HW & censorship

[Doug Pearson]

Sorry for the long post ...

On, Sat, 12 Dec 1998 19:46:30 +0100, christmu at EUNET.NO wrote:

>>From a strange urge to find Hawkwind in NME:
>http://www.nme.com/scripts/frameserver.cgi?http://nme.com/main.html in NME
>Nov. 9, 98.....

... and there was another article on the same compilation in SFWeekly, who
are always good for a laugh.  It's at:
http://www.sfweekly.com/1998/current/music2.html, or free in metal boxes
around the San Francisco area.  Here's some choice bits:

>Banarama
>Various Artists
>Smashed Hits
>(Index on Censorship)
>By Gavin McNett

>Sometimes an idea is so good that it’s hard to believe how long it took
for someone to come up with it. This is certainly the case with the book
and CD package on censored music just released by the international human
rights magazine Index on Censorship.

>But unlike the book, the CD offers a coherent -- if simplistic -- answer.
Censorship, it tells us, is bad, whether it’s of Hawkwind, Fela Kuti, or
the Tibetan Singing Nuns. That simple answer is easy to swallow when the
music is top-notch: marvelous reggae like Eric Donaldson’s “Stand Up”
(banned on South African radio), or Fela Kuti’s “Sorrow, Tears, and Blood”
(one of the many songs that got the late Nigerian star jailed repeatedly),
which also drive home the point that American soul music didn’t just
disappear into a vat of syrup by the late ’70s. It had, by that point,
moved its spiritual capital overseas, to dozens of Detroits and
Philadelphias in the Third World. Also included are Ian Dury’s “Spasticus
Autisticus,” pulled by the BBC, and the “agitpop” band Flannel’s parody of
Oasis’ “Wonderwall”; something big and dancey by the sound-system
collective Exodus (not the thrash-metal band); and a song by the North
African chanteuse Malouma. And, again, Hawkwind.

>I think the world would undoubtedly be a better place if most of
Hawkwind’s records were banned, instead of just 1972’s “Urban Guerilla,”
yanked by the BBC for fear of IRA incitement. The band was actually pretty
good at that point, being as they were a roaring proto-punk group cleverly
disguised as a tribe of silly hippies.

[the article first caught my eye because the first sentence in the above
paragraph, up to the first comma, appears in very large print in the sidebar]

>But if Menuhin would concede that Marilyn Manson and his corporate
handlers are also “harnessing the potency of music for financial gain,” and
perhaps hardening youth against music (and life) in the process, then
what’s the difference between Manson’s shtick and Hawkwind’s
“transgressive” radical-chic posturing in 1972? “Urban Guerilla” was
suppressed because of its casual, and undoubtedly self-serving, treatment
of terrorism during an IRA campaign on the British mainland. Could it have
been justifiable to ban radio play of “Urban Guerilla” because of its
label’s (United Artists) willingness to profit from the deaths of innocent
civilians?

... as a friend of mine once said, "irony is often lost on children of this
age."

        -Doug
         ceres at sirius.com