Music, lyrics, and how far things can be reasonably taken

Right. Following on from my earlier post 'Music, lyrics and the PMRC', I've done a bit more thinking about what I said, particularly about the political side of things. For a start, I'm going to emphasize that I stand by everything detailed in that post, and still hold those beliefs. But a question that did occur to me is whether censorship is ever truly appropriate. To clarify, in my earlier post, I did not mean that I thought that the lyrics of Green Day should be censored; far from it, I just felt that these are some of the most extreme cases in the mainstream.

However, outside of the mainstream there are some murky things to be found. What I want to explore is whether music should ever be completely censored. The three famous cases of censorship that spring to mind are Cannibal Corpse albums being banned due to the artwork, similarly, The Scorpions' album 'Virgin Killer' being banned due to its artwork (which depicted a naked prepubescent girl) - and even recently the wikipedia page was blocked for a while to all UK IP addresses - and the case in which Earache records were raided by the police for possibly illegal content of some of their records; Digby Pearson has since complained that he never got his Alice Cooper poster back, even though they were found to be not guilty.

However, even these seem practically tame compared to some things which aren't censored due to their limited availability, and I should probably make it clear that I am strongly against censorship in the aforementioned cases. There are two cases in which I feel universal censorship is appropriate. These are the more extreme cases of the pornogrind genre (the name of which probably speaks for itself), and NSBM, which stands for National Socialist Black Metal. I daresay that there are similar cases in other genres, but metal, and metallic music, is my area of so-called expertise, and so these are appropriate case studies for me to look into.

Pornogrind has developed for a few years, and varies from grindcore with innuendo, to the stuff with endless porn samples and frankly disgusting artwork and lyrics. A case of the latter, and a case that I will use to argue for censorship to be introduced to this part of the genre, is XXX Maniak's album 'Harvesting The Cunt Nectar'. This album contains frequent extreme song titles and samples, often referring to paedophilia and its practise, although the artwork is comparatively tame. After reading a review in Terrorizer magazine, I decided to give it a listen, almost as some sort of initiation rite, and was nearly sick at some of the stuff contained; and I have a strong stomach!

At the other end of the should-be-censored spectrum is NSBM. This is something that I am strongly against; anything that encourages prejudice against a race or group should be strongly discouraged in my eyes, and although it is debatable whether it is a suitable topic for an art form (in my eyes, it's reasonably okay if one doesn't actually believe in the politics), anybody who is highjacking art and using it to spread Nazi propaganda in general ought to be shot. That this is now viewed as a legitimate strain of the black metal genre is frankly ridiculous, on two fronts: firstly, the actual belief in the lyrical content itself, which is turning one or two black metal kiddies with malleable minds into anti-Semitic wannabe Nazis; and that they're adding an extra genre classification based on lyrical content? Really?

So, although there is very little music, and indeed all other art forms, that I would encourage censorship of, I think to summarise, all the things which encourage highly illegal activity (the adjective being there as I don't mind 'UGH! LET'S SMOKE SOME DOPE!' lyrics, just find them pathetic), such as Nazism and paedophilia. Of course, there are one or two exceptions - the one that springs to mind is that 'Mein Kampf' and other texts are interesting and useful in a historical context, and thus should not be censored. But the principal as a whole, I think, is sound.