Review: Taboo Tunes: A History of Banned Bands and Censored Songs

By Peter Blecha. Backbeat Books, 214 pages, $17.95 (paper).

Music may have charms to soothe the savage breast, but it can also angry up the blood – to variously constructive, liberating, or oppressive results. Peter Blecha's excellent Taboo Tunes: A History of Banned Bands and Censored Songs chronicles the history of popular music-related controversies and crackdowns in recent decades. It offers a studious yet highly entertaining reminder that the relationships among art, commerce, morality, and free speech are forever being renegotiated, often without our consent.

Though his focus is primarily on America in the rock 'n' roll era, Blecha sees melodic subversion and suppression going way back, reaching way wide: Ancient China's Qin dynasty "purged" music-making tools altogether, while fourth-century BCE Rome sentenced singers of offensive songs to death by clubbing. Today government strangleholds on potentially individual thought-encouraging music are particularly asphyxiating in fundamentalist Islamic circles and in China, where some traditions die very hard.

But then, rockin' in the free world, as Neil Young once caustically put it, has seldom been an e-ticket ride either. Ragtime, jazz, and anything that encouraged "suggestive" dancing were targets of conservative outcry long before R&B came along. It started a fire that rock then fanned sky-high.

Behind the arguments of concerned grown-ups was the racist fear that innocent (white) youth would be "corrupted" by the "savage beat," resulting in who knew what "sexual atrocities" and miscellaneous other "straight out of the jungle" behaviors. As one Alabama White Citizens' Council bluntly put it in 1954, "Rock 'n' roll will pull the white man down to the level of the negro." Oh God, no!

Racism and raunch remained popular sticking points, though by the late '60s panic had shifted to acid rock's presumed prodrug propaganda, usually said to be couched in the ever popular "subliminal message." (Blecha confirms that, like the mythical spider in the Bubble Yum, no actual S.M.s were ever found – until musicians amused by all the paranoia responded by planting joke ones.) This led to the embarrassing phenomenon of certain communities, stores, and radio stations banning not just dubiously "druggy" songs – Peter, Paul, and Mary's "Puff the Magic Dragon" being the most famous example – but also ones that were genuinely antidrug.

More recently, watchdogs have sniffed around for evidence of musical Satanism, radical-left sentiment (very few far-right songs have ever been publicly decried), antiwar leanings, and so on. Punk, rap, metal, and disco all rattled prudes many times over. Whenever the industry attempts to protect itself (and sensitive listeners) by creating something like those parental advisory stickers, it only provides (as movie X and NC-17 ratings did) an excuse for retailers to exclude controversial product outright.

Much covered in later chapters will be familiar: Tipper Gore, N.W.A., and the Dixie Chicks, among other subjects. Still, Blecha's escalating outrage is refreshingly partisan, and many morsels throughout Taboo Tunes are revelatory. (Did you know Art Linklater's suicidal 20-year-old daughter – famously held up as "murdered by the people who manufacture and sell LSD" after her despondent 1969 high-rise leap – was in fact completely free of that substance, according to the autopsy report?)

Bush Jr.'s canny exploitation and condemnation of popular music that does or doesn't further his warmongering agenda suggest our cultural minders are more aware than ever that music is a powerful tool. Given the increasing squeeze on dissenting voices, hummable or not, we must be cautious lest certain of that tool's many uses be wrested away from universal access. (Dennis Harvey)