That's Obscene
Published July 22, 1990 in North Shore Sunday.
What is
obscenity? There are people who will
tell you that obscenity is impossible to define, but they know it when they see
it. Not the kind of answer you would
want your reputation to depend upon, is it.
The legal
community, if it expects to get away with throwing people in jail for violating
obscenity laws, has to be a little less vague, so it applies the high legal
principle known as the duck test (if something waddles like a duck and quacks
like a duck, it's a duck). With
obscenity, the duck test goes like this – if something is totally lacking in
social value, appeals to our basest instincts, and violates common standards of
decency, it's obscene. Could be, but it
also could be describing a lot of politicians I know.
It was on
this shaky legal principle that a federal judge recently ordered the arrest of
a Florida record store owner for selling an album that had been deemed
obscene. The album, called As Nasty
As They Wanna Be, is by the Rap group 2 Live Crew. Truth is, I've never listened to the album
and I don't intend to. I haven't had
much use for popular music ever since the dark days of Disco, when the Bee Gees
sang in those irritatingly shrill falsetto voices about ah...ah...ah...ah...stayin'
aliiiive, sounding like they recorded the song while hopping in pain on the
hot sand of Revere Beach. So whether 2
Live Crew's album is obscene or not, I can't tell you. But the point is, neither can anybody else.
Obscenity,
like beauty, is in the eye (or, in this case, ear) of the beholder. About the only charge anybody could reasonably
make against 2 Live Crew and the record store owner is bad taste. And if bad taste were a crime, then any
overweight, Spandex-wrapped jogger who ever quivered and rolled down Main Street
looking like a waterbed during an earthquake, and any American who keeps
Roseanne at the top of the charts, and any public official who would extend
most-favored-nation status for the Chinese less than a year after Tiananmen
Square – could easily end up in the slammer.
But the
judge claimed that 2 Live Crew goes beyond mere tastelessness, and it does
sound like As Nasty As They Wanna Be transcends the accepted level of
stick-that-in-your-ear-you- middle-class-pigs shock effect. Nevertheless, if adults want to indulge in
that kind of entertainment, that's their business. If adults complain that their children are indulging in such entertainment,
that's the parents' problem, not the government's. People shouldn't expect the government to legislate morality for their
children – much less want it to.
One of the
problems with censorship is that it often has undesirable results. For example:
It makes performers like 2 Live Crew more popular than ever.
It hangs a criminal record on somebody who probably wouldn't otherwise have one.
It adds ammunition to young people's belief that adults are just a bunch of hypocrites, which drives them to look for role models among people like – guess who, Rap and Rock stars.
It's hard
to imagine that the sex and violence in As Nasty As They Wanna Be can be
any worse for kids than their nightly overdose of prime-time TV. By the time kids are out of high school, how
many bloody acts of murder and mutilation have they witnessed? How many times have they been fed idealized
sexual images designed to keep them tuned in and turned on to advertisers'
products? Rap might be more shocking
and explicit, but I doubt it can be any more powerful than so-called free TV.
Still,
most people will probably agree that popular music in general has resorted to
greater degrees of sex and lurid sensationalism over the years. More and more, it seems, anything goes –
and when Cole Porter wrote that, there wasn't even any such thing as MTV, much
less 2 Live Crew. But Porter was
talking about the times, not about music.
Music, like any art, is a mirror of its times. And if the lyrics of music like 2 Live Crew's are getting so
obscene that they can't be printed in a newspaper, isn't it about time that we
stopped killing the messenger and started getting the message?
