Comment: It's true enough that censorship doesn't work when it comes to music, writes BernardZuel
Firstly, as even the Soviet authorities found 40 years ago, when cassettes of radical and decadent western acts like – hmm - the Beatles, Iron Maiden and Billy Joel, made it past their border guards, music is portable, copyable, spreadable. The Internet makes those borders even less relevant today: music will be heard.
The list proving this is as long as the history of popular music, whether it’s bobby-soxers told to stay away from that skinny Hoboken kid, Frank Sinatra, or the loose-hipped Elvis Presley, school children advised to avert their eyes from the Rolling Stones or The Doors, whole families warned of the presence of anti-royal punks, The Sex Pistols, or glam shockers, Skyhooks, and a nation seen as imperilled by rappers Ice T or NWA.
Both acts were not just blocked from the airways but saw authorities actively work to prevent them performing, whether warning off local authorities and venues or declaring that if certain songs – NWA’sThe Pistols could barely score a gig but went to No.2 withand their debut album reached No.
Here’s the one glimmer of joy though for those whom Paul Keating called the straighteners and punishers. Neither the Pistols nor NWA ever reached those peaks again, splitting in part because of the pressures of constantly being under pressure to be standardbearers and ideologues first, musicians second.
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