I heard our lovely Home Secretary on the radio today discussing the recent murders in Birmingham. He had a few things to say about rap
music, too:

I am not going to get into the issue of censoring.

But I am concerned that we need to talk to the record producers, to the distributors, to those who are actually engaged in the music business about what is and isn’t acceptable.

Now one the one hand he says he’s not going to talk about censorship, then he goes on to say that he sees a need to discuss what’s “acceptable”. Now I know that this isn’t the same as banning a track for containing lyrics about guns, but it’s still taking a step down that road. I don’t think that it’s up to the government to so much as suggest what “is and isn’t acceptable” in art, whether it be music, literature, painting , whatever.

Thankfully, judging from the BBC report cited above, at least some of Mr. Blunkett’s colleagues may have a clue – both John Denham and Dianne Abbott came out with statements tempering Blunkett’s (I might be a cynic, but this does smell a bit of spin control…), and to be fair to him, he had just been played a track by someone hoping to get remarks like this out of him.

I don’t really think that the pols are about to turn around and ban hip hop, but it’s worth watching. Plus, I’m getting a sense of deja vu from somewhere, too… isn’t Metal supposed to turn kids into satanists? And didn’t Elvis encourage promiscuity with his shockingly gauche hip movements? And… yeah, you get the point.