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And they created a huge new multibillion-dollar market -- of kids and the underclass -- to buy their product. Parents and other guardians of tradition are as concerned about the audience for X-rated pop as they are about the perpetrators. If pop weren't popular, fewer people would worry about its impact. No one has mounted a campaign against Randy Newman's songs about racial and sexual bigotry, for example, because Newman's audience is relatively small and well educated. The artful photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, some of which depict homosexual acts and sadomasochism, took a while to raise legal hackles because, after all, they were displayed in museums, where nice people have always looked at pictures of naked people.
"There's a tired old distinction that bright people will not be corrupted, | but that the working classes will," says Clive Barker, the English horror writer whose books have never been banned but whose films must be trimmed to get an R rating. "Therefore, television must be scrutinized more vigorously than pop music, pop music more than pop movies, pop movies more than art-house movies. Books needn't be watched at all. If people are reading, after all, they must be bright and won't be affected by all this stuff."
Maybe so, but even booksellers have come under fire. For months, the Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, based in Tupelo, Miss., has campaigned to get stores to remove Playboy, Penthouse and similar magazines from their shelves. Last week the 1,300-store Waldenbooks chain, the nation's largest, launched a counterattack in the form of full-page ads in 32 U.S. newspapers, denouncing "censorship efforts" and "an increasing pattern of intolerance."
Books were hot stuff 30 years ago, when Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer broke censorship barriers and hit the best-seller lists. At the same time, Lenny Bruce set the four-letter standard for comics, and in the '70s Pryor and George Carlin brought it to the masses, where it belonged. Midnight Cowboy, which won an Oscar for best picture of 1969, was rated X, and so were other lauded films, such as Medium Cool, Performance and The Devils. Explicit lyrics have been in the pop mainstream since the late '60s; the Jefferson Airplane sang "Up against the wall, m f s," and they sang it on The Dick Cavett Show.
There are differences worth noting. Raw culture of the '60s was a political response to a system seen by many artists as repressive and, in Vietnam, genocidal. They championed the underdog by kicking the top dog. And for the first time, thanks to Supreme Court decisions liberalizing the definition of obscenity, performers were able to use whatever words they chose. Bruce, the gifted, tortured pioneer of this mode, aptly titled his autobiography How to Talk Dirty and Influence People. In the book's foreword, critic Kenneth Tynan praised Bruce as "an impromptu prose poet who trusted his audience so completely that he could talk in public no less outspokenly than he would talk in private." But Bruce suffered for that trust. His scabrous truth telling got him arrested in the U.S. and evicted from Britain. He died in 1966, perhaps the last American performer for whom notoriety was not a career move.