Sensitivity during tragic times isn’t always censorship

Currently making the rounds through mass e-mails, band message boards and print media is a list circulated within Clear Channel Communications, the United States' largest owner of radio stations. This piping-hot conversation piece is a compilation of songs deemed as possibly "lyrically inappropriate" for play after the World Trade Center and Pentagon incidents.

The list has largely been circulated and discussed under the guise that the listed songs are "banned" from play on Clear Channel stations; this claim is untrue. Apparently assembled by various program directors at Clear Channel stations, the list has simply been offered to help stations keep sensitivity in mind during the last few weeks. Individual stations have followed, consulted or ignored this list. Others have played songs not on the list and received listener complaints, such as Washington's WASH 97.1 FM, which heard from a concerned listener after a DJ played Kool and the Gang's "Celebrate." But at some of the company's New York stations, listed songs such as John Lennon's "Imagine" have been among the most requested and played.

In a time of crisis in the United States, there will inevitably be a debate over censorship and sensitivity. Clear Channel has not censored its stations' play lists beyond the damage radio deregulation has already wrought on our nation's airwaves by limiting diversity in voices during the gradual consolidation of national media (the company in question owns over 1,000 stations). That, however, is another column for another week. What remains open for discussion is not Clear Channel's fictional impropriety, but the appearance of such impropriety and the attention and debate it has incited.

The generation of this list appears to me as a potentially positive movement that arose from emotional concern, but I don't know the motives of each person who contributed to it. The idea that songs were temporarily dropped because of financial concerns about offending advertising demographics is almost too cynical to stomach, but radio is big business. The program directors had reason for concern. Radio profits are garnered from advertising, and advertising revenue is generated on the basis of listener reaction, so removing songs from play during a time of crisis because of high potential for complaints is too complex an issue to be addressed in strict terms of right and wrong. Financial issues may have been considered, but I like to believe that calls on play lists were driven by emotional and sympathetic initiatives. More than 5,000 people died two weeks ago, and radio stations considering not spinning already worn copies of AC/DC's "Highway to Hell" for a few weeks hardly seems worth any attention.

Individual stations choose what they play, and self-censorship in the name of sensitivity is not necessarily a bad thing. For my first radio show at KSCR this semester, I composed the play list two weeks in advance. The attacks occurred during the week following the writing of that play list. When the time came a week later to get ready for the show, I looked at what I'd scribbled two weeks previously, took out a pen and crossed out The Clash's "City of the Dead," which isn't about planes crashing into buildings, much less anyone dying in any physical sense. It's about being young and bored in the town you grew up in. I took it off despite the rather obvious lyrical meanings, because it didn't feel right to play it. There would have been an appearance of impropriety, and I felt that willfully creating that appearance was just as bad as playing something obviously mean-spirited. My American Civil Liberties Union card didn't disintegrate as my pen marked the song's title off the page or when I put the disc back in its folder.

Censorship is a valid issue in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, but the Clear Channel list is ultimately a faulty impetus for debate.A more suitable issue would be something like bands altering track lists on upcoming CDs. The Strokes' debut album has already been issued in the U.K., and an import version exists in the U.S. The domestic release will arrive in stores in two weeks, and there are rumors that it will have one track missing from the earlier versions. Radio stations issued advance copies of the album have been asked to not play the song "New York City Cops." The chorus of the song quotes a girl as saying New York City cops / They ain't too smart. But the Strokes are an immensely talented but largely unknown band, and given the present musical climate, the release of their first album probably won't make huge waves in the mainstream anyway.

Sensitivity isn't always censorship. The Clear Channel list and the Strokes' album were not generated or regulated by any government agency. Tipper Gore isn't holding semi-legal hearings in front of Congress. Sensitivity in the short run is not going to keep all Rage Against the Machine songs off the radio forever (yes, the Clear Channel list often warns of two or three songs from a single band, but Rage gets the sole "all songs" distinction), though hopefully Savage Garden's "Crash and Burn" will be forgotten during its time off the air. Censorship is a vital issue, but the debate in the music world these past few weeks has been argued on an illusion. The national moods are temporary; music is forever.

Copyright 2001 by the Daily Trojan. All rights reserved.
This article was published in Vol. 144, No. 20 (Tuesday, September 25, 2001), beginning on page 7 and ending on page 9.