Obscenity Set to Music
“THE sacred mission of rock bands—to offend as many parents as possible—is an increasingly arduous assignment in a culture growing cruder by the day,” said a recent editorial in U.S.News & World Report. It noted, however, that some rock bands are meeting this “challenge of how to shock the already numb” by using more outlandishly vulgar language—not only in their music but even in the names they choose for themselves. The editorial reported: “Now there are at least 13 bands named after the male genitals, 6 after female genitals, 4 after sperm, 8 after abortion and one after a vaginal infection.” It added that one survey has found at least ten bands named after “various sex acts” and six after vomit. Granted, most of these groups are far from the mainstream, but their influence is felt.
In Florida, U.S.A., a court declared as obscene an album by the rock group 2 Live Crew that, according to one of its critics, contained “87 descriptions of oral sex, 116 mentions of male and female genitalia and other lyrical passages referring to male ejaculation.” The court ruling was later appealed and reversed. However, a record-store owner was arrested and later found guilty and fined $1,000 on charges of obscenity for selling the album. His lawyers planned to appeal the case.
Not everyone is offended by this onslaught of obscenity, though. In The Olympian, a newspaper of Washington State, U.S.A., a reviewer recently raved over the concert performance of a popular heavy-metal band. He noted that the group ‘may have set a record’ by using a foul, sexually explicit word “more than 200 times during its in-between-song comments. The crowd responded in kind. It was an evening of obscenity, rock ’n’ roll and the American way, and the crowd was happy.” The group, he summed up, “was magnificent.”
The standards of some of today’s music and critics are certainly far removed from the Bible’s wise counsel: “No bad language must pass your lips.” (Ephesians 4:29, The New English Bible) Music lovers, both young and old, do well not to let such obscenity pass their ears either.