Those lyrics in fact come from a rap song by Dr. Dre, whose label is Death Row/Interscope, which is part owned by Time Warner. Interscope is headed by Ted Field, a movie-and-record mogul who hosted Bill Clinton’s big Hollywood fund-raiser last year. “A lot of this [criticism of rap] is just plain old racism,” Field told the Los Angeles Times last month. “You can tell the people who want to stop us from releasing controversial rap music one thing: Kiss my ass.”
Since Hollywood already has enough people who spend their days eagerly taking Ted Field up on that offer, I thought I’d try a different tack. It is Field and other phony liberals of his ilk, wrapping themselves in constitutional pieties, who are applying the racial double standards and devaluing legitimate civil-liberties concerns. It is they, more than the rappers themselves, who are responsible for spreading irresponsibility. And it is those who oppose them–private citizens rebuking or boycotting sociopathic entertainment–who are engaged in free expression in its best, most democratic sense.
That word–censorship–has been thrown around much too casually in recent years. If a record-company executive or an artgallery owner or a book publisher declines to disseminate something, that’s not censorship, it’s judgment. It might be cowardly judgment or responsible judgment, but it is what they are paid to do. Garry Trudeau makes this point whenever some wimpy newspaper decides not to run a controversial “Doonesbury” strip: his fans say he was censored; he rightly calls it bad editing.
How did we get to a point where “art” became a code word for money? As record executive David Geffen said last year about Time Warner chief Gerald Levin’s lame rationalizations for Ice-T’s “Cop Killer,” “To say that this whole issue is not about profit is silly. It certainly is not about artistic freedom.” In other words, the Constitution guarantees all Americans the right to rap, but it says nothing about Dr. Dre’s right to a record contract.
In fact, if censorship means companies like Sony and Time Warner and Capitol Records begin to think harder about the messages they’re sending young African-Americans, then maybe we need more of it. If censorship means executives bear greater personal accountability for what their companies produce–if it means that when Ted Field walks into a Beverly Hills restaurant, the patrons turn around and say with disgust, “Hey, that’s the guy who tells blacks to shoot each other”–then it could help. But that’s not what the word means. Real censorship is when the government–the government–bans books in school libraries, prosecutes artists and writers for their work, seizes pornography, exercises prior restraint. And there’s the whif of censorship when the government hints at future action, as Janet Reno did last month with the TV networks. The line here gets tricky. Tipper Gore was way ahead of her time, and she never advocated censorship, only voluntary labeling of albums. But as the wife of the vice president, she’s probably wise to go light on the issue now. Otherwise it might begin to feel censorious. A few private institutions–like schools that try to punish offensive student speech–could also be categorized as engaging in real censorship.
Beyond that, let’s give the word a rest. I was once a judge for a journalism contest sponsored by a group called Project Censored. The goal was to identify underreported or ignored stories, not officially censored ones. Such casual use of the word demeans victims of real censorship, here and abroad. So does describing the battle over government funding of controversial art as a “censorship” issue. This is loopy. Declining to use taxpayer dollars to fund art is hardly the same as suppressing it. When Los Angeles radio station KACEFM recently took the commendable step of banning “socially irresponsible” music from its format, this, too, was attacked by some other radio stations as censorship. These other stations routinely fail to play any folk music. Are they censoring Peter, Paul and Mary? Of course not. They’re simply making a business assessment that folk is a ratings loser. What’s annoying is the implicit assumption that choosing songs on the basis of what sells is somehow superior to choosing them on the basis of what’s responsible.
If an editor wants to change the text of an article about ghetto life, that’s editing. But if a rap producer wants to change sociopathic lyrics, that’s seen as censorship. Even if you assume that rap is superior esthetically to journalism, is it really more worthy of protection? Is rap an inherently more valid form of expression than prose with no beat behind it? After all, they are both “voices of the community,” waiting to be heard. So is Aryan Nation.
This is not an argument for applying a harsh moral standard to art, for easy listening everywhere on the dial, for record-company executives to sponsor nothing that they don’t personally embrace. But even at its grimmest, music is meant to enhance life. Like tobacco executives, artists and record moguls who market death bear at least some responsibility for the consequences of their work. Let’s confront that–and stop crying wolf on censorship.
