Popular Music Under Seige :: essays research papers

POPULAR MUSIC UNDER siege Beginning in the 1980s, religious fundamentalists and some parents groups own waged a firm campaign to limit the variety of cultural messages available to American callowness by attacking the content of some of the medicinal drug industrys creative products. These attacks have taken numerous forms, including a call by the Parents Music alternative Center (PMRC) for the piting of recordings whose themes or imagery relate to sexuality, violence, drug or alcoholic drink use, suicide or the "occult," and prosecutions of record companies and storeowners for producing or selling albums that contain polemic songs. After days of pressure from the PMRC and a series of Senate hearings in 1985, the written text Industry Association of America (RIAA) introduced, in 1990, a uniform labeling schema using the logo, "Parental Advisory - Explicit Lyrics." The RIAA initiated this system without providing record companies with each standards, crit eria or guidelines for determining what albums should be labeled. That decision is left completely up to the companies, which have chosen to label only selected rock and rap albums and not recordings of country music, opera or musical comedy that may alike contain controversial material. Dissatisfied with the RIAAs labels, many would-be censors have demanded raze more limits on the barter of music with controversial lyrics. As a result, legislators have introduced bills in more than 20 states in recent years that would require warning labels far more detailed than the RIAAs. Some proposed laws would go beyond mandatory labeling and actually ban the sale to minors of music deemed to be objectionable. Until 1992, none of this legislation had passed, although in 1991 a bill in Louisiana failed by only one vote. In 1992, however, the state of uppercase passed a law that required storeowners to place "adults only" labels on recordings a judge had found to be "erotic" the law also criminalized the sale of any labeled CD or tape to a soul under age 18. Fortunately, the law was never enforced because a few months after passage a state court declared it unconstitutional. stock-still though Washingtons "erotic music" law failed, the battle over proposals to label or otherwise restrict certain music sales pass on probably continue. The groups and individuals who have been attacking popular music want to call in their personal moral and political standards on the rest of us. The American accomplished Liberties Union is working hard to prevent the achievement of that goal, which would imperil the number one Amendment rights of musicians, and of all Americans, to create, perform and hear music of our own choosing.