Music Censors Have a Long History

Annie Nakao, in the San Francisco Chronicle (May 30, 2004):

Long before Janet Jackson's breast set off national hand-wringing over smut on our airwaves, the world was already a dicey place. Or so Seattle music historian Peter Blecha maintains in his new book, "Taboo Tunes, A History of Banned Bands and Censored Songs," which romps through centuries of public outrage over music of every sort, from bawdy tavern ditties to gritty hip-hop.

"I absolutely sympathize with parents, who have every good reason in the world to protect their children from being exposed to questionable stuff," Blecha says. "But the world has never been perfect. It's always been full of dangerous things, wild and crazy ideas and bad language."

Not to mention songs.

"Some things never change," the 47-year-old onetime garage band drummer and DJ says in a phone interview.

"Taboo Tunes" was published in paperback by San Francisco's Backbeat Books, with a foreword by Nirvana's Krist Novoselic. Blecha, a past senior curator at the Experience Music Project, Seattle's rock 'n' roll museum, has studied public alarm over controversial songs and artists for 20 years. He views the censoriously inclined as mostly "woefully misguided, often destructive, occasionally comical and remarkably unsuccessful."

Hold on, says Jim Steyer, who teaches civil liberties at Stanford University and heads Common Sense Media, which informs parents on films, CDs and TV shows.

"Millions of parents are really concerned about the music their kids are listening to," Steyer said. "We're for sanity, not censorship."

But Blecha believes history justifies his protectionist stance on behalf of "unintimidated music making."

Plato warned politicians of his day to be wary of poets and their corrupting influences on youth. Henry David Thoreau, in 1854, opined that like liquor, "even music may be intoxicating."

Plato also noted that new rhythms can set in motion ripples that can turn cultures on their heads. This explains why jazz, rock 'n' roll and now hip-hop have caused such a ruckus.

"A wave of vulgar, filthy and suggestive music has inundated the land with its obscene posturing, its lewd gestures," spewed one newspaper in 1899 about jazz.

When jazz swept through Chicago, the playing of saxophones and trumpets was banned after dark; "reckless" new jazz dance steps like the bunny hug, the turkey trot and the lame duck were outlawed.

A half-century later, Time magazine disparaged rock 'n' roll as "an unrelenting, shocking syncopation that sounds like a bull whip; a choleric saxophone honking mating calls; an electric guitar turned up so loud that it shatters and splits."

Rock festivals were targeted in the early 1970s. The Indiana Legislature hastily enacted laws barring such events, only to discover that it had outlawed nearly every large public gathering, including the Indianapolis 500 auto race....