Censorship in Popular Music: A Research Perspective

Exploring censorship in popular music

Censorship touches virtually every corner of popular music. State authorities, religious leaders, radio programmers, record companies, parents, and musicians themselves all restrict musical expression. This practice is familiar in authoritarian regimes and places where legal protections are weak, but it also occurs in democracies—corporate censorship being a prominent example. Six articles featured here investigate diverse facets of music censorship, a subject whose relevance shows no sign of fading.

Popular music attracts censorship far more often than many other cultural forms, though the absolute number of outright bans may be modest when set against the total output of the field (Street, “Pop Star” 50). One reason for this heightened scrutiny is the rapid dissemination of popular music through multiple media channels. Ideas, once aired, can spread broadly—to the distress of those who oppose them. The inherently oppositional nature of pop itself draws fire (Peddie xvii). Few consistent patterns emerge in the specific triggers for censorship, but power always lies at the root of the question (see Cloonan). Music functions as a sharp marker of social belonging and exclusion; lyrics, or even the sounds themselves—including sonic references to particular places and communities—can be labeled offensive or improper. A tune might be silenced for seeming illegitimate, using the “wrong” key or instruments, or a multitude of other reasons. Because the institutions and agents behind these restrictions are complex, exploring the boundaries of free expression offers an important avenue for popular music scholarship—politically and academically.

Liberal opinion tends to see censorship as detrimental to culture, yet many acknowledge the need to curb hate speech. This orientation is tied to protecting young people from potentially traumatic content, to preventing friction or dangerous activities, and ultimately to preserving social peace—where respect for others’ rights is paramount. This stance, grounded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, often collides with more absolutist views of free expression. When a society acts to secure social peace, its own sensitivities rarely undergo critical scrutiny, while comparable steps in other societies are widely branded repressive. John Street argues compellingly that the capacity and will to censor, along with the motivations driving it, must be studied in context (Music and Politics 14). Such an approach opens the field to the narratives that the humanities can interpret and makes censorship a challenging subject for research.

The Researching Music Censorship (RMC) network came together in 2010 with funding from NordForsk, a cross-Nordic research body. From the start, the network set a clear goal:

To question the often uncomplicated and simplified definitions of the concept in popular discourse, and based on a firm understanding of music as a socially organized means of communication and through identification and documentation of discourses on restrictions and regulations in musical expression, the participating researchers will examine global, regional and local frameworks for music censorship. (RMC website)

The RMC network concluded formally in late 2014, but its richest work has only lately appeared. Nearly fifty scholars and PhD candidates from Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden participated, joined by associates elsewhere. Their backgrounds spanned popular music studies, music education, ethnomusicology, law, and religious studies. Members shared their findings at conferences, in papers and articles, and through media appearances and university teaching. Out of numerous seminar and conference presentations, 25 articles were chosen for publication. Seven of these were released in a 2015 special issue of Danish Musicology Online. A volume comprising both theory and case studies, based largely on papers from the international conference on music censorship staged by RMC in Copenhagen in June 2013, was scheduled for release by Cambridge Scholars in 2017. Additionally, the PhD cohort—several of whom now hold doctorates—prepared a collection to be published in 2017 as a Freemuse report (freemuse.org).

The six case studies assembled in this special issue explore censorship through diverse lenses. The first two examine shootings at schools in the USA (Carpenter) and Finland (Anttonen), probing moral implications surrounding acts of music. Starting from the supposition that heavy metal or hardcore music can incite violence—an allegation the authors challenge—both reflect on the strategic self-censorship that artists inevitably face. The next two articles adopt a historical viewpoint, looking back at how spaces for musical expression were negotiated in two former Eastern Bloc countries. Rauhut’s investigation into East Germany finds that the church carved out niches for jazz, blues, rock, and punk, while also nurturing a discourse of dissent. Husák, focusing on rock in Czechoslovakia, shows how a deeply suspicious state’s censorial constraints were countered by resistant artists and enthusiasts, who found alternative channels for communication through rock. In both examples, socialist or Marxist ideology decisively colored official attitudes toward Western-style music. Both contributors concur that music played a politically subversive role. From a perspective that pairs these studies with the first two, one sees that the actual or imagined social impact of music is among the central issues in this area of study.

The fifth article (Kallio) takes up de facto censorship in Finnish music pedagogy, where “unwanted music” is quietly excluded. The author claims that educational aims for school music effectively produce censorial procedures that exclude most popular musics. Here, the teacher emerges as an unwilling gatekeeper—Kallio also terms this role “ethical agent”—a position at odds with ideals of inclusion and democracy. Regulations surrounding commercial music supply and the recorded industry are the focus of the sixth article (Krogh and Kaargaard Nielsen). They analyze how a Danish-market commercial product remains subject to legal and moral constraints and to “corporate music self-censorship” in the US market; they identify this dynamic as “spillover censorship.” The same study challenges its own framework, considering whether “censorship” properly describes situations in which anonymous actors aim simply to meet market demands methodically.

Both Carpenter and Anttonen examine scenarios in which movements of violent events bring musicians’ works to involuntary prominence, forcing these artists into uncomfortable decisions about whether to alter performances and recordings. Carpenter focuses on repercussions stemming from an artist’s willingness to acknowledge (or being forced to address) a link between a particular piece of music and the violent behavior committed by someone else. That trajectory, the argument goes, easily leads to overcautious creativity. Anttonen proposes that such a situation can be better understood via seven separate modes of censorship discourse. Through these categories, a decision to withhold a piece associated with a school shooting can be read both as an act of respect and mature artistic judgment and conversely as a sign of inauthenticity—that the band never truly meant its earlier expressions. Actor-led self-censorship can pose new dangers for a band’s reputation, yet it may simultaneously generate fresh audience interest. These pieces jointly confound the common notion that censorship is conducted only by centralized government apparatuses; the artist’s own persona as a public figure also mandates scrutiny.

Rauhut and Husák both elucidate how countercultural spaces that offered resistance to the strictures of censorship proliferated in the postwar years before 1989. In East Germany, religious institutions created hospitable rooms—substantial ones—for jazz, blues, rock, and punk, establishing latitude for contentious ideas. Husák demonstrates how strategies to crush rock in Czechoslovakia were steadily weakened by artists and enthusiastic listeners delving alternate communication channels. Most mentions even moderate Soviet politics or Marxism profoundly framed those systems’ scorn toward Western popular music. Both authors point to music’s specifically political-subversive potential and demonstrate why examining music’s believed or concrete effect upon society at large is considered so central to censorship scholarship.

Kallio overlays the “deviantization” concept onto popular music, showing the process that categorizes certain songs as teachable and in turn, eliminates others. Teachers thus unconsciously accept certain protocols preferring “good” playable sound sources that express national curriculum aims at arithmetic-defined affective registers. Here their latitude resembles authorized curation, which offers edges regarding how democratic education ordinarily wants equal occasion to emanate, conduct created new directions absent or reduced. Their title summons censorship-spowing machinery plus decision makers. At the record-industrial-level are Krogh and Kaargaard Nielsen’s complementary case-building sets. Though earlier inspections mostly pick situations that match nationwide spans (border-defined ones), the market extends Danish shelves full alongside wherever premises hook location, exposing productions predicated by compliance from abroad somewhere but also maybe not: they concluded as deceptively difficult property definition(s) drift across supply thresholds into possibly sub-vert their own claim—sincerely: is “censorship” itself valid an encounter from blurred-author role definitions thus known to handle?

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