From: j.stokes@bohm.anu.edu.au (Jason Stokes) Subject: [Music-Censorship-Notes] Senate committee wants to ban suicide lyrics Newsgroups: aus.censorship,aus.music Date: Monday, 16 Feb 1997 Well, here we go again.. The Senate Select Committee on Community Standards has made new proposals for censorship of music lyrics relating to suicide. Friday's [14-FEB-97] The Australian has an article on page 1 under the headline "Beatles, Nirvana face suicide song censors". The proposals, released on Thursday, recommend a change to the Australian Record Industry Association's newly instigated censorship code to ban music featuring "music glorifying or inciting suicide." The article gives some examples; the code could now ban Nirvana's "I Hate Myself and Want to Die", the Beatles' "Yer Blues", Pearl Jam's "Jeremy" and Silverchair's "Suicidal Dream." It also mentions Metallica, Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest as bands that may run into censorship trouble as they've all been accused of inciting suicide in their time. ARIA's response has been entirely predictable based on their past history of knuckling under to the government at the first sign of trouble - ARIA president Emmanual Candi has welcomed the proposal. He's quoted as saying only the most extreme references to suicide would be banned: "Explicit lyrics that gratuitously deal with instructions on criminal violence is the category they are talking about.. explicit hardcore stuff, not passing references or ponderings." The article gives some quotes from the report itself: "The repetitive and nature of many popular lyrics also leads to a fear that a depressed adolescent may succumb to negative messages - such as lyrics promoting suicide as a means of resolving personal problems. "Violent acts, whether directed towards the self as in suicides or towards others in mass shootings tend to engender a copycat element." This looks like the big one for censorship in 1997. It's not just music, the proposals are part of a wide range of proposed limitations on speech in the media. Early rumblings from this particular committee were not good. (Remember, it was formed after the Port Arthur Massacre and made all kinds of pious declamations about "violence in the media". So as well as hating Bryant for killing 47 people, we can now hate him for giving the government a pretext to crack down on us all.) It looks like the final report is a shocker. It's interesting to note the hypocrisy of all this - one wag has already written in "The Australian" saying he'll really miss "Waltzing Matilda" (and Waltzing Matilda most certainly fits within the definition - drown yourself rather than submit to unjust authority) but of course ARIA/The Government (there is no distinction in regards to this matter) will dodge the full horror of its broad definition with the usual appeals to "exceptions for artistic merit." They'll never tell us what artistic merit is, of course. There's also hypocrisy in that morbid poems by Sylvia Plath or extremely violent books like "In The Cut" remain unregulated, but the hand of government feels free to come down on song lyrics. Either books are next on their list, or they can only get away with this kind of thing when ensured of liberal apathy. It seems that literature is sufficiently marginal in Australian society that it's left pretty much alone, but music, being so much more popular and widespread and of course popular with teenagers, is a prime target for censorship. Frankly, between Emmanual "crocodile tears" Candi and the Government mental purity league, I've had it up to here. This is the last straw. I now pledge to go in full scale activist mode. I expect they'll be a lot of response to this report within the free speech/civil liberties community (such as it is in Australia) so I've requested a copy of the committee's report from parliament house and I'll be contacting the free speech committee pledging my help with a response. My advice to you all is to do the same. The committee is supposedly going to publish the report electronically, but when I called they were "having problems with the system" and didn't know when it would be ready. The situation is critical and I think we desparately need a web page devoted to this stuff. Since the ANU refuses to give web pages to undergraduates, can anyone offer web space for resources relating to Australian music censorship? I don't have that much to put on it right now, but as this progresses I'm sure we will get a lot more. Danny? Anyone?
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