From the Harvard Law Record
April 17, 1987 Vol.84, No.8
Transcribed 8/90 by Diabolical Ed
Holiday Inn, Cambodia BBS - 209/456-8584
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The Far Right and the Censorship of Music:
An Attack on the Freedom of Expression
By Jello Biafra
Jello Biafra was until recently lead singer, lyricist, and chief songwriter
of the San Francisco-based punk rock group Dead Kennedys, one of the leading
undergound bands in the country. He also operates Alternative Tentacles
Records, their own recording label. He came fourth place in the 1979 San
Francisco mayoral election, won by Diane Feinstein. On June 2, 1986 Biafra
was charged by the Los Angeles City Attorney's office with distributing
harmful matter to minors. The charge stemmed from Dead Kennedy's inclusion
in their third album, Frankenchrist, of a poster by Oscar award-winning
Swedish artist H.R. Giger, entitled Landscape No.XX: Where Are We Going?
Biafra and four other defendants intend to plead not guilty; the American
Civil Liberties Union is assisting in Biafra's defense, challenging the
constitutionality of the charge. Since that time, the Dead Kennedys' have
broken up, an event the associate editor of Rolling Stone magazine termed "a
real loss to the American scene". To raise the necessary funds to fight this
case, Biafra helped to form the San Francisco-based No More Censorship
Defense Fund. He now tours various parts of the country giving talks on the
issue of censorship, and performing "spoken word" readings of his poetry and
lyrics. His musical activities will probably remain on ice for some time to
come.
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I was half asleep in the attic of my rented flat on April 15th of last
year when I was startled by nine police officers tearing my place apart.
They had broken a window by the front door in order to get in. They claimed
they had knocked but I had not heard them. The police were hoping, I think,
to find the original Giger painting, or better yet, Giger himself, and were
disappointed to learn that the painting was hanging in aa private collection
in France and that Giger lived in Switzerland. With their vaguely-worded
search warrant, they looked through so many places that it was quite obvious
they were hoping to find drugs or weapons as well as anything pertaining to
the set-up of a harmful matter bust. (The search warrant said nothing about
drugs or weapons.) They were again disappointed. They found nothing of this
type since we don't touch that sort of thing in the first place.
All this apparently started just the day before Christmas of 1985, when a
teenage girl bought the Frankenchrist album as a present for her younger
brother. Upon seeing the poster, their mother wrote a letter of complaint to
the California Attorney General's office, the Los Angeles City Attorney's
office, and on April 15th both my flat and the offices of the record company
I own, Alternative Tentacles Records, were raided by the police - three
officers from Los Angeles and six from San Francisco.
Criminal charges were levelled against me, the by then ex-general manager
of our record company, the distributor, the wholesaler in Los Angeles, and a
67-year-old man who owns the record pressing plant that actually manufactured
the posters and inserted the poster in the albums. The charges were
announced to the press on June 2nd, the day before primary elections in
California.
I see this prosecution as a direct result of a nation-wide climate of
hysteria created by an orchestrated power play by forces on the far right to
set in motion a pattern of censorship that will allow them to censor anything
they find 'objectionable'. There are already movements to purge 'The Wizard
of Oz, 'The Catcher inthe Rye', and many other books out of the public
schools, and remove or qualify the mention of Darwin's theory of evolution in
school science text-books. The recent U.S. District Court ruling in Alabama
striking down the use of any textbook that mention what the judge classified
as "secular humanism" resulted from a lawsuit partly orchestrated by the
judge himself and funded by TV evangelist Pat Robertson.
Yet rock music, and particularly underground and independent rock music,
has become one of the far-rights' most convenient targets. Ideally, what
such groups are hoping to do is set in motion a domino effect, similar to
what happened with 7-11 and other conveniance stores pulling Playboy and
Penthouse off their shelves after that under-the-table threat letter from the
Ed Meese Inquisition saying that these stores would be labeled 'peddlers of
pornography' unless such magazines were removed. Lo and behold, less than a
month later, the Wal-Mart drug store chain, with stores throughout the
Midwest, South, and Southeastern seaboard pulled Rolling Stone, Creem, Tiger
Beat and 30 other publications pertaining to rock music off their shelves on
the grounds that they too were 'pornographic'. Who was it that threatened
Wal-Mart by branding these magazines pornographic? Not Ed Meese, but TV
evangelist JIMMY SWAGGERT! Since when has a religion-for-profit exhorter
been allowed wield this much power?
We have truly reached a low point in our history when self-appointed
guardians such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are presented as valid
spokesmen for the American mainstream. Thinking people are aware they
represent nothing of the kind, yet at times it seems otherwise because the
far-right is better organized and more widely exposed than at any time in the
recent past. Their success so far in advancing their adgenda is at least
partly due to the fact that people are characteristically silent in this
country until something reaches their own raw nerve and threatens their
personal comfort and cocoon. When a few loudmouths on the far right begin
harping at grocery stores or at local school boards, and the majority fail to
take notice and respond, the school board or retailer feels it has no choice
but to give in to the high-pressure tactics, exaggerations, and outright lies
employed by the far right.
Enter the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center), a pressure group formed
by the wives of several Congressmen and a member of President Reagan's
cabinet. Like so many far right groups, they masquerade their real goals
behind the ruse of the 'concerned parent'. That time-honored cry of 'what
about our children?' has always been an effective tool for getting attention.
The PMRC operates as a secret society, complete with tax-exempt status.
They claim they have no membership (only founders) and refuse to divulge
their sources of financing. Their start-up money apparently came from a rock
musician, Mike Love of the Beach Boys. Now their backers reportedly include
noted arch-conservative fundraiser and Reagan kitchen-cabinet member Joseph
Coors of the Coors brewing family.
The co-founders of the PMRC are Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary
James A. Baker III, and Tipper Gore, wife of presidential aspirant Senator
Albert Gore, Jr.(D-Tenn). Their avowed purpose is to force record companies
to bypass the law and censor their own releases by slapping movie-style 'R'
or 'X', or at the very least Parental Advisory warning labels on the album
covers of artists they deem 'morally objectionable.' What is 'morally
objectionable'? According to the PMRC's 'Rock Music Report', it is any song
dealing with rebellion, substance abuse, sexual promiscuity, perversion,
'violence-nihilism', or their definition of the occult. Ironically, they
voice next to no objection to violent TV shows or opera and country-western
music lyrics.
Besides a rating system, they call for lyrics to be printed on album
covers whether the artist deems it appropriate or not, and covers deemed
'explicit' to be kept under the counter. More dangerously, they call for the
're-assessment of contracts of performers' they claim 'engage in violent or
explicit sexual behaviour' on stage. Their so-called 'media-watch' asks
citizens and record companies to pressure broadcasters not to air
'questionable' artists. Many chain shopping malls have already threatened to
evict any record store that stocks any item carrying any kind of warning
sticker whatsoever, including the 'Explicit Material Warning Advisory'
warning label the PMRC proposes. This not only amounts to censorship, but a
partial and all-too-ominous black-balling of the artist himself.
The joke stopped being funny in the fall of 1985 when the PMRC wives
arranged for the U.S. Senate Commerce Technology and Transportation Committee
to hold public hearings on obscenity in rock, even though no legislation was
actually being considered. Five of the wives' husbands were on that
committee.
The mainstream record industry has been all too silent about this power
play towards censorship. Very few major artists, with the exception of Frank
Zappa, have spoken out against this subject in interviews. Zappa has even
wound up spending over $70,000 of his own money, and at least one year of his
time, trying to raise the awareness of music enthusiasts to the growing
threat of censorship and blackballing. Why isn't the industry backing him up?
It appears members of the Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA) have agreed to censor their own artists by playing ball with the wives
in hopes their husbands will ram a tax on blank recording tapes and/or
cassette tape recorders through Congress. They claim this tax ($0.01 per
minute of tape, $.90 on a 90-minute tape at the WHOLESALE price) will
reimburse musicians who lose royalties when listeners tape their albums at
home. This is complete fraud. In reality, 90% of this tax would go DIRECTLY
TO THE RECORD COMPANIES, with only %10 to the artist, a $250 million
windfall. Even the artists' %10 would be divided according to whoever sold
the most units, thus ensuring the smaller artists would get nothing. This
also means that if I were to buy a cassette tape and a recorder to tape, say,
a classroom lecture or correspondence memos, I would wind up paying a royalty
to Michael Jackson. I hardly think that's fair, yet this is why major record
companies continue to cooperate with the censors.
Ours is a test case. I have no doubt that if someone as popular as
Madonna, Prince, or Ozzy Osbourne were charged as we are, the record
companies would give them the best legal help money could buy. But
Alternative Tentacles and I are a self-supported, self-managed independant
artist and record company, and are therefore the easiest to destroy through
bankruptcy. An official said on network television news that they picked us
to prosecute because "We feel this is a COST-EFFECTIVE (our emphasis) way of
sending a message that....we are going to prosecute."
It is also curious that the record store responsible for the actual sale,
an outlet of the giant Wherehouse chain, was not charged in this case, on the
grounds that "they were cooperative and took the record off the shelves."
This same prosecuting official also told the National Law Journal in the July
28, 1986 issue: "We don't feel that the City Attorney's office is in charge
of protecting [the daughter of the mother who complained] from this: We are
responsible for seeing that the Dead Kennedys don't profit from the sale of
this sort of merchandise[.]"
The major reason we are fighting this charge instead of taking a slap on
the wrist, paying a fine, and negotiating away the jail sentence is that a
conviction would have ramifications far beyond this case. A legal precedent
set by such a conviction could only open the floodgates nationwide for
further charges and harassment against other artists, big and small. Not
just underground artists, but also folk artists, as well as some of the
journalists who are being kept out of the country by the INS would be
affected. We hope that fighting this charge will help stop this lurch
towards blackballing dead in its tracks.
The rippling effect of a McCarthy-style chill factor has already taken
its toll. Contrary to media predictions, there has been no dramatic rise in
our record sales as a result of the publicity surrounding this case. In
fact, many retailers have already removed our records from their shelves in
fear of being dragged down to the nearest kangaroo court by the local
gendarmes. They know too well how easy it is to go broke defending
themselves, even if they win in court. People have written in from all over
the country, saying they can no longer find Dead Kennedy records in their
local stores, especially chain stores.
Another alarming example of possible blackballing is the banishment of
John Denver from RCA records. Until recently RCA was owned by General
Electric, one of the world's largest arms manufacturers. John Denver, a
veteran and very successful RCA recording artist, included a song attacking
the arms race on his last LP. After his album was released Denver testified
against the censorship warning sticker proposal at the Senate hearings. Soon
afterwards, RCA dropped John Denver - someone who has sold tens, if not
hundreds of millions of records for them. Sure, Denver's sales have been
declining, but would RCA have dropped Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley?
Turning now to the poster itself, when I first saw H.R. Giger's work, I
was very impressed, emotionally affected, and even uplifted by it. The art
that truly inspires me is the kind that jolts the dormant sediment in my
brain and gets thoughts spinning and whirling so ideas pop into my head, and
I am then inspired to create on my own. I had not seen any visual art that
had affected me this deeply since viewing the work of Hieronymus Bosch.
'Landscape No.XX', in particular made me think, "My god, here it is, this is
how we treat each other every day in a consumer-orientated society,
intentionally or as a self-defense mechanism This is consumer culture on
parade!" This painting portrayed to me a vortex of exploitation, that
vicious circle of greed where one of us will exploit another for gain and
wind up looking over our shoulder lest someone do the same thing to us in
return. I realized that many of these same themes ran like a thread through
the songs slated to be on the 'Frankenchrist' album, which we were in the
process of recording at the time. I felt that we should include this piece
of artwork as a kind of crowning statement of what the record was tryng to
say, musically, lyrically and visually. The Constitution implies that it is
up to the individual to make that decision, not the State or self-appointed
surrogate parents in Washington, DC to make it for them.
We do not feel the mother who complained about the poster had a valid
complaint. Nothing we have ever included on one of our records or in an
album cover was intended to be harmful to anyone. But even if she thought it
was harmful it is the height of irresponsibility by a parent to be so lazy as
to expect the police to do one's parenting for them. If my kid brought home
home something that I thought was harmful, the last thing I would do would be
to call the police and try to have the artist arrested.
But let me mention first what I would consider harmful. If my kid
brought home something like 'Top Gun' on videotape, or one of those blatantly
nationalistic, racist, or sexist heavy metal albums that promote beating or
sexual assault of women, or some whisky-drenched country-western song where
the guy brags about beating or shooting his wife, or a Rambo-type toy - yes,
that would rub my fur the wrong way. What, after all, encourages kids more
kids to go out and get killed, Ozzy Osbourne records or armed forces'
recruiting ads? I do not feel, however, that any of the above should be
censored. That's not what the Constitution says. I would rather reply to
and expose stupidity in media through my own artwork, and make it an issue
that way.
Nor would I abdicate my parental responsibility and chicken out and call
the cops. I wouldn't even confiscate the offending article, because that
would not teach the kid that the article could be harmful or misconstrued.
Such an action on my part would only serve to reinforce the notion that daddy
is a fascist, or that daddy is mean, or worse yet an uptight jerk who just
doesn't understand.
What I WOULD do is sit down with the kid and say "Look, you went out and
brought home this item. Why? Why did you buy this? Why do you like it?
What do you see in this? How does it affect you? How do you think it might
affect someone else? And now let me tell you what I think of it and how it
affects me." A meaningful discussion is a far healthier way to help nurture
a loving family than is discipline with no rational explanation to back it
up. Such a breakdown in communication might also encourage the kid to simply
sneak the offending artical home and hide it.
More generally, Dead Kennedys have always used their art as political
speech. One element of the band has always been journalism. Through our
songs we have exposed issues around us that our audience might not ever even
have heard of otherwise, since many people their age who listen to records
were brought up on television and hardly ever read books and newspapers.
If we are successful in defending ourselves on this charge, we hope a
dismissal will help slam the door on prosecutions of rock musicians for what
they say with their records, and artists and journalists for what they say
with their work. And perhaps ultimately we would be able to send a message
to public officials who think they need to hop on the censorship bandwagon in
order to avoid attacks from wealthy far right wing fringe groups or attract
funding from the same right wing political action committees, by saying that
perhaps this is not such a lucrative issue after all since it makes the
person doing the harrassing out to be the pompous jerk he or she really is.
Censorship is like that certain brand of potato chips. Nobody can stop
with just one. Well-organized and financed pressure from the far right has
already dealt a serious blow to what we see, read, hear - and ultimately
think. People once viewed as dangerous right-wing extremists have succeeded
in casting themselves as spokespeople of the American mainstream. In their
world music and literature can be judged harmful, yet Star Wars is considered
perfectly safe. And genocide squads like the Nicaraguan contras are "the
moral equivalent of our founding fathers."
Libraries and textbooks are under new attacks in schools. Many gifted
artists now face possible blackballing. Urinalysis and lie detector tests at
work are actively being promoted by the Reagan Administration under the
continuing guise of a drug scare. Attorney General Edwin Meese has used a
wildly-contrived "study" of "pornography" as the first step in a crusade to
widen the crackdown on free speech. His commission threatens magazine
retailers through extra-legal manuevers such as threat letters, while he
strives to pack the federal court system with avowed enemies of
Constitutional liberties.
A fresh PMRC media blitz again has them in the news, with new censorship
via warning label proposals. Their tone is more concilitory now, with their
more volatile edges temporarily masked. They compare the rock music they
deem "objectionable" to the violence on television many of the rest of us
have problems with, yet they still concentrate their attack on one form of
music - rock - and barely address the issue of television at all. What about
all the families bombrded every night by the violence seen on the six o'clock
news?
History has shown us that any compromise with cultural vigilantes just
encourages more of them to go further. The hysteria sparked by the PMRC
husbands' Senate hearings is what gave Jimmy Swaggart's views front page
respectibility in the first place.
The rationale behind freedom of speech has always been that truth emerges
out of open debate. Democracy assumes a variety of voices, each trying to
persuade the other. Dissent is healthy, even when presented in a a manner
which may seem abhorrent or obscene to those who fear direct confrontation
with the reality that surrounds us. Only an informed population can make
responsible choices.
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For more information on this case, please address all correspondence or
contributions to:
No More Censorship Defense Fund
P.O. Box 11458
San Francisco, CA. 94101