Music censorship has been around - in one form or another - since music became an organized art form. In Western culture, it is only in the past hundred years that artists have had much autonomy at all. Most classical and popular music through the 1800's was created under a patronage system - where a rich benefactor or royalty would pay a composer to create musical works. Music was deliberately created to the tastes and interests of the patrons - if the patron did not enjoy a theme or style - the composer simply would not be able to create and perform the music as easily.

One of the earliest examples of independent popular music being censored against its creators will was during the 1850's, when Giuseppe Verdi's opera "La Traviata" was altered several times because of "suggestive lyrics." The phrase, "He took the desired prize, in the arms of love," was a little too much for the citizens of Naples and Rome. In both cases the phrase was rewritten to a more appropriate verse. Most of what we know as music censorship started with the development and popularity of rock and roll in the early 1950s.

Music is evolving very rapidly. The nature of communication through music is adapting in response to technological and societal changes. Modern issues "did not exist 200 years ago when the First Amendment was added to the Constitution to protect the musician from the oppressive hand of government. Now, by contrast, the new communications technologies require that government work hand in glove with music companies...."(Lawrence K. Grossman, in Columbia Journalism Review) Who shall protect freedom of speech in this new system, and is it even necessary?

As the eighties arrived, punk was evolving into something much less aggressive. It had become a softer more romantic scene, but was still under the wide eye of the censors. During the eighties, the first pro-music censorship group, the Parent's Music Resource Center, was set up. The PMRC was made up US governors' wives who were concerned about the content of some modern music and "set itself the task of monitoring the content of pop records and identifying instances of lewdness, violence and profanity"(Street 1986, p15). While the eighties were less confrontational than the seventies, there was still a growing sense of anger and frustration aimed at the likes of the PMRC and other pro-censorship groups such as Britain's National Viewers and Listeners Association. In the US a campaign brought the PMRC face to face with some of the musicians it had attacked when Frank Zappa, Dee Snider of Twisted Sister and John Denver took the stand to oppose the 'moral puritanism' (Street 1986, p15) of the group. The 'meeting' was well publicized but had no real outcome. Among the bands discussed were Judas Priest, The Dead Kennedys, Megadeth and Twisted Sister. Meanwhile in the UK, a number one single was banned by the BBC because of its rather blatant sexual content. Frankie Goes To Hollywood's single Relax received unwanted attention from the BBC's controllers when, after the song had been played on Radio 1 over 70 times, the band confirmed suspicions about the song's subject, homosexual sex. After the confirmation the song was immediately banned, as Street (1986, p115) when referring to Derek Chinnery, former controller of Radio 1, states: "when the performers themselves confirmed it was referring to these sexual aberrations then it didn't seem to me appropriate that we should play it at all. And most of my colleagues agreed." So Radio 1 banned the song and Top of the Pops followed accordingly. Clearly here the bands confirmation of the song's nature played a large part in the eventual censoring of it. One wonders what might have happened if the FGTH had denied any sexual connotation. As well as the New Romantics, the eighties saw the rise to prominence of rap music. Groups like Run DMC, Public Enemy, NWA and the Beastie Boys arrived with a gritty, often street based music that often contained controversial subject matter and lyrics. The Beastie Boys in particular enjoyed huge success on both sides of the Atlantic, though the video for their song You Gotta Fight For You Right (To Party) was banned by TOTP. The video, depicting a rather dull party held by a group of very 'proper' teenagers being gate crashed by the band and turning into a drunken orgy, was deemed too suggestive by the BBC. Rap music was never far from the news as many other groups were censored and banned throughout the eighties, culminating in one of the most famous instances when in 1990 Ice T

Some common words found in the essay are:
Night Spend, Cop Killer, Joan Baez, Artists Presley, Journalism Review, Project ACLU, Magic Dragon, Goatshead Soup, Explicit Lyrics, Naples Rome, pop music, popular music, music censorship, cop killer, record company, street 1986, rolling stones, radio 1, record companies, police officers, arts censorship project, censorship project aclu, song cop killer, misbehavior outside musical, outside musical duties,
Approximate Word count = 3882
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page double spaced)