Banned Band? CENSORSHIP OF MUSIC VIDS

UPDATE, FEB 2017:

Please take heed of the warning below - this post is about videos/music subjected to censorship, so view/read with caution and not with younger children in sight of your screen.

As I recently returned to this topic, I've added a few more examples below, and I'll develop this further when time permits, perhaps into an exam case study on the mediareg blog (where there are further resources on this). Use the censorship tag to find more on this blog.

Here's a fairly recent example that I've blogged on in detail over on the mediareg blog.

There are many interesting, highly readable books on the topic - I'll add details of some I've read as + when time permits, but you can find examples with a simple 'banned music' search (eg AmazonUK). I'll be reading Southall's book shortly - available on Kindle Unlimited if you're a subscriber.

Brian Southall’s history of the songs, performers, record covers BANNED by ‘the authorities’ includes the incredible facts behind stories such as…
Roger Daltrey trying to perfect Sonny Boy Williamson’s stuttering, Cliff Richard banning himself, the airbrushing out of Alice Cooper’s ‘penis’ on a record cover, and attempts by USA citizens to get Justin Bieber deported to his native Canada.

Did you know that Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus’ was the first single banned from UK’s Top of the Pops and that before that No.1 hit with Jane Birkin he’d completed an earlier version with Brigitte Bardot?
What was the real reason the Sex Pistols were prevented from topping the singles chart with ‘God Save The Queen’ in Silver Jubilee week 1977?
Why did a falling out between Terence Stamp and The Smiths create a collectors’ item in 1984?
Boycotted, banned and the subject of death threats – what exactly was The Dixie Chicks’ crime in 2003?

NB: we also discussed the economic context of the music industry: the concentration of ownership (one of Chomsky's five filters in his propaganda model; filters remove radical counter-hegemonic content before it can shape public discourse or opinion), or consolidation as free market apologists would prefer.

With such scale, the pressure from threats of boycott, often exerted through campaigners targeting advertisers who put ads on some other wing of a conglomerate, can be immense - advertiser power being another of Chomsky (and Herrmann's) propaganda model. Madonna lost a multi-million Pepsi sponsorship when she dared to depict a black Jesus in her Like a Prayer; Time-Warner famously pulled Ice-T's Cop Killer after facing high level political and police pressure, and threats from shareholders. Ice-T now claims the decision was his; he left the record label after the row over this - the Wiki is a short, informative read, but you can find further accounts easily.

When I started out, [Warner] never censored us. Everything we did, we had full control over. But what happened was when the cops moved on Body Count they issued pressure on the corporate division of Warner Bros., and that made the music division, they couldn't out-fight 'em in the battle, so even when you're in a business with somebody who might not wanna censor you, economically people can put restraints on 'em and cause 'em to be afraid. I learned that lesson in there, that you're never really safe as long as you're connected to any big corporation's money. [Wiki]

Artist2: Cher

See Chris' blog for his PowerPoint and post.

Cher's career in a way reflects the key trend in the contemporary music industry: long-established artists maintaining an older audience picked up over their careers whilst also seeing the digital revolution helping them to gain a younger, secondary audience.
Cher is notorious for her drastic usage of plastic surgery to defy the aging process, becoming the oldest woman, at 52, to reach no.1 in the contemporary charts with 1998's "Believe". Her work, her very body, is highly contestible, and would evoke radically different responses from a feminist and a post-feminist, arguments we looked at with Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" video. Her hyper-femininity being achieved through such artificial means also brings to mind Judith Butler's provocative concept of the performativity of gender: the idea that gender does not exist in nature, but is simply a concept we learn to apply and 'perform'. This has made Butler an important thinker within 'queer theory', but could also help explain why Cher has attained iconic status within the gay community.

(This last phrase, gay community, itself contains ideological values: are all gay people the same (homogenous)?! Our language, especially as expressed through our media, are constantly loaded with subtle value judgements we tend to think little about. When an idea is seen as common sense; that it would be ridiculous to even question it, we say that it has achieved hegemonic status ... a concept we'll explore in more detail later in A2)

Over her long career Cher has created some hallmark singles:

• 1989's "If I Could Turn Back Time" was instantly banned by MTV for her risque criss-crossed belts costume (and features unsubtle phallic imagery: Cher sits astride the long artillery barrels [here we've just applied some basic Freudian psychoanalysis, a common approach within Media and especially Film Studies]). The ambiguity of her gender performance, to use Butler's concept, is seen in the juxtaposition of her feminine long hair and thickly applied make-up, plus her semi-nude attire (Laura Mulvey's male gaze...), with her tattoos and manly biker's jacket. The heterosexual eroticism of the video, however, is somewhat undermined by the campness of the 'in the navy' backdrop!
• 1998's "Believe" brought the vocoder into mainstream pop, later to be (ab)used by the likes of Victoria Beckham. This intentionally distorts the voice, creating a robotic, mechanistic effect - not to be confused with auto-tuning, source of a recent X Factor scandal, which computer processes any voice to put it into the correct key and essentially can make any terrible singer sound quite good and in tune! Again, Cher's physicality is key to the video. The nightclub setting also takes on a camp aspect, as does her headdress, which helps her appeal not just to a mainstream pop audience but also a gay audience. Explicitly referencing gay culture has been a strategy used to gain greater credibility by Madonna as well, who, for example, took 'voguing' from gay clubs onto MTV and into mainstream consciousness, and has worked with provocative gay artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe. (He caused huge controversy with works such as 'Piss Christ'; using such an artist helps Madonna render his edginess as part of her image)

 

WALKING IN MEMPHIS

This video is perhaps not as iconic as the other two, but is interesting in itself (good choice Chris!). Again, notwithstanding her determination to achieve an ideal of feminine beauty (feminists have written about how our misogynistic media have pushed women to aspire take up less space in starving themselves and inflict grievous injury upon themselves in the way of plastic surgery - not an analysis which most post-feminists would necessarily concur with), there is an ambiguity to her gender performance. Her deep voice sits somewhat at odds with the woman whose legs seem to be the focus of the prevailing long shot on her. She is first seen in a slow pan up and over her body, a veritable caress from the camera. She is cleverly affecting a humbleness which helps to appeal to a mainstream American audience: sitting on the steps of a greyhound bus, part of the iconography of America, familiar to a global audience as well through countless TV shows, films and music videos (remember Axl Rose stepping off a Greyhound bus in the diegetic intro to "Welcome to the Jungle"?)
Black and white is used to affect a timeless, classic feel, with the shots of the diner, seemingly featuring a youthful Cher, signifying the 50s, a period many Americans look to with real affection: this was pre-Vietnam War, and seen as a golden age when there seemed to be a clear set of universal values. This is a fantasy, but a powerful one. Weezer's "Buddy Holly" is a great example of a postmodern text which reflects this: it plants the band inside footage from Happy Days, a 70s TV show which affectionately reconstructed the 50s featuring a 90s band! Its a good example of director Spike Jonze's style (and is featured on the 2DVD set of his work now in the Library and available to loan!).



Its not often I'll embed anything related to the loutish Mr Moyles, but here's an example of the technology in action