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 corr