LETTERS

LETTERS

Please send your letters to: Mail Dept., CREEM Magazine, 7715 Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90046.

PUDDING POP!

Dear Tipper Gore, PMRC, and CREEM readers:

On the surface your letter (CREEM, November 1986) justifying your campaign to censor rock was surprisingly convincing. I’d almost be ready to fall for your concerned mommy act if it weren’t for what your group says they really have in mind.

Nowhere in your letter do you reveal your role in founding the PMRC and staging last fall’s Senate hearings for rating rock records.

If the PMRC doesn’t want to censor, why do its own handouts call for the “reassessment of contracts of artists” who do things onstage the PMRC doesn’t approve of? This isn’t just censorship, it’s blackballing—the kind of thing done in the days of Joe McCarthy.

If the PMRC is not a front for the religious right then you certainly are their dupes. Why else would your proposed record warning sticker guidelines include a separate rating category of “O” for occult?

Why do you confine your “Rock Music Report” manifesto to the recklessly poor “research” of one Reverend Jeff Ling, who does say he wants music he deems “explicit” purged from the shelves?

Some of us have seen how falling dominoes can spread like a disease once someone decides to stretch their definition of “objectionable” as far as they think they can get away with.

Censorship is like a certain brand of potato chips. People can’t stop after just one.

First 7-11 yanks out Playboy and Penthouse because the Meese inquisition says they’re pornography. Next thing you know Wal-Mart has pulled CREEM, Rolling Stone and 30 other rock publications because Rev. Jimmy Swaggart says they are pornography.

Which domino gets toppled next? Take a look at what’s being purged from our school libraries.

What is “explicit pornography” anyway? Who defines what “occult” is when records get rated—you or Jimmy Swaggart?

Your witch hunt has damaged the lives of real victims. Myself and four other people now face up to a year in jail and a $2,000 fine over what Dead Kennedys say with their records.

This is a political prosecution; the first rock ’n’ roll trial since the warning sticker

hearings. The climate you and Ed Meese helped create made it lucrative for these charges to be filed the day before election day.

Has all this “free” publicity sent our record sales skyrocketing? Hardly. More and more stores are now afraid to carry our records out of fear of being dragged through the nearest kangaroo court.

The Los Angeles City Attorney’s office says they picked us to bust because it was “cost-effective.” In other words, we are under arrest because we run our own record company and are therefore'the easiest to bankrupt.

We will fight these charges with everything we have. Anyone who wants to help us, please contact the No More Censorship Defense Fund, P.O. Box 11458, San Francisco, California, 94101.

It seems doubly cockeyed to finger us as the test case when our band has always come out against the same things you do.

I agree that too much of today’s music does “blatantly commercialize brutality and...particularly fosters a degrading attitude toward women.” That’s funny, so does Rambo. So does almost everything on prime-time TV, especially the commercials.

PUBLISHER ARNOLD LEVITT

But let’s face it, Judas Priest and W.A.S.P. are just our generations’s Bob Hope and Bing Crosby—skilled comedians who know how to play it safe to make a buck. Sure they’re stupid. Sure they’re hokey. But does that mean they should be censored? What really encourages more kids to wind up dead, Ozzy Osbourne or military recruiting ads?

Why is C&W spared from your war on words? I’ve heard lots of whiskydrenched country tunes that glorify people with guns who beat their wives. Or is C & W protected because your husband’s a senator from Tennessee and must respect the powers down in Nashville?

C’mon, do you really think taking away a kid’s Prince and Ozzy records, and substituting U2 and Phil Collins, as your cassette says to do, will do anything to change the kid’s tastes, besides making him even angrier at his parents?

Everything I’ve seen from the PMRC propaganda mill seems tailored to play into the hands of uptight parents who refuse to communicate with their own kids.

If I were a parent and my youngster brought home something I felt was “harmful” (a Rambo video or Sammy Hagar LP, let’s say) I wouldn’t hit the roof and grab the item away. That wouldn’t teach the kid that what he bought might screw his brain up; it would reinforce the notion that Daddy is a fascist.

What I would do is sit down with the kid and say, “OK, so you spent your own money on this. Why? What do you see in it? Why do you like it? Let’s hear an intelligent explanation. Now let me tell you why I don’t like it...”

It seems to me that rational communication is a far better way to help nurture a loving family.

Your letter claims you are “not an uptight prude who wants to ban rock.” Yet you keep trying to restrict our music to your own idea of “normal sex and sensuality.” It just isn’t the Eisenhower era anymore; your guise of “protecting” children is a smokescreen.

Requiring lyrics on the back of albums does abridge certain artists’ rights—-or should I say copyrights. We’ve always included lyrics with our records. But what about all the writer’s royalties owed to musicians who prefer to publish song books? Would the PMRC like to pay them?

I was “Born In The U.S.A.” too. I’m glad we have a constitution designed to protect our right to information from selfappointed moral guardians like you; that says you are free to buy other music for your children and “protect” them from those wicked Dead Kennedys records.

I do not need a bouffant-encrusted thought police to tell me or younger kids what they can listen to. Your fantasies of laws that wash our art out with soap would be a whole lot funnier if the PMRC had less money and power.

I would urge CREEM readers who care about music to keep a sharp eye out for censorship in your area, and be prepared to protest. At the very least, why give the PMRC’s sponsors your money? Their office space rent is said to be paid by the Coors Beer family, and their “special acknowledgement” recently went out to John Naman of the Washington, D.C. 7-Up Bottling Co.

It’s time to take off the masks. I know I won’t be buying these products for a long, long time.

By the way, Mrs. Gore, I don’t care if you use hairspray. The Constitution says you are free to do that, too.

Yours in Frankenchrist,

Jello Biafra

San Francisco, CA

GUY WRITES TO WRONG MAGAZINE, FRIENDLY EDITORS PRINT LETTER ANYWAY!

I’m not really one of the myriad Star Trek fans (the show’s main attribute in my book is the sight of Capt. James T. Kirk hamming it up), but I thought it was pretty neat to see Joan Collins in “The City On The Edge Of Forever” episode, which was also, interestingly enough, penned by none other than Harlan Ellison. In this particular adventure, Dr. “Bones” McCoy accidentally gets injected (by himself!) with some drug and, ultimately transports himself back to 1930’s U.S. of A., thereby in a position to change history. Mr. Spock and Kirk end up saving the day”, of course, but Joan’s character had to die (Jimmy was in love again, as usual) which I thought was a bum deal. The only loophole I saw was when this guy phases himself out with McCoy’s “phaser” (Is that right?). That’s changing the course of events, isn’t it? Sorry to bother...

Peter Egley

Keokak, IA

SPRINGSTEEN CHANGES SURNAME, WRITES!

“Disgusted CREEM Reader” from North Vancouver has again proven correct my assumption that Canadians suffer from frostbite of the brain. Calling John Mendelssohn’s Eleganza column garbage is tantamount to announcing that you’re a mindless twit.

John Mendelssohn is one of the most insightful rock crits to ever unsheath a pen. He never ceases to hit the nail on the head with his clever observations on rock stardom and fandom. If all rock fans had John Mendelssohn’s acute perception in discerning art from bullshit, purveyors of pretention and pomposity would cease to be lionized by legions of lunkheads.

Eleganza is always CREEM’s most readable, witty, and thought-provoking department. “Disgusted CREEM Reader” should go hibernate in his igloo, and spare us his brainless complaints.

Bruce Davis

Villanova, PA