(3 of 9)
Gore of P.M.R.C., which is in favor of labeling but not censorship, talks of 14 million children "at risk" and in need of counseling thanks to the "graphic brutality marketed to these kids through music and television." Lawmakers in 19 states went further; they considered proposing warning labels for any song dealing with such topics as drugs, incest, murder and suicide, which would conceivably outlaw depraved works like I Get a Kick Out of You, Die Walkure, Frankie and Johnny and Tosca. The music industry quickly forestalled such legislation by decreeing that record companies will decide which material is controversial and alert consumers with a label that reads PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT LYRICS.
Whatever heavy metal can do to provoke censure, rap can outdo. Whereas metal is mostly suggestive, this urban-black music is often politically or sexually explicit. N.W.A. (Niggers With Attitude) won an admonishing letter from the FBI for their song FTha Police, in which the singer warns the ghetto's occupying force: "Ice Cube will swarm/ On any m f in a blue uniform . . ./ A young nigger on the warpath,/ And when I finish it's gonna be a bloodbath." Another group, Public Enemy, has been charged with anti-Semitism in their lyrics and statements to the press. But their songs are also critical of blacks who reject their roots, of the brothers and sisters too busy partying to see the problem. P.E.'s new album, Fear of a Black Planet, qualifies as dance music that is dense music: soul with a vengeance and the most challenging street art that rap has to offer.
Comedy. Stand-up comedy, once relegated to nightclubs and TV variety shows, is now big business. Its practitioners work comedy clubs, the concert circuit and cable TV, where their material is available to children. One way to get attention, to appear hip, to make a provocative point or just to give a joke some taboo oomph, is to talk dirty. Plenty of comics don't; the most popular TV comedian of the '80s is clean (and funny) Jay Leno. But plenty do. Just watch them on HBO or Showtime. Sam Kinison, a kind of defrocked evangelist of red-neck rage (and also, in spurts, funny), provoked the condemnation of gay spokesmen with his jokes about AIDS. On his new album, Leader of the Banned, Kinison declares that his motto is "family entertainment," then proceeds to put the knock on gays, Dr. Ruth, Jerry Lewis' "kids" and the worldwide female dictatorship. Family entertainment? Right: the Manson family.
Even on radio, where the most common four-letter vulgarisms are verboten, a host of popular "shock jocks" consider giving offense is Job One. Their humor is guy talk, kid division. The victims of their gags are familiar from the schoolyard: racial and sexual minorities, scheming females, body parts and bodily functions. A few years back, a D.C. radio host was censured for observing, on Martin Luther King Day, that "killing four more" would get + Americans the rest of the week off.