Jennifer Anderson

Letters

A matter of taste

From Socialist Review, No. 177, July/August 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

I would like to add to your Briefing on censorship (June SR). As a regular listener to One FM, its absurd and anomalous approach to censorship never ceases to amaze me. Daily Telegraph readers would vehemently deny it, but the BBC is in fact paranoid and conservative.

Songs are no longer ‘banned’, they are ‘not playlisted’ in the same way that Reservoir Dogs is ‘awaiting certification’. The BBC is keen to emphasis its commercial impartiality, but a place on its playlist can make or break a single. Those which are not put on its daytime playlist are very unlikely to enter the Top 40; these are usually independent record companies’ singles but they refused to playlist Movin’ On Special, Apache Indian’s personal response to the election of Derek Beackon.

Overtly political songs are usually excluded. The BBC cannot be accused of right wing bias as there is nothing expressing the sentiment, ‘Isn’t Mrs Thatcher great?’ Chumbawamba’s second single We Are The World was banned for commending direct action to build a socialist revolution. U2’s Sunday Bloody Sunday was too controversial. Leftfield and Lydon’s Open Up, containing the lyric, ‘Burn Hollywood, burn/Take down Tinseltown,’ was not to be played near news bulletins after the Malibu fires. Matty Hanson of Credit to the Nation is a ‘controversial’ rapper because he told us that ‘enough is enough’ where racial violence and fascism are concerned; the line ‘Big deal/I smoke spliff’ from Teenage Sensation was altered to omit the word ‘spliff’, making it sound ridiculous.

The BBC also fancies itself as an arbiter of ‘taste’. The Smashing Pumpkins refused to change a line from Disarm: ‘Cut that little child up inside of me,’ and so were not allowed to play on Top Of The Pops. Come Baby Come by K7 was on Top Of The Pops – although it was full of puerile unoriginal innuendo and grossly offensive to women. Reinforcing sexual stereotypes is clearly more ‘tasteful’ than allowing unusual artistic expression.

However, I always manage a smile when the BBC spectacularly gets it wrong. Rock Star by Hole was played on Radio One at 7.30pm: Courtney Love screams ‘REVOLUTION’ and ‘FUCK’ (four times) as well as the line, ‘Well I went to school in a fascist state,’ about nice old Uncle Sam. Only last week the Top 40 show featured a Nine Inch Nails single with the lyric, ‘I want to fuck you like an animal’ (four times), played at 5.20 p.m. Taste, decency and respect – if they had any Nothing Has Been Proved by the Pet Shop Boys and Dusty Springfield about the Profumo affair would not have been played the day after Stephen Milligan’s body was found. It is amusing but puts paid to their pretensions of decorum.

Jennifer Anderson
Kettering

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