From: j.stokes@bohm.anu.edu.au (Jason Stokes)
Subject: [Music-Censorship-Notes] Senate committee wants to ban suicide lyrics
Newsgroups: aus.censorship,aus.music
Date: Monday, 16 Feb 1997

Well, here we go again..

The Senate Select Committee on Community Standards has made new proposals
for censorship of music lyrics relating to suicide.  Friday's [14-FEB-97]
The Australian has an article on page 1 under the headline "Beatles, Nirvana
face suicide song censors".  The proposals, released on Thursday, recommend
a change to the Australian Record Industry Association's newly instigated
censorship code to ban music featuring "music glorifying or inciting
suicide."

The article gives some examples; the code could now ban Nirvana's "I Hate
Myself and Want to Die", the Beatles' "Yer Blues", Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" and
Silverchair's "Suicidal Dream." It also mentions Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne
and Judas Priest as bands that may run into censorship trouble as they've
all been accused of inciting suicide in their time.

ARIA's response has been entirely predictable based on their past history of
knuckling under to the government at the first sign of trouble - ARIA
president Emmanual Candi has welcomed the proposal.  He's quoted as saying
only the most extreme references to suicide would be banned:

"Explicit lyrics that gratuitously deal with instructions on criminal
violence is the category they are talking about.. explicit hardcore stuff,
not passing references or ponderings."

The article gives some quotes from the report itself:

"The repetitive and nature of many popular lyrics also leads to a fear that
a depressed adolescent may succumb to negative messages - such as lyrics
promoting suicide as a means of resolving personal problems.

"Violent acts, whether directed towards the self as in suicides or towards
others in mass shootings tend to engender a copycat element."

This looks like the big one for censorship in 1997.  It's not just music,
the proposals are part of a wide range of proposed limitations on speech in
the media.  Early rumblings from this particular committee were not good.
(Remember, it was formed after the Port Arthur Massacre and made all kinds
of pious declamations about "violence in the media".  So as well as hating
Bryant for killing 47 people, we can now hate him for giving the government
a pretext to crack down on us all.) It looks like the final report is a
shocker.

It's interesting to note the hypocrisy of all this - one wag has already
written in "The Australian" saying he'll really miss "Waltzing Matilda" (and
Waltzing Matilda most certainly fits within the definition - drown yourself
rather than submit to unjust authority) but of course ARIA/The Government
(there is no distinction in regards to this matter) will dodge the full
horror of its broad definition with the usual appeals to "exceptions for
artistic merit." They'll never tell us what artistic merit is, of course.
 
There's also hypocrisy in that morbid poems by Sylvia Plath or extremely
violent books like "In The Cut" remain unregulated, but the hand of
government feels free to come down on song lyrics.  Either books are next on
their list, or they can only get away with this kind of thing when ensured
of liberal apathy.  It seems that literature is sufficiently marginal in
Australian society that it's left pretty much alone, but music, being so
much more popular and widespread and of course popular with teenagers, is a
prime target for censorship.

Frankly, between Emmanual "crocodile tears" Candi and the Government mental
purity league, I've had it up to here.  This is the last straw.  I now
pledge to go in full scale activist mode.  I expect they'll be a lot of
response to this report within the free speech/civil liberties community
(such as it is in Australia) so I've requested a copy of the committee's
report from parliament house and I'll be contacting the free speech
committee pledging my help with a response.  My advice to you all is to do
the same.  The committee is supposedly going to publish the report
electronically, but when I called they were "having problems with the
system" and didn't know when it would be ready.

The situation is critical and I think we desparately need a web page devoted
to this stuff.  Since the ANU refuses to give web pages to undergraduates,
can anyone offer web space for resources relating to Australian music
censorship?  I don't have that much to put on it right now, but as this
progresses I'm sure we will get a lot more.  Danny?  Anyone?

Music Censorship << Internet Censorship in Australia << Danny Yee