphorical, such as Peter & Gordon's "I Go to Pieces," whose title refers to a feeling of romantic love, and some that were deemed inappropriately upbeat, such as the Beatles' "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da." The already embattled "Peace Train" also made the list. The existence of this list drew public outcry at the time, but the songs on the list were not officially banned; a number of stations under the Clear Channel umbrella stated that they disregarded the list entirely.

Bibliography

Denisoff, R. Serge. Solid Gold: The Popular Record Industry. Transaction Books, 1975.

Hill, Trent. “The Enemy Within: Censorship in Rock Music in the 1950’s.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 90, no. 4, 1991.

Martin, Linda, and Kerry Seagrave. Anti-Rock: The Opposition to Rock and Roll. Da Capo Press, 1993.

Nuzum, Eric. Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America. HarperCollins, 2009.

Palmer, Robert. Rock and Roll: An Unruly History. Harmony Books, 1995.

Stuessy, Joe. Rock and Roll: Its History and Stylistic Development. Prentice-Hall, 1994.