Rock 'n' Roll Music and Censorship

Definition: Popular music genre associated with youth

Significance: As a musical form often associated with rebellion, sex, drugs, and protest, rock ’n’ roll has often been attacked for its content and its performers’ actions

Since the onset of its popularity in the mid-1950s, rock ’n’ roll music has remained controversial, largely for its lyrics expressing rebellious themes, sexuality, antiwar and other political opinions, and language deemed offensive by parents and broadcast institutions. During rock ’n’ roll’s first decade, the blues influence on rock rhythms and the performers’ stage acts troubled parents, the broadcast media, and the music establishment, largely on racial grounds. The use of rock music in such films as The Blackboard Jungle also led some adults to associate the new music with juvenile delinquency.

White Fear of Black Influences

Before June, 1951, African American-influenced music had been called “race,” or “rhythm and blues,” until Cleveland disc jockey Allan Freed started a rhythm and blues radio show for largely white audiences. To avoid racial stigmatizing he coined the phrase “rock ’n’ roll.” Immediately, white parents reacted against black influences on their children, claiming that stage antics by performers such as Little Richard (Richard Penniman) were too overtly sexual for white audiences. Record companies responded by giving songs by Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and other black artists, to white performers to “cover” for young white audiences. For example, Pat Boone covered Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” in 1955. Other white groups altered the lyrics of black composers, as when Bill Haley and the Comets covered Joe Turner’s “Shake Rattle and Roll.” This began a long tradition of altering recorded lyrics in order to appease broadcasters.

Segregationists also turned to violence to suppress rock music, as in 1956, when a director of the Birmingham, Alabama, White Citizens’ Council assaulted black jazz singer Nat King Cole in the middle of a concert, thinking him a rock ’n’ roll performer. During this period the American Society of Composers, Authors, & Publishers (ASCAP), then the largest royalty-collection agency for songwriters, resisted accepting rock composers into its membership. ASCAP wanted to distance itself from music that it felt was faddish and primitive; it accepted rock musicians only after its primary competitor, Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI) grew in power by building on the growing financial boom of rock’s success.

Radio stations were also quick to ban rock records. For example, three radio networks banned Dot and Diamond’s 1956 song “Transfusion,” finding the then-popular theme of teenage death inappropriate for airplay. In 1955 Chicago rock stations received fifteen thousand letters complaining of dirty lyrics, and Mobile, Alabama, station WABB promised to exclude black rhythm and blues records from its playlist.

Outside the United States

In 1960 the tightly restrictive British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) banned Ray Peterson’s “Tell Laura I Love Her” for its theme of young death. Through the subsequent decade the BBC’s tight control of broadcast music, including its banning of Gene McDaniels’ and Craig Douglas’ versions of “One Hundred Pounds of Clay” (1961), helped to popularize “pirate” radio stations, which aired rock music from ships at sea to avoid detection and prosecution. These unauthorized broadcasts were paralleled in the southern United States; Mexican radio stations, notably “Radio X,” featured disc jockeys such as Wolfman Jack playing songs banned by American radio stations for American audiences across the border.

The 1960s

During the 1960s rock lyrics expanded to embrace social criticism, more overt sexuality, and more daring onstage performances, which led to continual attempts to censor rock musicians. In 1966, for example, Chicago radio station WLS banned the song “Gloria” by the Irish band Them, and hired the local band Shadows of Knight to cover the song, altering one lyrical line.

Record company clashes with rock artists included Verve’s holding up the release of the Velvet Underground’s first 1967 album because of its sexual and drug-oriented lyrics. In 1968 the Detroit group MC5 issued their album Kick Out the Jams, which contained an offensive line prompting one record chain’s refusal to carry the album. Elektra Records issued an altered version of the album and then dropped the group. In 1969 RCA’s group Jefferson Airplane had several problems with their album Volunteers, which contained lyrics the label found offensive. RCA forced the band to alter printed lyrics on the album sleeve. Originally titled “Volunteers of Amerika,” the title was changed at the insistence of the charity organization of the same name. The band then formed its own label, Grunt Records, to avoid future conflicts.

Censorship occasionally occurred because of misunderstood or unintelligible lyrics. In 1966, for example, the BBC banned the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High,” inferring that the song was about drug use despite the band's denials. An El Paso, Texas, radio station banned all Bob Dylan songs because their lyrics were “indecipherable” and potentially offensive; however, it did air cover versions of the same songs. Rumors that the song "Louie Louie" contained obscene lyrics, including the Kingsmen’s popular 1963 version, inspired in a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigation, which found the song’s lyrics were indecipherable, and therefore not obscene.

Anti-Vietnam war music of the 1960s aroused considerable censorship. However, Barry McGuire’s 1965 “Eve of Destruction” quickly rose to the top of the charts, despite a nationwide banning of the song that included all of the ABC networks and attacks by the Christian Anti-Communist Crusade. Chicago mayor Richard Daley attempted to ban airplay of the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man” in 1968, fearing it might contribute to the volatile atmosphere surrounding the Democratic National Convention. Ohio governor James Rhodes asked radio stations not to broadcast Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s 1970 song, “Ohio” for similar reasons.

Television shows also censored rock music, notably The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan himself insisted that Elvis Presley would never appear on his Sunday night variety show, but he relented under commercial pressure. However, Presley’s third 1956 appearance was censored, as the camera was not allowed to descend below Presley’s waist. In 1967 Sullivan ordered the Rolling Stones to alter the lyrics of “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” and attempted to force the Doors to do the same with their “Light My Fire.” However, Doors’s lead singer Jim Morrison ignored the request; the band was subsequently banned from the show.

Morrison’s frank sexuality in his lyrics and on-stage performances led to arrests in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1967 and Miami, Florida, in 1969 for which he was found guilty of public indecency. The controversy surrounding Morrison’s alleged misbehavior resulted in a series of “Decency allies” in the American South, in which religious leaders and performers such as Anita Bryant preached against the evils they felt present in the rock scene. Other Doors recordings banned on broadcast media included 1968’s “The Unknown Soldier,” an anti-Vietnam War song.

The packaging of rock records was also a subject of censorship, notably the Beatles’ Yesterday and Today (1966) “butcher boys cover,” which Capitol Records covered with a less-offensive sleeve, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Two Virgins (1969) cover, which portrayed Lennon and Ono nude. Other banned album covers included a 1969 Blind Faith album whose British cover featured a young nude girl holding a space ship–like object that many saw as a phallic symbol. This cover was not accepted by the band’s American label, Atlantic Records, which substituted a picture of the band itself.

Religion and Rock Music

Although public furor over rock lyrics subsided somewhat in the 1970s, the FCC sent telegrams to rock stations in March, 1971, reminding them that broadcasts of songs promoting or glorifying the use of drugs could endanger their station licenses, but no such challenges resulted. In the mid-1970s various Christian organizations led boycotts of radio stations that aired songs deemed sacrilegious. In 1981 stations in Provo and Salt Lake City, Utah, banned Olivia Newton John’s song “Physical,” finding it offensive to Mormon audiences.

Broader movements to ban rock songs surfaced in the late 1980s with the rise in popularity of lyric-driven rap music. In 1991 Ice-T issued Body Count, which became one of the most notorious recordings in pop history. A Texas police group complained about one album track, “Cop Killer,” and threatened to boycott Time Warner, the corporation for which Ice-T recorded. A political firestorm ensued, led by the American Family Association and Tipper Gore, spokesperson for the Parents’ Music Resource Center. The U.S. Senate’s Juvenile Justice Subcommittee held hearings on “Gangsta rap” at which lyrics determined to be violent or sexist were read by artists including Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Luther Campbell, Eazy-E, and Boss. The National Political Congress of Black Women and the Reverend Jesse Jackson praised radio stations, such as Los Angeles’ KACE-FM and New York City’s WBLS-FM, which banned songs such as Dr. Dre’s “Wit Dre Day (and Everybody Celebratin’),” H-Town’s “Lick U Up,” and Aaron Hall’s “Get a Little Freaky with Me.”

The pressure groups successfully gained voluntary parental advisory labels on albums with explicit lyrics, although the National Association of Broadcasters resisted these efforts, as did rock composers such as Frank Zappa. However, a year later, “Cop Killer” was removed from Body Count, and Ice-T was released from his contract, as were other rappers deemed controversial.

Concurrent with these moves, cable music network Music TeleVision (MTV) began to censor the visuals of music videos, asking artists to obscure or edit anatomical features or controversial subject matter, as in John Mellencamp’s “When Jesus Left Birmingham.”

During the 1990s several attempts were made in Washington State to criminalize the sale to minors of recordings judged in court to be “patently offensive,” appealing “to prurient interest” or lacking “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors.” The Washington Music Industry Coalition fought these measures, beginning in 1992, by using Seattle band Soundgarden for a test case. The state supreme court eventually declared the first statute unconstitutional, although subsequent attempts were made to broaden censorship of all entertainment media in the state. In 1998 a high school student in Michigan was suspended for wearing a shirt featuring the name of the controversial band Korn, although it had no other words or imagery.

Though rap music continued to face notable censorship, rock had been largely accepted in popular culture by the twenty-first century and generated fewer widespread controversies. However, instances of censorship continued to occur beyond the long-accepted bleeping of profanity on radio and television broadcasts. For example, after the singer of the country-rock group the Dixie Chicks made disparaging comments about President George W. Bush in 2003, many radio stations throughout the United States banned the group's songs. Outside the United States, some governments continued to enforce much stricter censorship of rock music. In 2012 members of the Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot were accused of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred." arrested, and sentenced to two-year prison terms. After the musicians were released early, they faced further acts of censorship and intimidation at concerts during the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

Bibliography

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Cateforis, Theo. The Rock History Reader. New York: Routledge, 2013. Print.

Cloonan, Martin, and Reebee Garofalo. Policing Pop. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003. Print.

Nuzum, Eric. D. Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America. New York: Perennial, 2004. Print.

Rutledge-Borger, Meredith. "Rock and Roll vs. Censorship." Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, 23 Aug. 2015. Web. 17 Nov. 2015.

Winfield, Betty Houchin, and Sandra Davidson. Bleep! Censoring Rock and Rap Music. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. Print.