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 100 Megs online, hundreds of TFiles 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. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- 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. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- 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