Radio Suckers: The FCC's Arbitrary Attack On Rap

 Let's play a little game. It's called FCC Enforcer. On one radio station you have the dulcet sounds of a man having sex with a piñata during an office party. On another you have the edited version of Eminem's "The Real Slim Shady."

Now, which do you think is too indecent for radio broadcast? (Before you fire up that big brain, remember you are dealing with an agency of the federal government.) If you guessed that making love with a paper donkey is too much for our nation's airwaves, guess again. The Federal Communications Commission dismissed that complaint without investigation. However, the FCC thinks KKMG-FM in Colorado Springs deserves a big fine for playing the edited, bleep-drenched, profanity-free Eminem song.

Since March, when the FCC issued a clarification of its regulations regarding indecency on radio, the agency has been on the warpath against smut. But it seems as if the agency is actually on a mission against rap music. KKMG isn't the first station to be fined for playing rap — far from it, in fact: WSUC-FM, Cortland, N.Y., WLLD-FM, Holmes Beach, Fla., and WZEE-FM, Madison, Wis., are three more examples — but it is the first to be fined for playing an edited song. In its ruling against the station last week, the FCC said that even though every profanity had been excised from the song, it still contained references to sex that were "patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards."

The FCC — the only federal agency charged with the censorship of citizens — has been in the indecency game since the late '20s. The Supreme Court upheld that privilege in 1971, though limiting the definition of indecency to material that "depicts sexual or excretory organs and activities." That's it — sex and poop.

With its latest clarification, however, the FCC has expanded restrictions to include any use of innuendo or double-entendre to describe said "sexual or excretory" activities. Problem is, it's hard to name one song that doesn't contain at least one potential sexual innuendo. Under this definition, does Captain & Tennille's "Muskrat Love" become a tribute to bestiality? Does Shirley Temple's "I Wanna Be Loved by You" become a graphic description of pedophilia? That all depends on the mood of the real-life FCC enforcers.

Take the case of KBOO, a community radio station in Portland, Oregon. One evening, a DJ played a song by poet Sarah Jones and DJ Vadim entitled "Your Revolution." The song, a send-up of the Gil Scott-Heron classic "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" — here it's "will not take place between these thighs" — condemns rappers for demanding an equal society for themselves, yet still filling their music with misogynistic lyrics. The song contains lyrics such as "Your revolution will not find me in the back seat of a jeep … doing it and doing it and doing it well. Think I'm going to put it in my mouth just because you make a few bucks? Please, brother, please."

When a local listener recorded the broadcast and sent it to the FCC Enforcement Bureau, KBOO was fined for airing "patently offensive" material. By anything except the most literal interpretations of the questionable phrases, the song is a political protest. It is about feminism, not blowjobs.

When things like this happen, it is censorship at its most explicit.

The Moral Majority's Cal Thomas once commented that when an insurgency starts, "The revolutionaries always take the radio station first. They get the presidential palace later."

Perhaps they already have.

FCC Jumps the Gun on Violence and Children

  Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its second report on the marketing of violent entertainment to children, reserving its strongest language for the music industry. According to the FTC, teenagers have no trouble buying CDs with "Parental Advisory" labels, and advertisements for these releases are regularly featured in media that cater to young people. In the report, the FTC recommends that the music industry enforce its policies about underage purchase of stickered CDs and cease advertising in media with a "substantial" youth audience. According to the FTC, the industry's attitudes towards both are woefully inadequate and meaningless.

Reading through the commission's 70-page tome (see it for yourself at www.FTC.gov), you might wonder if the agency read its own data findings before writing the report. Even with the slightest scrutiny, some of the FTC's arguments simply don't hold water.

The report's summary claims "Most teens and pre-teens make music purchase decisions without consulting their parents." Forty pages after making this statement, the report's own data show that an adult is "involved" in 77 percent of underage music purchases.

The report further claims "recording companies routinely print advertising to promote their explicit-content labeled recordings to children under 17." In the appendix to the report, the list of publications that the FTC feels have "majority or substantial audience under age 17" includes The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Vibe, Spin, The Washington Post, and many others. While almost one-third of the listed publications had a median age of 17 or less (including Seventeen, WWF Magazine and YM), some listed rags have an underage audience in the single digits. The same is true for the TV programs highlighted in the FTC report. The only program listed that had a majority of its viewers under 17 was MTV's Total Request Live (at 58 percent). The 14 other programs on the FTC target list ranged from 38 percent underage viewers to 16 percent. In other words, were the FTC to get its way, the music industry would lose access to the 20 percent of the Friends audience under the age of 17, but also to the 80 percent of its viewers who are adults.

And most confusing of all, even thought the FTC was commissioned to research "violent" media, the agency seems to have expanded the list considerably. Would you consider the music of OutKast and Blink-182 to be excessively violent? The FTC does. Interestingly, of the 35 "objectionable" musical acts the FTC chose to monitor, only five include white musicians, and only three of those five acts are comprised entirely of whites.

The idea of conducting this investigation began shortly after the Columbine shootings in 1999. Hot on the heels of the public success of a similar FTC study into tobacco marketing, President Clinton felt it was an appropriate response to the public's outcry for answers in the wake of the tragedy. However, unlike tobacco, there are a few pieces of information missing in the decision to investigate the music industry. It is fairly conclusive that smoking cigarettes will harm your health. But there's simply no proof that music causes sane individuals – youth or adult – to become violent, suicidal, or sexually promiscuous because of exposure to music or music advertising. After more than four decades of academic research on the subject, no one has been able to prove that music makes good people do bad things. Someone prone to violence or extreme behavior would commit those same acts whether or not an Xzibit CD was playing at the time.

So where is this going? Probably nowhere for now. Despite the level of rhetoric this week, many of these politicians are probably just showing they can still be tough despite the almost $60 million in campaign donations the entertainment industry shelled out for the November elections ($50 million to Obama, and Hilary). But this is arguably just the setup; the FTC is scheduled to deliver another progress report on the music industry in six months. Politicians on Capitol Hill are already threatening legislative action if the music industry doesn't get its act together by fall. As in the past, those attempting to control or suppress music are banking on the notion that they can get some good press on this issue and get away clean because the public is too ignorant, apathetic or disorganized to put up a fight.

We'll see.