(4 of 7)
Dole says he's not interested in government censorship, which in any event hasn't worked very well in the past. In the best tradition of Patrick Henry, Americans generally don't have much patience with government interference in First Amendment rights of expression, even when they may not much like what's being expressed. In the most highly publicized attempt in recent years to set the law on pop music, three members of 2 Live Crew were arrested in Florida in 1990 after a live performance. It took a local jury just two hours to acquit them on obscenity charges.
But the First Amendment applies only to attempts by government to restrain expression. It says nothing about decisions made by private media companies, and it does nothing to prevent them from choosing which songs or programs they will or will not promote. Five years ago, Simon & Schuster canceled plans to publish American Psycho, the sado-chic novel by Bret Easton Ellis, after advance complaints about passages detailing the sexual torture and mutilation of women. (It was subsequently published by Knopf, a division of Random House.) "It's our responsibility,'' says Martin Davis, then chairman of Simon & Schuster's corporate parent Paramount. "You have to stand for something.'' This is just the sort of thing that Dole says he has in mind: self-restraint on the part of producers and distributors. "I'm just saying sometimes you have to have corporate responsibility and remember the impact on children.''
Some media execs claim there isn't much that companies can do to restrain artists once they have them on their rosters. "Artists make records, not record companies,'' says David Geffen, the film and record producer who is now one-third of DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. "No record company tells them what to record.''
But Geffen, whose label stopped distributing the Geto Boys in 1991 because he couldn't stomach their lyrics, also knows it's not so simple. Record companies routinely tell artists to remix their albums or record new tracks. Something like that happened two years ago at A&M records. Its president, Al Cafaro, heard a track intended for an album by the rap artist Intelligent Hoodlum. Bullet in the Brain was about killing a police officer. In the wake of the uproar over Ice-T's song Cop Killer, record executives everywhere were thinking twice. "It was nothing that we could be party to,'' says Cafaro of the song. "I told him I couldn't release it.'' What did Intelligent Hoodlum do? "He took the song off the record.''
Two weeks ago, in a conversation with TIME editors and correspondents, House Speaker Newt Gingrich went one step further when he suggested that major radio advertisers band together to boycott stations that play "explicitly vicious'' rap. "They could drive violent rap music off radio within weeks,'' he said. Talk like that makes record execs very nervous. They know their product can also be vulnerable to boycotts by record stores that are under pressure from consumer groups. "You can make waves, but you can't mess with retail,'' says Eric Brooks, president of Noo Trybe Records. "You need to have your album stocked in the store.''