SKIRMISH ONE: DISCO, POP’S INTERNAL WAR

At the outset of the 1970s, rock & roll still prided itself on its aspirations to revolution. From rockabilly to glitter rock, it was music that not only articulated and vented the frustrations of cultural outsiders, but that also won those upstarts a station and voice that they might otherwise have been denied. But in the mid-1970s, a genuine revolution took place within the bounds of pop culture—and rock & roll hated it. The upheaval was called “disco,” and it subverted not just rock’s familiar notions of fun and form, but also its pretended ideals of community and meaning. It was a music that, without rhetoric or stridor, seized and transformed the pop mainstream and its long-unchallenged star systems, and it empowered cultural outlanders that rock & roll had snubbed or simply abandoned. In the process, disco became the biggest commercial pop genre of the 1970s—actually, the biggest pop music movement of all time—and in the end, its single-minded, booming beat proved to be the most resilient and enduring stylistic breakthrough of the last twenty years or so. In short, disco—the pop revolution that was quickly overthrown by an ungrateful pop world—figured out a way to outlast its own demise, a way to remain dominant, while feigning an ignoble death.

So how did this cultural rupture happen? How did disco become both one of the most popular and reviled mileposts in pop music’s history?

To answer these questions, one has to look at the confluence of musical history and social longing that produced the disco explosion. Musically, disco was a logical outgrowth of how soul music had developed in the 1960s, and how it had adapted in order to survive in the early 1970s. From the terse protofunk of James Brown and the spare but accentuated dynamics of the Stax-Volt sound, disco derived its obsession with a simple but relentlessly driving beat; and from the pop savvy of Motown, as well as from the suave romanticism of such Philadelphia-based producers and writers as Thom Bell (who had defined the Spinners’ sound) and the team of Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff (who worked with the O’Jays, the Intruders, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, and Teddy Pendergrass, among others), disco gained its undying passion for elegant, swooning, sexy surfaces that were their own irrefutable rewards. But disco was more than music as sound, or sound as style or artifice. It also aimed to reaffirm one of music’s most time-worn purposes: namely, its power as a social unifier, as a means of bringing together an audience that shared a certain social perspective and that found meaning and pleasure in the ritual of public dancing. In this sense, disco had roots in traditions as urbane as Big Band and Swing music; as rowdy as blues-style juke joints and country-western honky-tonks; and as sexually irrepressible as early rock & roll and its cleaned-up public exposition, “American Bandstand.”

More immediately, though, disco extended (in fact, revived) some of the most joyful ambitions of 1960s pop. In the early 1960s—before Motown or the Beatles—the media largely perceived pop music as little more than a medium of transient dance styles, like the Twist, Mashed Potato, and Hully Gully, that lived out their heady but brief vogues in crowded and intoxicating public venues, such as New York’s Peppermint Lounge, and numerous other discotheques scattered across America and Europe. When the 1960s exploded with the British Invasion and soul, it became apparent that rock was more than an agency for dancing—though clearly, dancing was now more fun, more an assertion of generational identity and power, than ever before. But as rock became more ambitious, more “significant,” it gradually abdicated the dance floor. Though it isn’t often acknowledged, the San Francisco hippie community grew out of a dance movement: young people coming together in the city’s ballrooms and clubs, to dance exhaustingly to the colorful psychedelia that was being invented by such community bands as the Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead; indeed, dancing, even more than drugs or sex, was how that scene first publicly realized its ideals of communal ecstasy. But within a season or two, the scene’s followers were dancing a lot less. Instead, they were now paying serious attention to the new music, to its lyrical pronouncements and aural constructions, and as often as not, they did so from a sitting posture. By the early 1970s, rock was something you listened to, and for whatever the numerous and undeniable virtues of such artists as the Eagles, Pink Floyd, the Allman Brothers, or even early David Bowie, there was little about their music that inspired a mass terpsichore. Dancing was something practiced by established stars like Mick Jagger—it was not something that an audience did. The star was empowered to move, while the audience was obliged to pay, to watch and listen, to revere.

Still, there were audiences for whom dancing was a vital social bond and an essential sensual act, though they were largely audiences that had been shut out by rock & roll’s developing styles and pretensions. Certainly, for the early 1970s black audience—which had enjoyed something of an alliance with the rock mainstream in the mid-1960s—pop no longer offered much embrace, or much satisfaction. For the various Hispanic audiences, and for numerous other ethnic minorities, the reality was even more exclusionary: Pop accommodated ethnic styles in only the most vague or diluted sense, as in the pyrotechnic Latin rock of Santana. In addition, there was one other large audience that had been shut out of rock’s concerns, and that was the gay underground—an audience for whom dancing proved an important assertion of identity and community. In 1973 and 1974, these audiences gradually (and perhaps a bit unwittingly) began to form an ever-expanding network—or at least they began influencing each other’s musical preferences—as dance clubs sprang up around the East Coast and Europe, and as the D.J.s at these clubs began searching out some of the hippest dance-oriented black, Hispanic, and European pop to play for these audiences. As the trend grew, the D.J.s refined their style of programming: Usually cutting back and forth between two turntables, the D.J.s aimed to play a sequence of songs in such a manner that beats between the songs were consistent, each track blending into the following track, making for a steady, seamless flow, and for a mounting mood of physical frenzy among the dancers. Like the music of the 1960s, disco was supposed to be a celebration of community and ecstasy—only this time, the revelers who were celebrating these ideals were the same ones who had been forgotten or expatriated by the established rock world.

THIS EMERGING DANCE movement turned out to be one of the most pivotal and radical developments in 1970s rock. In fact, it upended pop’s common values and its known hierarchy. Whereas, for the vast majority of the post-Beatles audience, it was the artists and their statements that constituted rock’s main pleasures and main worth, disco’s partisans agreed on some new values. What mattered in disco’s ethos wasn’t the apotheosis of the artist, but the experience and involvement of the audience itself. Consequently, disco elected a new system of pop heroes. On the romantic side, the heroes were the dancers, who were acting out this new egalitarianism on the dance floor. On the practical side, the heroes were the people who knew how to shape and manipulate sound in order to construct moods and motivate an audience—the D.J.s and producers and arrangers who were the real auteurs of disco style and meaning.

In other words, in disco, the artists—the singers and instrumentalists—were an essential backdrop, but they weren’t the focus of the action; disco fans didn’t go to disco shows to watch disco stars. Indeed, what disco declared was that our pop stars weren’t our representatives, but that we could (and should) be the stars in our own scenarios of pleasure and empowerment. To some pop fans and critics, this assertion—namely, that “everybody is a star”—seemed a bit trivial, even pathetic. But to the emerging disco audience, it amounted to nothing less than a vision of empowerment: It said that whatever the reality of your existence, you could refuse to be defined by menial conditions. You could put on your best clothes, go out in public, and act out your worthiness, as if you were entitled to all the acts and trappings of luxury that were flaunted by the dominant culture. In other words, you could appropriate those trappings. In other other words, strike a pose; there’s nothing to it.

In time, disco’s obsessions with dressiness would become elitist and defeating—especially once the scene’s clubs began enforcing dress codes that simply affirmed the very ideals of affluence and privilege that the original disco audience had meant to usurp, rather than simply emulate. But in the early 1970s, disco’s “everybody is a star” mentality was genuinely liberating: It had the effect of empowering (and even briefly unifying) an audience of gays, blacks, and ethnics that had, for too long, been disdained or displaced by a rock world that had become overwhelmingly white. This rising coalition of outsiders—pop’s equivalent of a silent majority—was about to become the biggest audience in pop’s history, though in a thoroughly unprecedented way. In fact, disco became a mass revolution at pretty much the same time that it remained an underground phenomenon. Because disco was a music played in clubs, a music without clearly identifiable central stars, a music that radio and pop media largely ignored at first, its massive popularity was almost invisible. Indeed, for a year or two, the disco world was a network of clubs, dancers, and music makers that didn’t so much enter the pop mainstream as simply form an equally viable alternative to that mainstream, that could launch massive-selling hits without benefit of radio or media exposure. Without intending to, the disco world had seized and exercised its own power by the most effective means possible—by means of pure commerce—and this development would have a galvanic effect on the business and culture of popular music.

Of course, this meant that disco’s genuine mainstream assimilation was inevitable, and that the music itself would be co-opted and marketed as a formula. Indeed, by 1974, disco had been codified. The beat ruled—it was a tightly uniform, booming 4/4 pulse, without patience for rhythmic shifts or improvisation. But within its rigid limitations, the structure allowed for a surprising amount of nuance and variation: It could be elegant, coy, and tuneful, as in Van McCoy’s “The Hustle”; it could be taut and sweetly funky, as in Shirley and Company’s “Shame, Shame, Shame”; it could be sexy and evocative, as in the Hues Corporation’s “Rock the Boat” and George McCrae’s “Rock Your Baby”; it could be propulsive and soulful, as in Average White Band’s “Pick Up the Pieces.” The following year, disco even launched its first certified star: a former church and theatrical singer named Donna Summer, who began as merely another prop-singer (with the mock-orgasmic “Love to Love You Baby”), and would shortly become the form’s most ambitious and enduring artist.

In the mid-1970s, disco fused with the public imagination in an incendiary mass moment. By this time, numerous artists—including Donna Summer, Labelle, K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Wild Cherry, and Silver Convention—had already scored Top 10 disco hits. But the genre’s biggest milestone, of course, was the 1977 Saturday Night Fever—a film that gave a sympathetic and fairly accurate portrayal of how disco night life provided a transcendent identity for certain East Coast working-class ethnic youths. More significant than the film, though, was its soundtrack album. Featuring the music of the Bee Gees and the Trammps, among others, it rapidly sold over 25 million copies, and set a record as the biggest-selling record in pop history at that time.

Disco’s triumph was complete, which of course only signaled the movement’s end. Actually, disco had been taken out of the hands of both its creators and its audience. Saturday Night Fever’s (and disco’s) biggest stars were the Bee Gees—a group of British pop stars who had created a glossy adaptation of the form’s style and popularity as a way of reviving their flagging careers. In addition, in the rush to exploit disco’s hitmaking abilities, several other established pop stars—including the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney, Elton John, the Eagles, and Rod Stewart—had also started accommodating their music to the disco style and its audience. Suddenly, disco’s pulse was omnipresent: It dominated film scores, TV commercials, Top 40 radio, and almost every lounge and club where recorded music was played for a dancing audience. It wasn’t just that the music was now pervasive; it also seemed bent on revising all known music history. Everything—from the hits of the Beatles to the dark beauty of Beethoven—became fair game for disco’s pounding 4/4 formula, and the sameness of it all began to rub many people the wrong way.

As disco became the pop norm, a counterreaction set in—in swift and fierce terms. By 1978, rock fans were beginning to sport T-shirts emblazoned with hostile decrees—”Disco Sucks” and “Death to Disco.” And then, in July 1979, a hard rock radio D.J. from Chicago’s WLUP turned a baseball game at Comiskey Park into an anti-disco rally. As he incited the audience to chant “Disco sucks,” the D.J. piled disco LPs into a wooden crate in center field—and exploded the crate. It was a supremely ugly moment, and its message was plain: The mainstream pop audience wasn’t about to allow a coalition of blacks and gays to usurp rock’s primacy. Indeed, it seemed hardly coincidental that, at a time when America was about to elect Ronald Reagan as president, and enter its most savage period of cultural denial, that disco’s dream of an all-embracing audience would invite rabid antipathy. Instead of opening up the pop world to a new consensus, disco had made plain that rock was fast becoming a field of diverse, often mutually antagonistic factions.

SO DISCO WAS ended. Even as the Village People—a gay goof that grew tiring quickly—became, for a short time, the biggest-selling band in America, the pop industry and media were already in retreat from disco. By 1980, disco was clearly a dirty word. Record sales plummeted almost overnight, and numerous artists, producers, and executives—even entire record labels and radio stations—fell into an irreclaimable oblivion. Disco had been overthrown, in part by its own excesses, and in part by a rising ugly racist and anti-gay sensibility.

But in many ways, disco transmuted its style and survived ingeniously—or at the very least, it has had a considerable legacy. In fact, in the 1980s, its rhythmic principles were adopted by two divergent audiences: the new wave crowd, who—from the Tom Tom Club to Billy Idol to Depeche Mode—enjoyed some of their biggest commercial successes by adapting disco’s dance structures to their own conceits; also, hip-hop and rap music based much of their linguistic and textural innovation on disco’s foursquare rhythmic pulse. In addition, the success of many of the 1980s’ biggest stars—including Michael Jackson, Prince, and Madonna—would have been unthinkable without the breakthroughs that disco made in both style and audience appeal. It’s also true, of course, that disco didn’t necessarily make the pop world more tolerant.

In general, though, disco managed to restore to rock the principle of dancing as one of music’s primary purposes and pleasures—and if anything, that truth is more dominant in the 1990s, in hip-hop, rave, and techno, than it was in the 1970s, at disco’s height. Disco also reasserted another vital truth: that dancing could be an act of affirmation—that it could unite people, could redeem (or at least help vent) their pains and longings, and could even empower those who had been too long denied or forgotten. In the end, the question isn’t why disco enjoyed such phenomenal success. The real question is, why didn’t more of 1970s rock & roll stand for those same worthy values?

SKIRMISH TWO: ROCK & ROLL’S POLITICS

Does dedication to rock & roll entail any political commitments?

That was a question I raised in the pages of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in September 1984, in the aftermath of Ronald Reagan’s attempt to appropriate Bruce Springsteen’s hard-bitten Americanism as a round-about endorsement of the president’s addled social policies (see this book’s earlier chapter). At the time I posed the question largely as a way of suggesting that to esteem the music of Springsteen and yet also support the reelection of President Reagan was (to my mind then and my mind now) to embrace a likely contradiction in ideals—that, in effect, the two interests simply wouldn’t mix. (Springsteen, I believe, made the same point when, shortly after Reagan’s action, he told a Philadelphia audience: “It’s a long walk from a government that’s supposed to represent all the people to where we are today.”) Several readers agreed with my suggestion, though many others—all of whom, interestingly, professed strong fondness for both the singer and the president—did not. In fact, some bristled at the idea that a love for rock & roll was tantamount to any political view whatsoever.

In part, I bring this matter up because some of those letters forced me to do some thinking about my stand. But I also reinvoke it because, at the time I wrote this article (two weeks before the Ronald Reagan-Walter Mondale presidential election) we were about to select a president, and to be honest, I’ve never cast a vote for that office without somehow reflecting on what rock & roll has taught me about my country.

I don’t say this lightly or jokingly. Just as there are people who believe that to follow certain religious convictions necessitates voting or acting in a specific political manner, I believe that to value rock’s contribution to popular culture requires (or eventually produces) given sociopolitical creeds, including a commitment to racial equality and an opposition to illiberalism in general. But if, as some partisans insist, rock no longer speaks for the sociopolitical disposition of American youth—or worse, if the political disposition it speaks for is as ungenerous as post 1930s’ Republicanism (meaning from 1940 to the year 2000, and probably beyond)—then maybe the rock movement has finally turned feckless and empty.

Is this true? Are we finally witnessing a humiliation of rock’s traditional intractability? Has the musical tradition of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Bob Dylan, Sly Stone, and Marvin Gaye finally grown to seem socially docile—even to the extent of enjoying conservative endorsement or co-option? Didn’t we, during the punk revolt of the late 1970s, come through some great “new music” revolution—an insurrection designed to overthrow the staid, cautious, apolitical murk that had gripped the pop scene in the aftermath of the frenetic 1960s?

Well, yes and no. True, the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and Graham Parker carved a hard line across the face of rock complacency, except their distinctly British brand of sociopolitical passion seemed too threatening to the American rock sensibility of the late 1970s and early 1980s—that is, until U.S. record companies figured a way to sell the music for its increasingly refined surfaces, while disregarding its political foundations. Whatever true punk revolution there was, by the mid-1980s it would merely look cute, poppy, and clearly marketable—stuff that even young Republicans can (and do) embrace, and by embracing defuse, without acknowledging the music’s real contents, meanings, or consequences.

While much of the best mid-1980s music (which in the case of such British bands as Eurythmics, Culture Club, and others mixed black rhythmic forms within a sleek pop outline) still advanced a liberal, pointedly anti-racist point of view in the context of British society, in America it was originally interpreted by a force like MTV as fun-minded style, without social significance (of course, this was back in that cable network’s pre-”Rock the Vote” period; “Rock the Vote” has turned out to be a smart and effective force, not to mention a nice redemption of the station’s early political stupefaction). To be sure, many 1980s bands—from Husker Du and the Minutemen to Rank and File and Lone Justice—fashioned a new and virile brand of politically informed rock, but until 1984, radio and MTV pretty much shunned (and thus discouraged) such adventurous sounds and outlooks. In fact, with rare exceptions—most notably Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and Born in the U.S.A., and the odd funk or country single—precious little overtly social-minded American rock music won public favor in the early 1980s.

Of course, some folks would argue that to delight in rock and soul music was never exactly the same as staking out a political stand—that, by example, reveling in the early ground-breaking achievements of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and Gene Vincent was to make an essentially nonpolitical choice based on generational diversion, not cultural insurrection. Even so, the choice had far-reaching political consequences: Rock & roll, remember, was vehemently and openly attacked in many U.S. cities as “nigger music.” Presley, and others like him—whether they intended to or not—brought a previously much feared and despised audience and sensibility into America’s wide-ranging predilections, and because of his actions, that “outsider” style (and its meanings) became publicly, massively integrated to an unprecedented extreme. This development, I believe, also helped play a role in the more significant advance of the civil rights cause.

By the mid-1960s, rock & roll was clearly politicized—but then so was everything else. The racial disquiet of the 1950s had given way to an impassioned and eventful civil rights struggle, while an emerging youth culture (defined in large part by the explosive sensibility of the Beatles) was quickly being turned to fodder for the self-realizing horror of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Initially, it was such left-derived folk activists as Peter, Paul, & Mary; Joan Baez; and Bob Dylan who recognized not merely the bearing these issues might have on their predominately young (though not yet rock-oriented) audience, but also understood the moral and emotional influence that music might have on social problems. When Dylan crossed over to a pop context (a move initially interpreted by the folk crowd as a sellout), he simply updated Presley’s implicit threat of brandishing rock & roll as a means of radicalizing—or at least disrupting—American mainstream entertainment.

More remarkable was the extent to which all this political music affected the business of music. While a company like MGM (under the direction of Republican hopeful Mike Curb) purged its roster of incendiary thinkers (like the Velvet Underground), other corporate structures (including CBS, Warner Bros., Atco/Atlantic, Decca/MCA and even the famously conservative RCA—the latter the home of Elvis Presley and the Jefferson Airplane) largely supported the activism of their artists as both good business and good ideals. (For example, consider this note from the inner-fold of Chicago’s first album: “With this album, we dedicate ourselves, our futures and our energies to the people of the revolution. . . . And the revolution in all its forms.” Was this simple-minded sedition or simply sound commercialism?)

Then, in the late 1970s, after the furor of Vietnam and Watergate had started to die down and when the battle over civil rights seemed to reach a certain (though only momentary) stability, and after acts from such record companies as Elektra/Asylum and Capricorn had helped support the presidential campaigns of Jerry Brown and Jimmy Carter—both of whom professed a strong liking for rock—two upheavals occurred that dramatically altered the temper of American rock. The first was the punk revolt, a movement that began in the United States as an aesthetic insurrection yet was adopted and expanded in Britain (by such acts as the Sex Pistols and Clash) as fierce, radical-minded music, leveled in protest against the United Kingdom’s emerging, reactionary, Margaret Thatcher-led mood. Consequently, the U.S. radio and record industries eschewed punk, looking on its grim tactics as tasteless and off-putting.

The other disturbance was more decisive. The bottom fell out of the overextended record business, cutting grandiose record sales in half and making simple survival seem more necessary than comfortable political ideals. In short, financial recovery became the first priority of the marketplace, which caused many music moguls (not to mention many musicians) to throw their support to Ronald Reagan, with his promise of restoring financial bounty to the corporate sector. It wasn’t Reagan (of course) who saved the music industry’s ass. Rather, it was that cleaned-up descendant of punk alluded to earlier—a largely dance-informed version of new wave—that did the trick. England’s most radical cultural export of the mid-1980s became one of America’s favorite urban trends. Who said, “This ain’t no party/This ain’t no disco”?

Where does this leave us? Has rock & roll come full circle, so that it is once more viewed as an art and entertainment form largely without political meaning? Or rather, in 1984, did American rock’s political bias actually start shifting to the right—to jingoism, hawkishness, and regressive racial prejudices? Did the rock “vote”—the vote of those who see rock & roll as somehow central to their view of pop culture—go, in 1984, to Ronald Reagan, a man who as California’s governor, once bandied the notion of engaging in a “blood bath” with America’s young dissidents?

I would like to think not—I’d like to think that rock still speaks to our best mixed impulses of insurgence and compassion—but that may not be realistic. Rather, it may simply be that rock is too big for much aesthetic or ideological unanimity, that it is now as variegated as America’s many regions and as disparate as the differences between the United States and the United Kingdom. It is also important that leftist fans like myself recognize that rightist rockers may well possess a redeeming genius, just as Frank Sinatra, Merle Haggard, Ray Charles, or even Neil Young made the misfortune of their politics seem secondary to the depth of their art. Maybe in the years ahead we will stop thinking of rock as a folk-art form that liberates its audience, and instead we’ll start regarding it as something that reinforces sunshine nationalism and grasping opulence. After all, given rock & roll as a spawn of American myth and wide-eyed ambition, unkind possibilities were never far beneath the music’s surface.

But there is another, better possibility, which has nothing to do with right or left, party or rhetoric: Namely, that rock & roll is no longer an answer so much as a big question mark pointed at each of us, asking us what we make of it, what bearing it has on our passions and dreams, and on our view of the world around us. After all, music has the ability to address our hearts personally—to reach me at the same moment it reaches you, no matter our political bonds or differences, despite the caprices of our government and of its self-serving leaders. If that stays true—if rock & roll continues to reach our hearts, and in doing so bids us to find purpose in its raw exhilaration—it will remain an inducement to freedom, and that is the best one could ever ask of any American-born dream or calling.

SKIRMISH THREE: OF SEX, VIOLENCE, PRINCE, MADONNA, SATAN, MURDER, METAL, AND THE NEW PARENTS

Does rock & roll threaten the morals of its most susceptible fans? Can it foment debauchery, cultural dissipation, sexism, even violence? These questions, in some form or another, have been the subject of repeated and passionately unresolved debates, stretching back as far as Elvis Presley’s first unabashedly sexy nationwide TV appearance—an event many critics and moralists viewed as a shocking signal of the degeneracy of postwar America.

Over the years this charge and its refutation have become a fixed and venerable part of the rock tradition for virtually every American and British parent and child (or censor and libertine) who have felt the volatile fluctuations of pop culture, from the initial jolt of Presley to the purposeful nihilism of the Sex Pistols to the coy androgyny of Boy George. But the continual controversy has also become a rite of passage that has a way, years later, of making unseeming conservatives and old fogies out of yesterday’s progressives. In the 1960s, many of us witnessed the moral pedagogy of parents and older siblings who had acted out the surface gestures of rebellion with Elvis but were angered by the social liberalism of the Beatles and the San Francisco bands and repelled by the sexual bravura of the Rolling Stones. By the same token, in the late 1970s, many of those former pop insurgents (the tiring “Big Chill” generation) resisted the punk mutiny, chafing at the knowledge of a younger crowd mocking their own once-daring but now enervated (or, more accurately, now abandoned) ideals.

I am both happy and sad to say that in 1985 things really aren’t that much different [nor are they different in 1997, as I revise this piece]. I am happy because I believe it’s every subsequent generation’s inalienable right (if not obligation) to disturb or offend the status quo, and sad because it invariably seems that so many of yesteryear’s iconoclasts, while they remain pious about their own periods of rebellion, end up disparaging the worth of any later upheavals or progressions. Sometimes it seems as if the children of ’56, ’67, or ’77 feel they have a patent on legitimate pop revolt, that their discovery of the thrill of change or disruption was the last cultural discovery worth sanctioning. The truly confounding part of this is that, with the rapid turnover these days in pop styles and values, it doesn’t take long for old-fogyism to creep in. For example, consider all the late-1970s punks who turn up their noses at anything that gives off even a whiff of techno-pop.

But the real subject here, of course, is the moral content of much of today’s pop, which certainly seems to be rankling many folks. Among them is freelance journalist Kandy Stroud, who in a 1985 Newsweek “My Turn” column, called for the legislative censorship of “pornographic rock.” Stroud (who professes to “being something of a rock freak,” by which she means she enjoys performing aerobics to it) was incensed when she discovered her fifteen-year-old daughter listening to Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” with its glaring reference to a woman “masturbating with a magazine.” After that, Stroud’s newly awakened ears found filth all over the place—in Madonna cooing “Feels so good inside” in “Like a Virgin”; in Frankie Goes to Hollywood singing of gay sex in “Relax”; in Sheena Easton extolling arousal in (Prince’s) “Sugar Walls.” Claiming that all this music degrades and corrupts its listeners, and noting that most parents don’t have the time or wherewithal to monitor what their children listen and dance to, Stroud proposed that the time has come for the public suppression of such songs—either by self-imposed restraints from the radio and record industry or by the enactment of local legislation.

Stroud finished her article with this thought: “Why can’t musicians . . . ensure that America’s own youth will be fed a diet of rock music that is not only good to dance to but healthy for their hearts and minds and souls as well?” Welcome to the new parents: rock fans who demand that the music adopt and stand for the prudish values that their generations were once free to reject.

Well, I guess Stroud’s question is fair: Why can’t rock stars produce music that is “healthy for hearts and minds and souls . . . ?” To my way of thinking, of course, rock musicians already are producing music that nurtures our souls and hearts, but here is the better answer to Stroud’s question: Because they don’t have to, nor are they morally obliged to. American and British artists are free to assume any perspective—even to exalt or to deride another person’s beliefs. Remember “freedom of expression”? It extends even to rock & roll upstarts.

PART OF WHAT Stroud and so many others miss or overlook is that sex is among the causal impulses of rock & roll. (Of jazz too, for that matter; remember the old rumor that the word jazz was derived from “jism” or “jizz”?) It wasn’t merely the bold, unmistakable thrust of the music’s grinding rhythms (a trait inherited from the pulse of blues and R & B) or the often prurient text of the lyrics (the sort of salty stuff that got songs like “Work with Me Annie” and “Sixty Minute Man” banned in some places in the mid-1950s), but rather the way the music brought chance masses of people into potentially excitable contact. From Alan Freed’s explosive live shows to the Rolling Stones’ 1960s tours, sexual provocation, expression, and implicit interaction were the sustaining subtext of rock’s popularity. What made this message so culturally eventful was that it forged inseparable facts out of youthful bravura and racial declaration. Of course, it was for this very feature (and for bringing undiluted black and hillbilly sounds into the pop mainstream) that many people regarded the rise of rock & roll as an ill omen: a sign of the coming of permissiveness and liberality in America. Fortunately, it was exactly that.

In the epoch since that initial eruption, everything and nothing have changed. Certainly rock & roll has consciously aspired to more overtly artistic and political (and even mystical) ambitions, just as art and politics (and yes, mysticism too) have aimed at more openly sexual concerns. Still, it is pop music that has done the most effective job of mixing and balancing these various elements—and of examining hard questions about how these matters relate in our daily lives.

In the music of Elvis Costello, for example, one finds an uncommonly deft examination of how some sexual-romantic interactions often resemble acts of social tyranny. Meantime, in the music of Bruce Springsteen, one finds accounts of erotic playfulness (such as “Pink Cadillac” and “Fire”) juxtaposed alongside harrowing portrayals of how sexual fear can fuel debilitating isolation (“Dancing in the Dark,” “Downbound Train,” “I’m on Fire”) and even sudden meanness (“You Can Look”).

Of course, all this sexual obsessiveness is also a two-edged knife: What once worked as a personally and politically liberating influence in some ways turned back on itself, until the liberation itself seemed like nothing so much as a costly indulgence paid for by sexual typecasting. One has only to regard what happened to punk and new wave in the early and mid-1980s to witness this development at its most troubling. In its early stages, punk asserted itself as music that rejected the knee-jerk carnality of the pro forma 1970s rock attitude, and in time—in its brief postpunk incarnation, through such bands as Au Pairs, Gang of Four, Young Marble Giants, and Delta 5—the music went on to consider questions of political friction and sexual rapprochement. One could almost imagine it as a worthy version of a sex classified: Good beat seeks good idea, for healthful intercourse.

Then, almost overnight, as new wave and video pop joined resources to help rejuvenate the record industry, the notion of social-sexual progressivism began to fall off. Calculated, arty sex poses—from artists like Dale Bozzio, Teri Nunn, Duran Duran, or Adam Ant—seemed indivisible from sleek textures and throbbing beats. In its rush to find wide acceptance, the new music had been reduced to a token of sexual manipulation—transformed into an easy version of excitement that sold easy and obvious (though still fun) ideals of sensual experience.

This, then, became the quandary: How does a music that derives in part from sexual rhythm and style remain sexy without becoming a medium of exploitation or debasement? Is the sort of sexiness that was once advanced by Elvis Presley, Tina Turner, James Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and so many others still tenable or understandable in a time where anti-sexism and anti-pornography have become large causes? Does pop romance need to be straitlaced to prove positive? Are implicit or graphic portrayals of sexual relations in rock (or pop culture in general) necessarily oppressive? Are vivid testimonials to lust essentially sexist?

If you want to see just how twisted these questions can get, consider the widely popular (at least in the mid-1980s) music of Prince and Madonna—two ambitious Minnesota-raised pop stars who made indelible content out of a manifest sexual style. Prince’s example might seem more substantial. He won his first bout of serious fame and acclaim with the 1980 album Dirty Mind, which presented unmistakable accounts of incest, infidelity, oral sex, and implicit bisexuality. At the same time, the record asserted Prince’s lionizing of sex as a means of striking back at all the tireless advocates of discrimination, avarice, inequity, and war who had helped hem in the world that the artist came up in. By the time of Controversy (1981) and 1999 (1982), Prince was already striving to make political, racial, and religious sense of his concerns—and while his social-sexual musings were sometimes contradictory or plain arrogant, they were also just as often edifying, not to mention provoking.

Interestingly, up through 1999, Prince’s unabashed sexual interests were hailed by most pop critics for their spunk and intelligence. But with Purple Rain—the surprise success film of 1984 about a maverick pop prodigy who must overcome selfishness and brutality to find redemption and acceptance—Prince began meeting reproof. Purple Rain’s detractors saw the film’s two male leads—Prince and the Time’s Morris Day, both playing men who contemptuously exploited the women around them for sexual and career purposes—as glorified endorsements of sexism, and also saw the cartoon-style sexiness of the female characters as a damaging stereotype.

What these critics seemed to miss is that the sexism of the Prince and Day characters runs pretty true to form for much of the pop scene. That is, the Prince and Day characters are mildly likable, unctuous men who come to look on women as the prize of privilege, and not surprisingly, they attract mildly likable, willing women who have learned to wield sex as an entrée to the realm of privilege. But like any worthy dramatic portrayal, Purple Rain gave these characters more depth than simple villain and victim delineations. In Prince’s case, the character he plays (“the Kid") is self-interested and ungenerous as the result of a brutal family environment; he hates his father for his violent tirades against the mother, but at the same time can’t even bring himself to give a fair hearing to the music of the women in his band, or allow his girlfriend the room for a pop career of her own (in fact, he slugs her when she announces her plans). At the film’s end, though, the Kid takes a small yet crucial step toward rejecting the brutality that trapped his parents, and the film puts forth a moving vision of redemption and equality as related ambitions.

But then Prince, um, climaxes the movie with an image of himself playing a guitar that literally ejaculates. Is this, as some critics insisted, an offensive image? (If so, what about Jimi Hendrix’s masturbatory displays with his guitar?) To some people, sure, that sort of imagery is offensive. It was probably even more offensive to some when Prince further celebrated orgasms by making a Top 10 single out of "Erotic City"—the first massively popular song ever to place the word "fuck" right in the heart of mainstream radio. Maybe this is a tawdry achievement, but it’s also an honest act of rejoicing. Prince may be a sensationalist and opportunist, but that doesn’t preclude him from being a serious and worthy artist: He aims to assert that a celebration of sex isn’t far removed from a celebration of life—which in the 1980s’ climate of voguish avarice and nuclear dread, could seem pretty transcendent and affirmative.

Madonna, too, is a sensationalist. From the start, with her hungry leer and her bemusedly mercenary view of romance, Madonna outraged some pop-leftists who believe that such manifestations of sexiness further objectify the cultural image of women, thereby undercutting feminism at a politically precarious moment. In other words, Madonna isn’t what some folks call a "sister."

As a result, in perhaps an even more enticing way than Prince, Madonna had proven a great divider in modern pop. Either you like her (not a simple affair, since for many of us it involves an appreciation for irony and a belief that feminism and lustful sexiness can be reconciled), or you revile her. And to a surprising extreme, many of Madonna’s detractors vilified her in dehumanizing ways—such as a 1985 Village Voice review that labeled her as "whorish," and numerous items in other magazines and newspapers that described her with the word sleazy, as if image and repertoire alone are enough to merit such a verdict. (Even record stores got into the act: Los Angeles’ Tower Records on Sunset carried Madonna’s "Like a Virgin" in its racks under the title "Like a Slug.") All this for a brazen belly button and an (at worst candid but more likely satiric) "boy-toy" image? If Madonna stands condemned under this sort of narrow-headed puritanism, I’m only glad that Eartha Kitt and Julie London got to make the best of their bedroom-and-furs bit before our current era of "enlightenment"—and I’m amazed that Tina Turner’s wonderful raunch (both past and present) has gone unscathed.

It’s also possible that Madonna’s critics just haven’t got a very good sense of humor, and also aren’t willing to afford a young woman the right to a brazen sexuality in the same manner they allowed Prince. ("I thought about that," Madonna once told me. "He was certainly just as sexually provocative, if not more than I was. I wasn’t talking about giving head.") Could the real message of these critics be that if a woman aspires to bold or cocky achievements, she must measure up to higher standards than her male counterparts? If that’s so—if this is the way we truly care to measure and condemn Madonna’s image—then is it really she who is guilty of the greater crime of sexism?

BACK TO KANDY STROUD and her questions about rock’s obligations. I admit, there are no easy answers to these concerns. If I were a parent like Stroud, there might be times when I also would worry about how my kids hear and assimilate some of pop culture’s images. Perhaps the closest I ever came to this was in the late summer of 1985, when I received a package of releases from the Important and Combat labels, representing the music of new heavy metal bands from around America. Here was a collection of all the vile vogues that alarmists had warned us about during the years: songs like "Kill Again," "Necrophilia," "Deliver Us to Evil," and "A Lesson in Violence," about rape, carnage, suicide, and devil worship, from bands with such names as Venom, Impaler, Exodus, Savatage, and Abattoir (which means "slaughterhouse"), some packaged in album jackets sporting clear images of bloody and nauseating misogyny and campy cannibalism.

Even more troubling were the actual contents of the songs—none of that kid’s stuff that Ozzy Osbourne served up, nor the phony posing of the death punk bands. This was the cry of the real punks. Consider this verse from an Exodus song: "Get in our way and we’re going to take your life/Kick in your face and rape and murder your wife/Plunder your town, your homes they’ll burn to the ground/You won’t hear a sound until my knife’s in your back." Most of the other records also brandished themes of murder, relentless hate, sacrifice, the abyss of life, the inferno (and morbid allure) of death, and an apocalypse that would cleanse the world of religion and virtue. In a word, yikes! Mean, where are these kids’ moms and dads?

Obviously, not all these horrific proclamations were meant to be taken as the literal values of these bands, just as few (if any) stalk-and-slash flicks reflect the real world views of their writers and directors. Still, there are clearly some young rock fans who find a sense of valor and meaning in the fearful iconography of the more violent-minded brands of heavy metal—some who, as a matter of record, have even tied acts of murder to their obsession with the image and music of some bands. While this kind of behavior is, of course, damn rare, one can understand why many folks of all social and political persuasions feel uncomfortable knowing that some rock music actually exalts these sentiments.

So, what should one do? Make this music illegal, prohibit its sales to minors? (Don’t worry about limiting airplay; it gets damn little.) Compose legislation that would allow victims to sue the bands that "cause" or "inspire" Satanist crime? And does one then penalize those who make similar-minded horror films?

Well, I hope not, and not simply because I regard freedom of expression as sacrosanct. These would be cosmetic solutions to serious symptoms, syndromes that don’t so much create attitudes and cause damage as they reflect certain realities of society and subcultures from which they spring. It’s too easy to blame Madonna, Prince, and half-witted devil rock bands for fomenting sexism, pornography, and violence, and it is too simple-minded to assume that by silencing these musicians’ messages, one has eliminated any causes or problems, or even any real unpleasantness. Anyway, just because I’m not crazy about the subjects that some of these bands sing about doesn’t empower me to gag them. I can rail against them if I like or choose not to support their music, but if push comes to shove, and any of these pop stars are threatened with repression, well, I’ve been a rock fan too long not to side with the profligates and upstarts.

VERY SHORTLY AFTER I wrote the words above, push did come to shove—and it never stopped. Also, in the fall of 1985, an incident occurred that only made matters worse. Even if you had scripted it, it would be hard to come up with a timelier—or worse—turn of events.

For weeks, a Washington, D.C., group of powerfully connected "concerned citizens" (inspired in part by Kandy Stroud’s Newsweek column), who called themselves the Parents Musical Resource Center (the PMRC—led by Tipper Gore, married then to Senator Al Gore, who is now the vice-president of the United States) had been raising a storm over the sexual and violent imagery of rock music and videos, with the aim of pressuring record companies and national broadcasters into a collective exercise of self-censorship. Pop had gotten out of hand, they claimed, and because much of its audience is young and presumably impressionable, that music possesses a startling potential (in fact, predilection) for corrupting the morals of its fans. Consequently, the PMRC wanted all pop music perused and rated ("X" for profane, "V" for violent, "O" for occult), plus they wanted the most provoking songs yanked off the airwaves—and if the music industry wouldn’t cooperate, the PMRC warned, perhaps Congress would take the matter under control.

During the same period that this movement was gathering force, a killer was traversing Southern California—raping, bludgeoning, murdering people in their sleep, leaving a vast community angry and terrified. There were few reported clues to this person’s identity or personality—except that at the scene of one crime he had left a hat emblazoned with the symbol AC/DC: the name of an Australian rock band that made hedonistic music with occasional menacing overtones. As it develops, the hat wasn’t so much a clue as a foretoken of media hysteria. Following the arrest of Richard Ramirez, the man who was accused, tried, and convicted of the “Night Stalker” murders, reports came fast and hard that Ramirez had indeed been an AC/DC fan—and that he had been particularly affected (“obsessed” was how most reports put it) by a song called “Night Prowler,” a horror-movie-type account of nocturnal crime. Unfortunately, this fact was made to carry more significance than was warranted: Los Angeles newspapers and newscasts carried features detailing the song’s lyrics, as if they were searching this evidence for an explanation to the Stalker’s horrible crimes. Some reports went further: “Could a song like this push somebody over the edge?” asked one TV reporter.

What was particularly galling about all this was the surprising misinformation spread in many of the reports. If anything, it was an example of the news media reading the surface of a medium—rock & roll—they have little understanding for. Thus AC/DC—an over-the-hill but respectably rousing heavy metal outfit—became a “Satanist” group because of such album titles as Highway to Hell and a photo depicting one member in showy devil’s horns. The truth is, beyond a display of sinister bravado (a commonplace of heavy metal style), there isn’t anything genuinely menacing or satanic in either the group’s stance or repertoire, and reporters could have discovered that by doing more than cribbing each other’s sensationalistic coverage, or by simply examining the band’s work a little more carefully.

But perhaps the most asinine as well as damaging example of misrepresentation was the widely reported assertion that the group’s initials stood for “Anti-Christ/Devil’s Child” or, according to another source, “After Christ, the Devil Comes.” Well, get ready, because here’s the hard truth: AC/DC is an electrical term; the band’s logo even includes an electrical volt; these guys play loud and powerful electric music—indeed, electricity is the lifeblood of heavy metal. AC/DC means high-voltage electricity—get it? The group has never hinted at any other possible interpretation—not even the obvious bisexual reference that the initials also sometimes stand for.

There are a number of bad side effects to this kind of reportage and speculation, including that it tends to simplify the real, complex, and more awful reasons a man like Richard Ramirez would commit such atrocities. But because I am a pop critic and a pop fan, I have a partisan interest in the matter: I think it bad-raps rock & roll, distorts its content and aims, makes it seem like a nefarious secret world with an unhealthy, maybe deadly effect. Obviously, as I noted earlier, there is some heavy metal rife with violent imagery and it’s fair to question such work. But it is a great leap to divine that such music endorses or might actually inspire murder, and it is a terrible thing to suggest that AC/DC or any other group is responsible for the dementia of its fans. How many parents came away from all those news reports fearing heavy metal as much as they had feared the Stalker? It must have seemed to some as if a terrible evil was already within their homes.

This, of course, is the very message that the PMRC wanted America to believe at the time: that much rock has become a dangerous influence and should be more actively scanned by concerned parents and by the industries that profit from it. When questioned by the Los Angeles Herald Examiner about the Night Stalker case, a PMRC spokesman said: “It’s a little early to say whether we’ll be citing it, but we’re certainly watching the case with interest.”

NOT MUCH LATER, the PMRC pretty much got their way. After a series of congressional hearings, the record industry announced that it had reached a compromise agreement with the PMRC: Record companies would begin a voluntary labeling effort, as a way of warning parents that some records contained “offensive” content. The settlement pertained only to rock and black pop records and not to country music—which made a kind of perverse sense, given that Al Gore was the senator from Tennessee at the time, and was understandably sensitive to the temperament of the Nashville music industry. The stickers also would not be affixed to classical music—weird, considering just how much murder and betrayal you can find in the stories told in opera.

So, some new releases were stickered. In a way, little changed—at least at first. Some artists kept making “offensive” music, and some of that music sold in the millions. And rock & roll remained a force of controversy—a music that (as Ronald Reagan termed it) was about “violence and perversity.” But rock & roll also remained music that is a call to freedom, a music about not shutting up, about not staying quietly in one’s place, and about not having to accept the dominant social order’s safe-minded morality. As Prince told Rolling Stone: “I wish people would understand that I always thought I was bad. I wouldn’t have got into this business if I didn’t think I was bad.”

But this first step toward a ratings system wasn’t enough for some people—and that brings us to the last skirmish of this present story, though certainly not the last one that rock & roll and other forms of popular music will ever have to endure or combat.

SKIRMISH FOUR: OF RAP, PORN, WITCHES, TRIALS, AND REFUSED FLAGS

Nineteen-ninety was another year when pop fans were forcibly reminded that rock & roll is, after all, still rock & roll: a disruptive art form, viewed with scorn by numerous cultural guardians and with outright animosity by many conservative moralists. Rock, of course, wasn’t alone in this regard. A coalition of fundamentalists and lawmakers assailed a wide range of American artists and charged them with disseminating obscenity, subversion, and blasphemy. But no other art form was threatened as frequently and as rigorously as pop music—and in the end, this atmosphere of peril may have done more to renew rock’s sense of purpose and courage than any event in years.

The first indication that 1990 was to be a contentious year came in March, when Newsweek ran a cover story entitled “The Rap Attitude.” Though the main article was ostensibly a report on the rise of bigotry and sexism in popular music in the late 1980s—and though the story made brief mention of the disturbing racial attitudes of white rock & rollers like Guns n’ Roses’ Axl Rose—Newsweek saved its greatest disdain for rap: a music that, in the magazine’s estimation, amounts to little more than a “streetwise music,” rife with “ugly macho boasting about anyone who hangs out on a different block—cops, other races, women, and homosexuals.” The article proved a remarkably misrepresentative view of a complex subject. While it is true that there are rap performers who deserve to be criticized for their misogyny and homophobia, it is also true that, by and large, rap addresses questions about race, community, self-determination, drug abuse, and the tragedy of violence in intelligent and probing ways, and that it does so with a degree of musical invention that no other popular form can match. Newsweek, though, ignored this larger picture, and settled for a surprisingly alarmist view of rap and its practitioners that dismissed both as a “repulsive” culture.

The Newsweek article was perhaps the most scathing indictment of rock-related culture by major media in over a generation, but it was only the opening salvo of a difficult season. That same month, one of America’s most powerful religious patriarchs, Roman Catholic Archbishop John O’Connor, told a congregation at New York’s Saint Patrick’s Cathedral that he believed that rock music was “a help to the devil.” O’Connor seemed to have heavy metal in mind when he claimed that certain kinds of rock could induce demonic possession and drive some listeners to suicide. It wasn’t the first time such a charge had been leveled. Three times parents have attempted to sue singer Ozzy Osbourne for the purported influence of his song “Suicide Solution” on the deaths of their sons, and at the time that O’Connor made his remarks, a similar suit—charging the lethal use of subliminal messages—was being prepared in Reno, Nevada, against Judas Priest. These were grim charges—that rock & roll could enter the souls of the young; that it could deliver them to dark forces and darker ends—and suddenly they seemed to be granted both religious and legal plausibility.

The most dauntless of rock’s foes was the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC)—the powerful watchdog organization founded in 1985 by Tipper Gore. Though the group claims that its primary aim is simply to make parents aware of the provocative themes and raw language that characterize much of today’s rock, the PMRC has in fact courted both the media and lawmakers as it has relentlessly pressured record labels to impose rating systems on their artists. Indeed, the PMRC had been rumored to have privately aligned itself with ultraconservative outfits like the Eagle Forum and Missouri Project Rock, and together, these factions have been decisive in bringing about the rising view that rock has become a force for moral and social disorder, and that the music’s themes and effects should be more closely monitored. As a result, the PMRC would become the most effective adversary that rock & roll has ever faced.

By early 1990, anti-rock sentiment had grown enough to fuel a full-fledged national movement calling for the labeling of controversial pop recordings. Under the aggressive crusading of such state representatives as Missouri’s Jean Dixon and Pennsylvania’s Ron Gamble, nearly twenty states were considering legislation that would require that any pop releases containing explicit language or describing or “advocating” certain sexual or violent behavior to be emblazoned with a bright warning sticker. The states differed a bit over which offensive subjects merited stickering (though Pennsylvania seemed to have the most representative list, running the gamut from “suicide,” “incest,” “murder,” and “bestiality” to “sexual activity in a violent context” and “illegal use of drugs or alcohol,” among other affronts). But nearly all the proposed bills agreed on one matter: If a record that featured any of the cited disturbing themes, or that featured explicit language, was sold without a warning sticker—or, in some cases, if a stickered recording was sold to a minor—the seller ran the risk of a fine or even of jail.

It was a mind-stopping development: Nearly half of the United States were considering measures that, if enacted, would subject one of the most popular (and one of the worthiest) art and entertainment forms of our time to state regulation. In addition, the proposed legislation would have the effect of stigmatizing some of the art form’s most important works, simply because of the music’s willingness to trade in the sort of language and themes that are commonplace in not only much of today’s more relevant film and literature, but also in the course of modern everyday life. But then, for a zealot like Representative Jean Dixon—who admits she gained her perspective on modern rock from the PMRC, the Eagle Forum, and other similar partisan groups—stigmatizing rock-related music was perhaps precisely the point. “Rebellion is like witchcraft,” said Dixon early in 1990, explaining her reprehension for the spirit of cultural and social insurrection that rock embodies for many of its fans. “That’s what it is, it’s like witchcraft.”

And if history is any indicator, where one finds witchcraft and witches, then witch hunts and witch trials are likely not far behind.

IT IS UNLIKELY, of course, that any of the proposed legislation would have withstood ultimate constitutional scrutiny. Even so, the mainstream recording industry—which has a history of conciliatory stands when it comes to dealing with prolabeling forces—elected not to stand up for principle. In March, eager to ward off any further legislative action and anxious not to stir up public reaction, the Recording Industry Association of America (the RIAA, the alliance of major record companies, which had capitulated to the PMRC’s pressures for “voluntary labeling” in 1986) announced that it was creating a uniform sticker for use by all record companies. The bold black-and-white label would carry the warning: PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT LYRICS. What’s more, the organization pledged to watch new pop releases more attentively, and to make certain that any recording which might merit such a label would not end up in record stores without one. A few weeks later the PMRC—joined by several state senators, representatives of the PTA, and the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM, whose members include record retailers)—held a press conference in Washington, D.C., and announced that, in light of the RIAA’s action, pending labeling legislation would now be dropped in thirteen states, with more likely to follow. Though both sides hoped to give the impression that a compromise had been struck, the conservative coalition had, in effect, won: The prolabeling forces had induced the recording industry to impose a stickering system, without having to resort to the legal process, and without having to face a constitutional test. And, according to Jean Dixon’s spokesman, if the industry failed to live up to its promise to police new releases, “I guarantee you there will be legislation in fifty states next year.” (Later, Dixon was to lose her bid for reelection in a Missouri primary.)

As it turns out, the threat was hardly necessary. Stickering followed with a vengeance, cropping up on numerous rap and heavy metal releases—sometimes without apparent reason and sometimes over the stated protests of the recording artists. In addition, some artists were apparently pressured to change explicit or potentially controversial words or phrases, or to drop entire songs. (In the case of the pointedly violent-minded debut album by the rap group the Geto Boys, Geffen Records chose to drop the entire work.) In the end, only one major label—Virgin Records—refused to sticker its artists, instead adorning its releases with the First Amendment. By contrast, only a few of the independent labels—where some of the most aggressive and explicit rap, metal, and punk music has been cultivated—chose to abide by the RIAA agreement.

But for one conservative moralist, a Coral Gables, Florida, lawyer named Jack Thompson, stickering was beside the point. Thompson—who, like Tipper Gore, describes himself as a long-standing rock fan—is a Christian Evangelical who fancies himself a Batman-style crusader against pornography and child abuse. At the beginning of 1990, Thompson received a transcript of the lyrics to As Nasty as They Wanna Be, by the 2 Live Crew, a black Miami group whose specialty is X-rated raps about male sexual prowess. Inflamed by the 2 Live Crew’s graphic language and by what he regarded as the band’s rapacious attitude toward women, Thompson launched a letter-faxing campaign to law-enforcement officials throughout Florida, urging them to take action against As Nasty as They Wanna Be as an “obscene” work. Thompson’s arguments caught the attention of Florida governor Bob Martinez, who set into motion a series of actions that resulted in a federal judge officially declaring the album “obscene” in June—the first such ruling for a recorded work in American history. Two days later, record store owner Charles Freeman was arrested in Fort Lauderdale after he sold a copy of the album to an undercover police officer. Within the week, three members of the 2 Live Crew—including leader Luther “Luke” Campbell—were arrested for performing material from the album at an adults only concert at a Broward County club. Meantime, Jack Thompson vowed to keep up his campaign against Nasty, citing his skirmish with the 2 Live Crew as merely “an opening shot in a cultural civil war.”

Thompson couldn’t have been more correct. In what was undoubtedly rock & roll’s most embattled year since the rise of Elvis Presley, nothing shocked the music community more than the Broward County arrests. It wasn’t that music professionals particularly revered or respected the 2 Live Crew; indeed, the band had been publicly and forcefully criticized for its puerile sexist humor by numerous critics and fellow rappers. But Florida’s heavyhanded response to the 2 Live Crew’s relentless sex raps (which, though coarse, were also a good deal funnier and less mean-spirited than is generally admitted) amounted to a clear effort to abrogate an artist’s rights to free speech—an action that, if successful, could endanger the rights of numerous other Americans in the oncoming censorship wars. Plus, there was another concern: Why had a black rap group been singled out for an obscenity prosecution—particularly in a county in which strip shows, adult reading material, and pornographic videos were readily accessible to consenting adults? “The subtext of this event,” said Jon Landau, manager and producer of Bruce Springsteen, “invites the suspicion that there is a substantial racist component. This is selective prosecution at its most extreme. Therefore, until Luke’s rights have been secured, discussion of the merits of his music is not really the point. The point is to make sure that we’re all free to express ourselves whatever the point of view, however extreme.”

As it turned out, much of the pop world shared Landau’s view. By making the 2 Live Crew a central target in a potentially far-reaching cultural and political battle, Jack Thompson forced many in the music industry to recognize how much ground had been conceded to the anti-rock forces. In addition, Thompson also helped transform Luther Campbell into something of an unlikely cause célèbre. In late June, when Campbell sought permission from Bruce Springsteen to use the backing track of “Born in the U.S.A.” for the 2 Live Crew’s account of their troubles in Florida, Springsteen granted the use free of charge. The result, called “Banned in the U.S.A.,” was the 2 Live Crew’s most laudable moment—or at least the one instance in which the group aspired to something other than puerile scatology. In response, Thompson fired off a fax to Springsteen: “Dear Mr. Springsteen,” he wrote, “I would suggest ’Raped in the U.S.A.’ as your next album. . . . You’re now harmful to the women and children who have bought your albums.” Later, in a Los Angeles Times interview, Thompson added: “Bruce and Luther can go to hell together.”

But the biggest drama was that of the trials. In October, a jury composed of five white women and one Hispanic man convicted store owner Charles Freeman of peddling obscenity; later that month, a different jury in the same Florida county acquitted Campbell and the other 2 Live Crew members of the obscenity charges. In essence, it was a split verdict—and nobody quite knew how to read its meaning. Meantime, in the year’s other big rock trial, Judas Priest was acquitted in Reno on charges that subliminal messages in the band’s music had led to the suicide of one youth and the attempted suicide of another—but the judge’s ruling left many legal questions unresolved and made it plain to the music industry that heavy metal recordings would likely remain subject to legal actions in the future. In response to all this activity, MTV—once a cautiously apolitical entertainment forum, and now probably rock’s most powerful media force—turned its annual awards show into an anti-censorship rally. In addition, with the help of artists like Madonna, the network launched a voter-registration drive, designed to mobilize the vote against pro-censorship crusader-politicians in upcoming elections.

In the end, none of these events settled the debate over rock’s rights to free speech. Certainly, in the rough seasons ahead, there will be further calls for censorship. More arrests and more trials are also likely, and given the rightward drift of America’s federal courts, it is hard to say how these campaigns will play themselves out. Still, there is hope: The tide of cultural history suggests that, as troubling as the notion may be to some, freedom of expression is a right that ultimately will not be undone. At the same time, perhaps the most frightening lesson of the Reagan era is that sometimes the tide of cultural history can be reversed.

IF NOTHING ELSE, all the brouhaha over censorship served to remind many of us that rock still has the power to unsettle and to inflame. Of course, sometimes it chooses to provoke its critics by merely taunting them with surefire irritants like explicit sexual descriptions, or rants about violence or the devil—but then sometimes the most effective (and hilarious) response to haughty disapproval is simply to become more unconscionable. At its best, though, rock & roll is a good deal more than a mere affront or a subject for argument. It is, in fact, perhaps the sole art form that most regularly forms an argument. That is, rock & roll is itself a disagreement with established power—a refutation of authority’s unearned influence.

Not surprisingly, some of the music that did the best job of both taunting and arguing in 1990 came from the two camps that experienced the greatest heat—heavy metal and rap. On the surface, these two genres might seem to have little in common, in terms either of audience or style. And yet both are derived from the structures of blues music, and by keeping that form’s temper fresh, rap and metal have also done a tremendous amount to revivify rock’s essential incendiary spirit. In addition, both rap and hard rock speak for and to the concerns of young and often disenfranchised audiences—working class and black youth, who are frequently viewed with fear and suspicion by much of the American mainstream—and it is this power to articulate and stir the passions of youthful outsiders that today scares so many people about rock & roll.

But it was rap that enjoyed more attention than any other pop genre in 1990, and for fair reason. Despite all the swipes directed at it, rap remained committed to holding forth on some of the most disturbing concerns of the day. Records like Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, Above the Law’s Livin’ Like Hustlers, Kid Frost’s Hispanic Causing Panic, Ice Cube’s AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, and the Geto Boys’ debut album were works that offered tough and unflinching appraisals of a broad range of unpleasant topics—including gang violence, misogyny, racism, and drug dealing—and despite the naysayers who warned that this music amounted to “ugly macho boasting” and “obscenity,” all of these albums enjoyed substantial sales. Is that cause for concern? Does it mean that the audience that buys rap records is an audience that likes this music because it espouses values of anger? Do people in that audience, in fact, take some of the songs on the Ice Cube, Geto Boys, Kid Frost, or Above the Law records as literal celebrations of misogyny or violence?

Obviously, few of the people who hear a musical account of a drive-by shooting lose their repulsion toward such acts in real life, much less feel any inclination to take part in such horror. Yet this isn’t to deny that one shouldn’t raise hard questions about the meaning and impact of some of this music. A record like The Geto Boys (which, remember, Geffen found so offensive, the label refused to release it) relates some truly unsettling tales about gang violence and homicidal rape, and does so from a first-person point of view that brings both the narrator and listener into the heart of modern urban horror. It may be among the most terrifying works that popular music has ever produced. Certainly, it is a record that one should take a good hard look at—indeed, any art that might seem to celebrate hatred and murder is art that should be scrutinized, and, when necessary, criticized. At the same time, that isn’t really what The Geto Boys is about. Like Martin Scorsese, whose GoodFellas is deeply felt drama about contemporary gangster life, the Geto Boys and other rappers are reporting on a social reality—in the Geto Boys’ case, one that they know firsthand—and at times such reportage can seem ugly and morally questionable. But whereas Scorsese’s work is singled out as an artistic achievement, The Geto Boys is roundly condemned as brutal trash. Why? Is it because the Geto Boys are talking about conditions of violence so modern, so threatening, that we can’t view any of it with distance? Or is it because, by telling their tales in the first person, rappers seem to commit themselves to the worst impulses of their scenarios?

There are no simple answers to these questions. All that is clear is that works like The Geto Boys are disturbing for good reason—they’re meant to be disturbing—and it is to our peril and discredit when we fail to examine the conditions that have made such music possible, or necessary.

One other artist had a rough time of it in 1990, and that was Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor. The year began wonderfully for her, with a number 1 hit single, “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and an equally high-ranking album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. But during the summer, when O’Connor refused to allow the national anthem to be played at one of her performances in New Jersey, local and national media treated the event as major news. Overnight, there were calls for her to be deported back to the United Kingdom; radio stations announced they were boycotting her music; and she was vilified by other celebrities (including Frank Sinatra) and harassed in public. Over and over, irate Americans asked the same question: What did O’Connor have against the national anthem? (The answer is easy, and fairly innocent: O’Connor is opposed to nationalism of any sort, and in fact refused to pose with an Irish flag for a photo session for Rolling Stone earlier in the year.) But there was another question that wasn’t asked and perhaps should have been: Namely, in a year when rock was treated as subversion by so many American lawmakers and pundits, how could any principled rock & roller do anything but refuse any false tributes? Why should any performer be forced to pay tribute to a nation that is so reluctant to stand up for the rights of its own artists?

The incident was merely another reminder that these are dangerous times to advertise yourself as a malcontent in American pop culture. But it was also a reminder that rock’s best and bravest heroes aren’t about to back down when confronted by indignant authoritarians. Kicking against social repression and moral vapidity—that’s an activity which, for well over thirty years now, rock & roll has managed to do better than virtually any other art or entertainment form. But at this juncture, the forces that would not only condemn but curtail or silence that impulse are formidable. If 1990 taught us anything, it is that if we value rock as a spirit of insolent liberty, then the time has come to form a bulwark against those who would gladly muzzle that spirit.