From: dmac@julia.math.ucla.edu (saki)
Subject: Re: can you believe it?
Summary: Banning "Run For Your Life" and/or other songs 
Organization: UCLA Mathematics Department
Date: Sat, 12 Dec 92 00:38:35 GMT

In article <1992Dec10.164710.4189@news.columbia.edu> brennan@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Joseph Brennan) writes:
>A radio station deciding not to play "Run for your life" isn't
>censorship.  Some radio stations don't play any of the Beatles' music.
>If they don't feel like playing RFYL, why should they?  As long as
>the decision is theirs, this is not a censorship question.

There's a bit of a distinction to be made.

There are indeed stations that play no Beatles music at all---classical,
middle-of-the-road (as they used to be called), "talk/chat" stations,
country-western. Their playlists are restricted to music that caters
to a particular listenership.

But a pop station that *does* include Beatles music---and for some
reason decides to exclude a particular example because of lyrics
deemed offensive to one group or another---is practicing a type of
censorship, by strict dictionary definition ("deleting material
considered harmful to the interests of the organization", i.e. the
listenership). Maybe you'd like to distinguish this as banning a
record, which in practice it is, rather than censoring. Beatles
music has been banned before. Recall the uproar over the alleged
"more popular than Jesus" remark, which was hysterically misinterpreted
by some American radio stations in 1966 and resulted not only in banning
the Boys' tunes but in widespread destruction of the physical items of
offense, to wit, the LPs.

If this station in question feels that "Run For Your Life" is offensive
to women and ought to be given the boot, so to speak, I suppose that's
their decision. But if the women who brought up this complaint were
being thorough about the whole thing, they'd need to demand the banning
of a number of other tunes, don't you think? I mean, why pick on just
the Fabs?

Censoring songs isn't new. Some hits of the sixties were either recorded
in two versions or relooped in studio to produce less offensive versions;
viz., "Stagger Lee", which has the "nice" version wherein the principals
forgive each other their sins, and the "violent" version wherein one
gambling partner shoots the other rather graphically; or "Under the
Boardwalk", where the line "We'll be making love" is changed to "We'll
be falling in love" (this was 1963, which suggests that the phrase was
undergoing a change in meaning...and nervous Nellies at the record
company were afraid what listening teens might do under this song's
influence!) And one of Lou Christie's hits disappeared entirely from
the playlists, to my recollection---"Rhapsody In The Rain" (1965)...it
was the wrong kind of rhapsody, folks, to be broadcasting to the 
youthful listenership; but its follow-up, "Lightning Strikes", was
allowed to stand.

But if the feminists want to go after real substance, they ought
to attack the oeuvre of the Stones, it seems. Certainly "Under My
Thumb", "Backstreet Girl", and "Stupid Girl" all refer to women as
less than assertive creatures, even suggesting that the ladies in
question have few, if any, redeeming qualities. The Kinks' "Sunny
Afternoon" suggests that the girlfriend of the protagonist left
him because of his "drunkenness and cruelty"---isn't it inappropriate
to air *his* side of the story and not hers? Gary Puckett and the
Union Gap became semi-famous with a group of songs about seductive
young teases---is this politically correct? The Who's "Pictures of
Lily" is about pornography; followers of Andrea Dworkin and Catherine
MacKinnon, who favor its nationwide ban, ought to look into *this*
song. And what about earlier hits from the sixties like Joanie Sommers'
"Johnny Get Angry" (1963)---"Give me the biggest lecture I ever had",
begs the girlfriend; or Shelly Fabares' "Johnny Angel" (1962), a girl
who sits and waits for the phone to ring rather than going out with
other people---are *these* proper role models? :-)

You see what I mean.

It strikes me as odd that a station would respond in the way it
has without examining its motives for doing so. Banning "Run For Your
Life", it seems to me, sets a dangerous precedent, especially since
it's being done almost on the demand of a group of women who certainly
don't understand that this is not the place to battle the feminist
cause. McCarthyism, by any other name, is just as frightening as it
was in the fifties. And in the battle to be politically correct, it
seems to me that something vital---free will, freedom of speech, tolerance
of other ideas, no matter how offensive or "incorrect" they may be---is
being lost in the mix.
--
"Some of these tunes are purely instrumental, such as 'Looking Glass',
'Catswalk' and 'Winston's Walk', and others were composed with the modern
audience in mind, tunes like 'Thinking of Linking', 'The One After 909'...."
---------------------------------------------------saki (dmac@math.ucla.edu)