Banning Lyrics from Songs

Written by Phatriff on Fri, 04/05/2007 - 12:12pm in Articles censorship

Banning words in music There has been a recent news article where a well respected and long term leader of the Hip Hop scene  wants to ban particular words in music's lyrics because of the offense they can cause to certain people.  The words Simmons wanted to ban were Bitch, Ho and Nigga as they are deemed to be racist and sexist. Now  i partially agree with Simmons on this but the idea of censorship in music heavily unnerves me and it's a  dangerous road to go down. See i don't think words should be banned, i don't believe they can really be banned. Words like 'Nigga'  and 'Ho' for example are slang, putting a restriction on the use of these words will just lead to new  words being invented. In fact, equivalents already exist in the musical vocabulary.  The thing is nothing  can really be banned, people can still practice it, you can't just eradicate words from existence and  even if the words were made fully illegal then it would take a few generations for the words to be lost  because social changes take time and by then it's too late. The hip hop industry is very famous for inventing words, slang, phrases and language, the genre is also  very famous for expressing itself especially about the restrictions, censorship, laws of society so such  ban will only add fuel to Hip Hop's fire. So maybe this whole thing is a money spinner as all these  artist rush to be pioneers of a new set of explicits and gain publicity. Simmons and his label will  definitely get a lot of publicity from it. I believe that no music should be censored. I think that the public should have the choice of what they  want listen to. If a DJ decides he wants to play offensive music and people complain then the Dj will be  removed. If a Dj decides to ban music with explicits then people will go to other stations and clubs.  Music is already screened for explicits and releases must be marked appropriately if they don't pass the  screening but the underlining thing is that the music is still made available to the public albeit with  restrictions on the minimum age of the purchaser. I think the current system works fine;  i can walk into  a shop and buy any style of music i like. I am a man of choice and if i find out a store is censoring  music it's going to make me think what other music i am missing out on going there. Quite simply i will  shop elsewhere where i have the choice. Censorship can only be bad for the music industry. Watering down music will only lead to decreased sales.  Music is an expression after all.