Abstract
From jazz to rap, the establishment always wants to ban new styles of music with little reason, writes
Elvis Presley, who was accused of being too sensual, with female fans, Florida, 1956
CREDIT: Don Wright/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty
With its violent lyrics and gang themes, drill might appear dangerous to alarmed adults. Like much rap over the last 35 years, it sees the world as a dog-eats-dog struggle that all too accurately describes life for the poor under neo-liberalism. It aims to be frightening and has succeeded all too well.
But this flap about a new musical style is nothing new. Like rock’n’roll, and jazz before that, moralists and politicians have always pointed to music as having a terrifying influence on young people.
Before World War I, a powerful reform movement in the USA targeted the “animal dances” – fads inspired by animal movements, including the turkey trot – that exploded in popularity with the success of ragtime. As one campaigner fulminated: “It has struck sex o’clock in America; a wave of sex hysteria and sex discussion seems to have invaded this country.”
In the early 1920s, the Ladies’ Home Journal launched an anti-jazz crusade which castigated “the sensuous stimulation of the abominable big jazz orchestra with its voodoo-born minors and its direct appeal to the sensory centre”.
The actual legislation against jazz music in the 1920s was minor and localised (reformists were preoccupied with Prohibition), but it didn’t stop the moralists. In the late 1930s, the popularity of swing culture was excoriated by the Catholic bishop of Dubuque, Iowa, who denounced swing as “evil” and “communistic”.
“We permit jam sessions, jitterbugs and cannibalistic rhythm orgies to occupy a place in our social scheme of things, wooing our youth along the primrose path to hell,” he said.
Teenagers burn Beatles’ records, books and wigs in response to John Lennon’s comment that The Beatles were more popular than Jesus, Georgia, USA
CREDIT: Bettmann/Getty
These concerns were used by Harry J Anslinger – the first commissioner of the US Treasury Department’s Federal Bureau of Narcotics – to mount a campaign against jazz-associated drugs, in particular marijuana.
Each new generational music style attracts adverse attention. Unmanliness and excessive sexuality were constant charges that began in the mid 1920s with the early pop icon and sex symbol, Rudolph Valentino. Frank Sinatra was vilified for being ineligible for military service during World War II; Elvis Presley was hit by a storm of hostility in the USA during 1956 for his directness and apparent sensuality. That same year, rock’n’roll was banned in the Californian town of Santa Cruz, where, after a concert by Chuck Higgins and his Orchestra, city authorities called it “detrimental to both the health and morals of our youth and community”.
When Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock showed in British cinemas during the late summer of that year, outbreaks of petty hooliganism resulted in sensational headlines. As one reader wrote to The Times at the time: “The hypnotic rhythm and the wild gestures have a maddening effect on a rhythm-loving age group and the result of its impact is the relaxing of all self control.” The film was promptly banned in cities around the country. The 1960s saw the volume and incidence of these moral panics increase, just as youth began to find their power as a market force and class. In 1964, the Mods and Rockers disturbances at British seaside resorts gave rise to a textbook case of moral panic about violence and drugs. Two-and-a-half years after the Mod panic, the onset of the drug culture in popular music during late 1966 and early 1967 gave moralisers and newspapers a fresh target.
The topic of psychedelic drugs blew open after the arrest of the Rolling Stones on drug charges in February 1967. Several singles were banned or subject to hostile scrutiny early that year: records by The Rolling Stones, as well as by EMI groups The Game, The Smoke and Pink Floyd had been censored or critically lashed for their portrayal of sex, drugs and transvestitism respectively.
Even The Beatles fell foul of this censorious climate, when the song A Day In The Life was banned by the BBC during May. One month later, Paul McCartney went on national television and admitted that he had taken LSD.
The effect of hostile media reportage was to alert the police and the authorities and to make them see this new youth manifestation as a threat. The same thing occurred in the late 1980s when a tabloid panic about ecstasy and acid house music fed into the authorities’ concerns about illegal raves. After the week-long Castlemorton Common Festival in May 1992, the Conservatives introduced the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994), which explicitly targeted the “repetitive beats” of house music.
With a century-long history of moral panics and bans – both of which have had little effect except to focus the young even more on their chosen music – it’s clear that censorship of music is a temporary, and unsatisfactory, solution that attacks the surface manifestation rather than a deeper problem.
Teenagers are hardwired, at various times, to play society’s dominant values back at adults and the authorities in a raw manner. Thus punk’s shocking arrival – swearing, ragged clothes and an aggressive demeanour – coincided with the 1970s wave of youth unemployment. As Johnny Rotten sang on the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen: “We are the flowers in your dustbin.”
Instead of condemning young people for reflecting the world through their lyrics, adults and authorities need to listen to their concerns. Their music may be rebarbative, and even unpalatable, but they’re telling you something you need to know.
Rapper Cardi B, known for her sexualised lyrics, performs at the iHeart Radio Jingle Ball, December 2017
CREDIT: Michael Hurcomb/Rex
