Popular Music Under Seige :: essays research papers

POPULAR MUSIC UNDER SIEGE ancestry in the 1980s, religious fundamentalists and some parents groups bedevil waged a persistent fly the coop to limit the variety of cultural messages available to American youth by attacking the content of some of the music industrys creative products. These attacks cook interpreted numerous forms, including a c every(prenominal) by the Parents Music Resource centralise (PMRC) for the labeling of recordings whose themes or imagery relate to sexuality, violence, drug or alcohol use, felo-de-se or the "occult," and prosecutions of record companies and storeowners for producing or selling albums that stock controversial songs. by and by years of pressure from the PMRC and a series of Senate hearings in 1985, the Recording constancy Association of America (RIAA) introduced, in 1990, a uniform labeling system use the logo, "Parental Advisory - Explicit Lyrics." The RIAA initiated this system without providing record companies with every standards, criteria 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 kingdom music, opera or musical comedy that may also contain controversial material. Dissatisfied with the RIAAs labels, many would-be censors have demanded even much limits on the sale of music with controversial lyrics. As a result, legislators have introduced bills in more than 20 states in recent years that would aim 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 lah failed by only one vote. In 1992, however, the state of Washington passed a law that required storeowners to place "adults only" labels on recordings a calculate had found to be &qu oterotic" the law also criminalized the sale of any labeled CD or tape to a person to a lower place age 18. Fortunately, the law was never enforced because a few months after(prenominal) passage a state court declared it unconstitutional. Even though Washingtons "erotic music" law failed, the battle over proposals to label or otherwise restrict certain music sales will belike continue. The groups and individuals who have been attacking popular music want to impose their ad hominem moral and political standards on the rest of us. The American Civil Liberties magnetic north is working hard to prevent the achievement of that goal, which would imperil the First Amendment rights of musicians, and of all Americans, to create, perform and hear music of our own choosing.