A couple of weeks ago, the USA Today had the following heading "Efforts made
to keep music with mature content from children."
This is one of the reasons I don't care much for USA Today. "Mature
content?" I'd think we want to get as much mature content into the hands of
children as possible; like, you know, Bach, Beethoven, Ellington, Coltrane,
Hancock, (as well as 4 Hero, U.F.O., Truffaz...) and the like.
What the headline should have said was "Efforts made to keep infantile,
repulsive, gratuitous references to sex and violence from children." That
would've made sense.
One problem with censoring (or "voluntary" rating of movies, i.e. the MPAA),
is that those doing the censoring (usually a comittee), don't seem to like
their jobs. They follow a pre-ordained list of unacceptable words and
situations and put nothing other than "group-think" into it. Hence, the
"censorship" is almost always ludicrous.
Take a look at Total Request Live on MTV, which is geared for a pre-teen /
junior high audience. You'll hear Wheezer talk about "Hash pipes" (oops, I
mean H--- pipes), you'll hear Nelly talk about gettin' high in the back of
the Benz, (with the reference to marijuana replaced by an inhaling sound)
and you'll see Mya, Pink, Lil' Kim and Christian Aguilera strutting around
in their skivvies, with Lil' Kim giving out the positive message that y'all
poor chicks can complain if you want, but she's going to keep trading sex
for cash.
Even more fun is switching over to BET, where you will sometimes hear whole
lines (4 -8 seconds) of rap songs cut out, this despite the fact they are
lip-syncing the whole time, and it's not too hard to make out what they are
saying.
Now, how is it "censorship" to give these artists a national stage on
television (right after school), and let them clearly make the point they're
trying to make despite "blotting out" the pre-ordained offending words?
That's not censorship, that's effective promotion! Makes you wanna rush out
and get the real copy and study the lyrics, in case you (or your 5th grade
classmates) missed anything.
A movie like Schindler's List, or a song like Your Revolution actually
*depends* on graphic imagery to get the point across, and to remove such
imagery is to remove much of the art work's intended sting.
WAKE UP AMERICA! Chances are very good your kids have already been
desensitized to profanity, sex, and violence, and this before they even get
to high school. How many parents have even seen the cover to their kids'
Blink 182 albums? Yet that album has sold millions of copies, which should
tell us that either parents aren't paying attention, or they don't really
care what kind of images their children are getting.
So, for an agency to censor Charlie 2na for saying "Fuck your Lexus, if you
ain't giving God the praise then its useless" or Sarah Jones for saying "My
revolution will not be LL, hard as hell, you know doin' it and doin' it and
doin' it well" is to render itself irrelevant and to miss yet another chance
to give kids an alternative (and I would argue more positive) point of view
than what they get every day, by the bushelful.
(PS... Imus in the Morning, a syndicated radio show simulcast on MSNBC,
played a song parody today, re: the relationship between Janet Reno and
Donna Shalala, that was every bit as offensive, in the technical, "word by
word" sense, as "Your Revolution." Double standards by the government?)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon Jun 18 2001 - 20:09:43 CEST