I'm With the Banned

“Pyjamas lyin’ side by side / Ladies’ nighties I have spied / I’ve often seen what goes inside / When I’m cleaning windows.” George Formby: When I’m Cleaning Windows (1937) – banned by the BBC

“Fuck what I said, it don’t mean shit now / Fuck the presents, might as well throw them out / Fuck all those kisses, it didn’t mean jack / Fuck you, you ho, I don’t want you back.” Eamon: Fuck It (I Don’t Want You Back) (2003) – played (with swearing removed) on daytime BBC radio stations, helping the song to Number 1 in the UK singles chart.

Just after a decade ago, in the aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, a number of songs were banned by a range of radio stations following what is known as the Clear Channel Memorandum. These included When Will I See You Again by The Three Degrees, Bullet With Butterfly Wings by The Smashing Pumpkins, and the entire recorded oeuvre of Rage Against The Machine. Some artists were forced into other action: Bush renamed single, Speed Kills, to The People That We Love, Jimmy Eat World similarly updated Bleed American to Salt, Sweat, Sugar, The Strokes pulled New York City Cops from all subsequent editions of debut album, Is This It, and hip-hop duo The Coup hastily removed copies of their recent LP, Party Mu$ic, from shops due to its eerily prescient cover art.

People’s capacity to be easily offended can never be under-estimated. One person’s harmless remark is another’s devastatingly cruel barb. However, at the time, I couldn’t help but think people would probably have more pressing concerns than reading too much into what was being played on the radio. Of course, it’s better to be on the safe side, but the eagerness to cover all bases and ensure no offence was caused was a little on the over-zealous side. The Strokes were being hailed as counter-cultural icons, the figureheads of a zeitgeist-capturing scene – was anybody really going to be horrifically offended by their proclamation that New York City Cops “ain’t too smart”?

Since then, taking offence and apologies have become more and more commonplace. Politicians and celebrities “mis-speak”, jokes are taken out of context, comedians argue the toss over whether words have transcended their original meaning or not. Meanwhile, Outraged Of Tunbridge Wells fires off an email to Ofcom if Katy Perry so much as glances salaciously at a television camera. However, there have been no blanket bans on songs in the UK in such a manner, temporary or otherwise, since 2001. In fact, the BBC now go as far as to say they have a policy to not ban songs on their radio stations, which are listened to millions of residents each day.

Is this a good thing or not? As British tabloid, the Sunday People, once asked: must we fling this filth at our pop kids?

The list of songs banned by the BBC is a fascinating historical document which shows changes in what is and isn’t deemed acceptable over time, as fashions, trends and culture develops. There’s an hilarious missive from the Dance Music Policy Committee, written in 1942, which states: “We have recently adopted a policy of excluding sickly sentimentality which, particularly when sung by certain vocalists, can become nauseating and not at all in keeping with what we feel to be the need of the public in this country in the fourth year of war.” In its time, the BBC has banned A Day In The Life by The Beatles (which, technically, is still banned), Mack The Knife by Bobby Darin and Gloomy Sunday by Billie Holiday, amongst others. However, in more recent times, they’ve happily played Because I Got High by Afroman (practically a love letter to marijuana), Fuck It (I Don’t Want You Back) by Eamon (and its reply, F.U.R.B. (Fuck You Right Back) by Frankee) and S&M by Rihanna (though it was referred to by the title, Come On, by DJs).

Ultimately, times have changed, but although censorship and regulatory bodies still loom large in everyday life, pop music now seems to be almost beyond such standards. Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand caused a national scandal by leaving an – admittedly, unprovoked and cruel – answer machine message for actor Andrew Sachs, yet it’s fine to play songs which glamorise the taking of illegal intoxicants. UK viewers complained in their thousands about the provocative performances of Rihanna and Christina Aguilera on The X Factor, but myriad hip-hop videos which demean women and portray them as scantily-clad objects of lust fulfilment raise little more than a shrug.

Earlier this year, The British Board of Film Classification refused to grant a certificate to The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence) due to its content, the first time this had happened for over two years (it was subsequently given an 18 certificate following the removal of several scenes). It makes you think what a song would have to do to cause similar consternation because it now seems – profanity before the watershed aside – anything goes. One thing’s for sure, we’ve certainly come a long way since Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds was deemed too offensive for the public’s sensitive ears.

There's a Riot Goin' On

“I thought that if you had an acoustic guitar, it meant that you were a protest singer. I can smile about it now but at the time it was terrible.” Morrissey, 1985 (The Smiths – Shakespeare’s Sister)

“Let’s just keep fighting the end of the world. We can hold hands and we can make plans, for life.” MurrayLightburn, 2003 (The Dears – No Cities Left)

Although the riots that recently ravaged the major cities of England were shocking, signs of unrest amongst the populace have been plain to see for a few years. Recession, the MPs' expenses scandal and the extraordinary hike in university tuition fees are just some of the events that have led to a feeling of disaffection and tension on the streets.

Clearly, a sustained period of rioting and looting is an extreme response, and the factors that caused such acts are far more complex and myriad than those mentioned above. Indeed, solving these problems will require a long and sustained period of action, though no-one yet knows how this should be approached. It’s an unusual case; whereas the people normally rise up against their rulers or authority, these riots saw local businesses and homes attacked. It's plain to see that something has gone badly wrong.

However, it’s not the first time there have been economic problems in England and it’s not the first time people have taken to the streets to voice their unhappiness. Pop music often mirrors the mood of the nation. Under the previous Conservative government there were a number of politically-charged records in the charts, but now – where there’s a Conservative government in all but name – the stars of today have been curiously quiet.

The last major riots in the UK were almost exactly thirty years ago. The soundtrack to those events was The Specials’ Ghost Town, a sparse, unsettling song about urban decay and inner city violence. Ghost Town spent three weeks at number 1 in the charts – it’s a fantastic record but the fact it reflected major events of the time was also fundamental to its success. In fact, watch any reports or footage of those riots, and there’s a good chance Ghost Town will have been chosen to accompany the pictures.

In 2011, what do we get atop the charts as the anthem of our distress? Cher Lloyd’s Swagger Jagger. Although it’s an unhappy accident, there’s something that chimes with the attitudes of the rioters and theself-centred, confrontational nature of Lloyd’s song (“You can’t stop looking at me, so get off of my face”). That said, it’s unlikely any of the rioters were inspired by the words of a teenage reality show alumnus.

Protest songs have a rich and vibrant history. In the early to mid-20th Century, folk singers would travel round with little more than a guitar on their back, singing songs of oppression, deceit and skullduggery. These acts were particularly popular in New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1960s, a scene which spawned Bob Dylan, a keen student of Woody Guthrie amongst others. It’s difficult to imagine an artist of Dylan’s popularity today writing something as acerbic (yet articulate) as Masters Of War (except Dylan himself, perhaps).

As the 60s became the 70s, Curtis Mayfield wasn’t exactly shy about saying what he felt, and Marvin Gaye released the timeless What’s Going On. The 80s saw the newly mainstream hip-hop, hardcore punk and Billy Bragg pick up the baton, while the riot grrrls and Rage Against The Machine did for the 90s. In the 21st Century though, a swathe of post-9/11 tracks aside, the protest song seems to be a dying art.

Why could this be? Maybe it’s because the pursuit of commercial success comes before the desire to actually say something of any substance. Maybe it’s because the artists of today aren’t as politically engaged as those of yesteryear. Maybe it’s because rock and roll is now so much part of the establishment, it would seem mightily hypocritical to be rallying against it. Either way, modern artists tend to make any protest-like feelings they possess relatively opaque in their songs. It appears the only recent act to buck this trend and make a real statement against something was Green Day, with their rock opera,American Idiot. In a ridiculous turn of events, The Ordinary Boys started with a mod-like album of scathing attacks on modern British life, Over The Counter Culture, before their lead singer, Preston, became a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother, married a glamour model and ended up as a gossip magazine staple.

So, who is the new Bob Dylan or Billy Bragg? Where is the next Public Enemy? In the wake of the tuition fee protests in London, Brighton-based act, The Agitator, were pushed to prominence. However, further interrogation revealed them to be all fur coat and no knickers, full as they were of clichéd posturing and empty sloganeering. Their rallying cry of, “Now is the time to agitate,” is hopelessly vague and unlikely to overthrow a schoolgirl, let alone a government. In times of desperate need, “agitating” a group makes you a minor annoyance rather than a revolutionary.

Protest music is the music of the people; the lingua franca of the streets. As previously mentioned, it’s difficult for guitar-based music to become that when it’s such a commodity. In the UK, at least, it looks like hip-hop and grime could lead the way. Music journalist Dorian Lynskey - someone who should know a thing or two about protest music, having written a weighty tome on the subject (33 Revolutions Per Minute) - recently mentioned how the lyrics of Dizzee Rascal’s 2009 single, Dirtee Cash, seem particularly prescient given recent events (“Let me take you down to London city, where the attitude’s bad and the weather is shitty”). Dizzee probably has enough influence to become some sort of figurehead for the disaffected, though as his stock rises, how long can he really connect to the feelings of the people? Hip-hop artists generally start their careers stressing how much like us they are, but that attitude often changes when sponsorship, sexual attention and dollar signs come calling. Over the coming months, it will be interesting to see what comes through from new and exciting artists.

It could be argued that the power of song has been diminished, but perhaps this is only the case in the capitalist, commercialised west. When citizens took to the streets of Cairo earlier this year to protest about the reign of Hosni Mubarak, singers armed with acoustic guitars rallied the crowds into the small hours. The protest movement is still relevant after all. Maybe it’s only in times of real strife that people feel the need to articulate their frustrations in such a way. It just seems a shame that in the western world, it’s a tradition that’s falling by the wayside.