Why Political Clash Has Been Good For Culture But Calls For Censorship Are Not
was born in a hospital in Brownsville, NY, which is now apparently considered East Flatbush. While the blight and poverty of the 80s didn’t ultimately remain the backdrop of my upbringing when my parents worked double shifts to afford our first home on Long Island. Regardless of the dramatic change from the city, Elmont was still a bit of a suburban replacement for Brooklyn, troubled kids spilling over from Cambria Heights Queens looking to rob kids or beat them up, a working-class diverse neighborhood where I would meet people who introduced me to music and where I would start maybe Elmont’s first rock band in the early 2000s. We had working-class Italians who stayed in a diversifying neighborhood, Haitians and Pakistanis who were first-time homeowners, Nigerians, and Thai. We didn’t always get along, but this melting pot was all about being yourself, mind you, this was also because social media and smartphones didn’t even exist, but I believe the location and time helped. It was a cultural thing. It’s no surprise, my first band, Apophenia would be comprised of an Irish kid, a Haitian kid, an African American kid, and me, a half Pakistani half Indian kid, who made experimental progressive rock. This sort of thing doesn’t happen today as much. It’s partly the fault of the internet, everyone’s life is curated to their assumed pre-assumptions. But I think we’re doing ourselves a great disservice by not interacting with people based on chance and merit. We didn’t care that either one of us was totally different. We had a need, and we all had talent.
Today you’ve all seen through headlines, the soundbites, the viral videos, the talking heads, and platformers, and these pseudo-social media peddlers of ideology in exchange for their virtue signaling, from pop icons to nobodies with their 5 minutes of viral irrelevance. The mantra of the time is hurt people hurting people. I see this has trickled down to even art and music. There is this virtue signaling in even the most unexpected of places, Neil Young and Crosby Stills And Nash taking down their music while the eyes and applause could be heard. What you are being told is that speaking to people is not good. That people are worth removing from society. This is serious and something that is done every day from top to bottom in America. I believe the political clash has produced some incredible music. But when I see people lean into this moral justification for silencing people, I worry that it will destabilize the way we “let the steam out.”
We are all aware of the moral panic of the 90’s when conservatives tried to censor the new music genre hip-hop. Jack Thompson, a conservative lawyer from Coral Gables, spearheaded a campaign to restrict sales of the album in Florida’s Broward County, eventually leading to a U.S. District Court ruling that declared the album’s lyrics obscene. A record store owner in Ft. Lauderdale was subsequently arrested for selling As Nasty As They Wanna Be, and members of 2 Live Crew were detained and charged with obscenity after a show at an adults-only club in Hollywood, Florida. Just as significantly, rock & roll, which had once been the soundtrack of transgressive youth, was aging along with its Baby Boomer fans. With punk dead and heavy metal lost in a haze of hairspray, hardcore rap was becoming the high-octane sound of adolescent rebellion.
Before rap was the target, The Rolling Stones appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show on January 16, 1967. They were forced to change a lyric in their song “Let’s Spend the Night Together” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together.” Somehow, this forced lyric change saved the souls of Americans everywhere. Remember, this was before cable television, and most people only had 3 channels to choose from, and possibly a UHF channel for Public Broadcasting if their television was equipped for UHF. Mr. Sullivan held tremendous power over the television media back in the 1960s, and appearing on his show was the gateway to riches. Being blackballed from the show was a death sentence for a career, or at least could be. Far from an isolated incident, the Doors were also given a similar ultimatum when performing their song, “Light My Fire,” being told to change the lyric “girl we couldn’t get much higher” to the more genteel sounding “girl we couldn’t get much better.” Lead singer Jim Morrison agreed to the change but then sang the original lyrics, infuriating Ed Sullivan and getting the group banned from his show.
So to my surprise, the left (creative types), being subject to decades of censorship, would now carry the flag for calls for censorship. The left says, “well, it’s bigotry, so we have to cancel it.” But didn’t conservatives also say, “it’s Blasphemy, we have to cancel it?” Somehow life moved on, and the world didn’t end. Look at rapper Bryson Gray. His song “Safe Spaces” was banned from Spotify and Soundcloud. Sound familiar? Rap is being censored this time, not by the Right establishment but by the Left Establishment. Is this the new blasphemy?
“The ban just shines a spotlight on how far Big Tech is willing to take their censorship of dissenting views,” said Patriot J. “Spotify and SoundCloud don’t actually care about allegedly ‘hateful’ or ‘violent’ songs being on their platform, because if that were the case, they’d have taken down almost all of the popular rap songs on their platforms.”
What the left needs to consider, if it is going to survive, is that people cannot be reduced to their gender, skin, or country of origin, but they are holding a candle burning from both ends. They claim people are victims of the aforementioned and want them to identify to no end, enforce it themselves. But if we are to overcome, how can we identify with such meaningless labels? At what point does identity and labels no longer serve us? In fact, maybe they even hinder progress.
Just as conservatives needed to understand that they couldn’t circumvent the 1st amendment to play moral arbiters for the entire country, Liberals, too, must play by the same rules. Their witch trials for seemingly small potential offensives are akin to the moral panic of their supposed adversaries on the right. I hope that lawmakers see through the haze of emotional turmoil. That unless a law is broken, censorship, whomever it offends, is the tool of dictators in faraway lands. In the United States, we reserve a great privilege that I believe helps things work themselves out. People can make choices as adults on whom or what to listen to. You can simply change the channel or just not listen/support someone.
Ultimately as a Liberal, I want to see the ideas work themselves out naturally. I believe this tappers extremism on both ends of the spectrum. When you can’t speak, the loudest voices steamroll over the nuance. The nuance is where good art is.