Zappa : Speaking Frankly on Censorship

So I'll be looking from this Senate to stand point not just to bring pressures but to try to see if there is some constitutional provisions or tax or approach that can be used on the Congress to limit this outrageous filth. This is Pacifica Radio's presentation of Zapper on censorship, rock musician and political activist Frank Zapper in conversation with KPFK reporter JB Peterson. Recorded at his home in Los Angeles on the 21st of June 1990, Zapper discusses his views on the forms and implications of censorship in American society. My name is JB Peterson and this is the KPFK Pacifica Radio presentation of Zapper on censorship

with our special guest Frank Zapper. Let me start by commenting that in the last few years maybe even the last decade has been a real difficult time for people with the progressive orientation but the last few weeks seems to be a kind of culmination of the whole Reagan Bush era. We've had the director of the contemporary center of arts and Cincinnati indicted on charges of obscenity for displaying photographs of Robert Maplethorpe in a place called Empire, California. A local school board removed 400 copies of Little Red Writing Hood because Little Red had a bottle of wine for grandma and her basket of goodies and they felt that they didn't ban the book. They'd be condoning the use of alcohol. We've had the Supreme Court on flag burning and last but not least of course two life crew getting arrested and retailers being arrested for selling it. Do you see these as isolated incidents or perhaps somehow being subtly related? Subtly related. It's all coming from the same source. This is all the work of Christian fundamentalist organizations. Do you think that from these fundamentalist organizations are pushing their agenda on the nation or do you think these are actually centrist concerns

coming from Joe average adult? I don't think Joe average adult cares about these issues. I think he's got more important things in his mind but I believe that the fundamentalist right certainly has a political agenda and it's something that George Orwell would have been proud of. How are they networking? How are they collecting all their ammunition together outside of the mainstream? I mean there's not a Jerry Falwell who's leading the flock together. Is it a direct mail? Do you know anything about that? Well in the case of two live crew it's being spearheaded by a guy named Thompson. Born again Christian attorney who is fronting for a number of these Christian so-called family organizations and the reason why these people have so much power is because all of the regulations that control the tax exemption status for religious organizations all of that legislation which exists and could stop the situation is not being enforced or it's being randomly enforced or it's being enforced in favor of the Christian groups. In other words the tax exemption, the language and the tax exemption regulation states that if you want to have

a tax-free status for your religious organization you may not lobby for or against any legislation or for or against any political candidate and as far as I can see everybody from the Catholic church on down has been violating that and they should be taken to task for it. If they lose their tax exemption then they won't have access to the kind of dollars to mouth these PR campaigns to make this stuff happen. The IRS is charged with the responsibility of enforcing those regulations and they're just not doing it. How can the progressive politicians the liberal politicians if that's not a naughty word are having a hard time dealing with this? I mean these troubled times of global changes and serious youth concerns like drugs and teen pregnancy. How come they're going after these symbolic issues? Because it gets your name in the papers because it'll get you on television. You use all the buzz words and you strike the right pose and have a flag in the background and it gives the illusion that what you're doing is speaking on behalf of a silent

majority and this is a technique that these guys have been using throughout the Reagan years and it's continuing well into the Bush administration. They're environments, environments. How do they control the power and how come? Because they have a lot of money. How come Democrats or politicians from the left have a hard time stopping it all? How come they I guess it's the Democratic Party problem is what I'm asking about. How come they can? No, no, no, no, no. It ain't that. It ain't the right guys versus the left guys because first of all I don't see anything really creative happening on what could be described as the left and the Democratic Party. I'm sorry, folks. This is a waste of time. The whole idea of party politics has been superseded because the people who are the extremist on the right, their Republicans in name only, what these people really are as fascist, call a spade a spade. The basic Republican conservative philosophy is you want a smaller government and you want lower taxes. I think that's fine. Now tell me, sum up in a couple

of words, what's the Democratic philosophy? You got something better than that as a Democrat, smaller government, lower taxes. I want to see that. All I can detect on the Democratic side is chaos. So many little agendas, no big name value force to an electable force that they can put on a ticket. During a mess, the Republicans, if they don't have an electable name value force, they'll make one from scratch because they got the cash to do it. And Madison Avenue to create it. That's remember the Republicans were the first party to use a Madison Avenue advertising agency. BBDNO was the first one to get the ball rolling. How are they ever going to win though? How can they put candidates in office who hopefully believe in progressive ideas if they have to appeal to a farmer in mid-America to get the vote or to get the vote in California? There is such a thing as community standards like it or not. And they vary from place to place and they're different concerns from

one region to another. People in the rust belt have different concerns and people in the sun belt as opposed to people in the dust belt. And all the other belts, they're different regional concerns. And my analysis would be the best campaign that you could mount at this time that would cut across all of this is for candidate to say, look, we've got some economic problems, we've got some social problems, we've got all kinds of problems, but there's one thing that I can guarantee you. I'll guarantee you that if I'm elected, you won't have any deterioration of your constitutional rights. If all else fails, you'll still be in America because I'll protect the constitution. I want to see a politician stand up and say that and be able to deliver on it because I think that's the kind of a thing that no matter what your economic status or what part of the country you live in, you don't want to see the basic thing that allows you to be in America and to be thrown away. That's Bill of Rights. And there's not one guy that is in office

right now that would stand up and say that and be able to deliver on it. George Bush never could, Reagan certainly couldn't. I don't see one Republican that would dare to make that statement. How are the Democrats going to be able to deal with the flag burning issue? Because I watched it on C-SPAN this morning, all these speeches. And most of them were against the amendment. Now, the language that was used in the speeches basically went like this, that the Bill of Rights is there to protect the right of people who espouse ideas that the average guy may find repugnant, but he has the right to say it because that's what freedom of speech is all about. Now, why aren't they saying that about two live crew? They never would. It's just that the whole flag burning thing is a political football. And you know, you can posture and pose and get in there and you know, look like Joe Blow statesman and make those kinds of things. But nobody is standing up for the rights of two live crew or any other

group who wants to say what they have on their mind. You can agree with American disagree with them, but it should be your right to decide after you heard what they have to say. Any predictions on how the flag burning thing is going to go? I don't think that it's going to pass. I don't think that it's going to even, I don't think it's going to get out of the Congress. So there won't be your prediction is that there's not going to be a constitutional amendment? I don't think there will be. I think we're going to get off lucky on this one. It's going to be close, but I don't think that it's going to be brought to a vote. If it is brought to a vote and Democrats are up for election this fall, do you think that could cause them to be more conservative than they might otherwise be? Probably. We're talking about freedom of speech, Frank. And another thing is the banning of books. I mentioned earlier in the setup that little red riding. Yeah. What do you think about that? Well, you know, that wine can be awfully dangerous, but certainly not as dangerous as beer. I think that it's going too far to throw the book out because it talked about wine, but if little red riding it was taking beer to the grand mother, I'd raise my eyebrows at that.

Fahrenheit 451? What do we, you know, what do we have here? Well, there are certain precedents in the other restrictive societies that we could be looking at. We're not quite to the stage where we're piling books in the middle of the town square and setting them on fire, but it could happen. There are Christian groups that go from town to town, like what do they call what's in them? Those brothers, Peter's brothers, Steve Peer have been going from town to town for 10 years, sponsoring record burnings in the name of Jesus. That's their hook. They come into town, you know, bring your evil rock and roll records and we'll burn them for you in the name of Jesus. So maybe that wouldn't play in the heart of New York City, but it certainly plays in some small towns. I know they visited Pennsylvania several places and friend of mine actually went to one of their meetings to see what was going on. Came back with some horror stories about the kind of stupidity that is being promoted and these guys, that's how they earn their living.

Burn records, take up a collection, publish literature, sell pamphlets, sell tapes about backwards masking, all this kind of stuff. It's a racket. Talking about Little Red carrying a bottle of wine, what happened with that? Has it become trendy to kind of say, well, I'm no longer drinking alcohol anymore? Was this something pushed on us by Nancy Reagan? And has it affected people's mind? I don't know. I'm not a big drinker myself. I happen to like wine. I like it with food. I could never imagine just sitting around drinking wine for no reason at all or same with any other kind of an alcoholic beverage. It's just not my lifestyle, but I think that if you want to drink it, you have the right to drink it. So long as it doesn't impair you and you get in a car and kill somebody, you want to do whatever you want to do with your own body up to it and including killing yourself. So you don't have the right to kill somebody else, but you want to kill yourself whether you do it faster, you do it slow that your business because you own yourself. That's what personal freedom is all about. Part of the new proposal for the NEA

language keeps referring to something called the sensitive nature of public sponsorship. Let's start talking about the whole NEA grant. Well, let's call a spade of spade. The total amount of the budget for the NEA is what? 157 million dollars a year. Yeah. Okay, compared to everything else that gets spent on a federal level. Peanuts. Yeah, less than peanuts. And I debated this issue on a TV show called Crossfire with a guy named Danemire, who's one of the people who would like to see the NEA disposed of. And aside from the fact that the overall budget is small, I asked him specifically how much money had been spent out of that budget for those projects which they deemed objectionable. You want to know what the total amount was? $45,000. So 45,000 out of 157 million. We're talking micro peanuts here. And two people possibly, right? Right. The bulk of the money from the NEA and the part of the NEA

that I personally support is those monies which go for community activities that involve multiples of people. In other words, NEA would sponsor orchestras, they sponsor ballet companies in cities where they wouldn't have any kind of activity like that. I question the need for the NEA or any government agency to be involved in the funding for individual artists, you owe them something. And you run the risk at all times, especially with this new language that the government can influence the quality of the work or the content of the work. Language of the new NEA proposal says that this act demonstrates a commitment to artistic excellence which is sensitive to the nature of public sponsorship and does not deliberately denigrate the cultural heritage of the United States or violates prevailing standards of obscenity or indecency. That means if you take this money, you will keep your mouth shut. That's layman's translation. Well, how would you feel about artists who take them on aiming your mind as well? Well, I feel sorry for them because under these circumstances, you

would definitely have to be a desperate individual to take that tainted money. It's tainted money. If you sign a piece of paper that says you will do those things or avoid doing this list of things that they have in there, you're putting yourself in a box. But there are all different kinds of artists and there are all different kinds of economic needs. And I'm sure that there are extenuating circumstances, but I believe that the people in the U.S. government would be just as happy to have nobody take the money because it's just another way of wiping out the NEA. The people who sponsor this don't want a NEA to begin with. They would like to kill the NEA. They've said so. And so I think that every artist has a right to earn a living and stay alive and be supported. But when you have a government agency that is demanding that all the work that be done be done according to a formulas set up by the United States government, what kind of art is that? That's propaganda. So you might as well go around and hire all the artists in the United States to say, hey, you want a job? You have to do this non-content and boring stuff that we will approve. I think that that is not

something that I would support. So you think several of the people who are recipients who are turning down the money, the choreographer here in LA, the Shakespeare Festival in Oregon are, that's an effective symbolic gesture? Well, I think it's a symbolic gesture of the question of effectiveness. I don't know because most people in the United States don't care about art. Certainly nobody in the government cares about it. That's reflected in the amount of money for the budget. And because we don't care about art, it makes a little bit difficult for us to act as a real international player because other cultures on this planet can project their will or project the personality of their people through their culture. They have a ministry of culture or they have some mechanism by which the better thoughts of that society are projected to other nations. We don't have that. We never cared about it. What we project to other nations is military force. Now think about that. We're supposed to be the land of the free, the home of the brave, but actually we're turning into bullies and we're turning into cowardly bullies at that.

Worse than that, indebted cowardly bullies. We don't have enough cash in our own bank account to go out and buy the weapons that we're using to impress everybody. We've got a national deficit because we borrowed money to build bombs that were never going to use. So that means we're not only an indebted bunch of cowardly bullies. We're also really, really stupid and pretty bad business meant to boot. Look at what these guys are doing. You know, you look at the SNL crisis, a half a trillion dollars so far, half a trillion dollars. Now how much money is that? Well, for a half a trillion dollars, I think you could build all the new hospitals you ever wanted. You could take everyone in America who is homeless. Let's say there's three million homeless people. You could get each one of them a million dollars. You could take care of all the bad roads, you could all these parts of the country that are affected by floods over and over again,

you could fix all of that. That could all be done. We could turn the United States into Utopia. Instead, what do you got? You've got guys who've already made a fortune off of it who are still living in their mansions who have never been brought to justice and they have been able to pull off this crime of the century. This is a big, big robbery now. Half a trillion bucks is a big robbery. And they've done it with the assistance of people in both parties in the Congress to say nothing of the activity of Ronald Reagan. It's not just the Republicans who have done this. The Democrats voted for a lot of this stuff too. And the way I look at it, they all belong in jail. People forget that the government is something that you own. They work for you. You pay their salary. This is not something that is put in place to rule you. They work for you. And you should regard the activities of anybody who's in public office the same way. If you're an employer, you're going to regard the work of an employee. If the guy is stealing from you, he's your employee.

What do you do? Hire him, you know, keep paying him more money and keep him on the job. I'd go in there and look at the voting record of everybody in the Congress and anybody who allowed that deregulation that set the stage for the SNLs to crumble like that. Send them to jail, their varmints. Get them all in jail. And not a country club jail either. Frank, how come it seems that we're not hearing about that the SNL thing as much in the media, was we should? I mean, you'd think the role of any watchdog would be, get excited if there was something they could grab on. Are they not doing their watchdog role properly anymore? Watchdog. Look at who owns the media. Who owns it? Liberals? I mean, all the media outlets basically are owned by the forces of evil. These are guys who will take that phone call from Sanunu at the White House. And if he doesn't like the spin that you're putting on the news, you're going to change your spin. All right. Well, what's changed from the days then when Watergate... That was an amazing thing in American politics because nobody had ever thought before that that we could have a president

that was such a scumbag that would stoop to something like that. That was a shock to the American mentality. But after that, we found out that that was just the beginning. That was the tip of the iceberg. Under Ronald Reagan, you had Oliver North, a man who, in the course of his activities, drafted a plan for the suspension of the U.S. Constitution and nobody batted an eye. Don't we remember that? That was what he did. It wasn't just shipping a few arms here and taking a few bucks there. And when you get right down to it, the reason you're not hearing more about the S&L situation is there's CIA involvement in it. They were using the S&Ls to launder money to help pay for the war in Nicaragua. In one case, in Florida, Singlub and this female talk show, conservative talk show host from a radio station. So I was discussing this the other day on KFI with Tom Likus. He used to be on the same station with this female conservative talk show host. And she was always dealing with the contra topic and

all the rest of that stuff. Well, she was a partner with Singlub in an S&L, which was doing this. And there was other S&Ls in Texas that were doing this. There's a lot of people that would like to see the whole topic of S&Ls go away. But let's don't stop there. Let's take a look at HUD. And all the favors that were done, you could get millions of dollars of free money from HUD if one, you were Republican and two, you were born again Christian because at the time that was the prerequisite for getting your deal approved as opposed to somebody else. And they were always looking to see whether you were a Republican supporter, whether you were a Christian. So if we don't have free speech radio like Pacifica, do you see mainstream journalism, real journalism, hard journalism as something that's going to soon become a thing of the past? I think that hard journalism is already pretty soft in this country because it's not the reporter's fault. The reporters do dig up the news. They find the stuff and they try and get it in the paper,

but remember the paper itself is owned by guys who are usually of the Republican or extreme right persuasion. And they're not going to print certain things. There are certain kinds of stories which never get into the Los Angeles Times. There are certain stories that will never get into the Washington Post. And there are certain stories that will always get into the Washington Times because of the kind of paper it is. Do you think that a lot of stories don't get into because they're not sexy enough, because they're not glamorous enough, because they're not in a, you know, well in the case of two intellectuals? No, in the case of TV, the story is not going to go on unless there's a good picture, because TV is a pictorial medium, but there's no excuse in the world of newspapers and news is news. I'm talking about even people who are semi-respected talk show hosts and years gone by where they did some time, a lot of political analysis. They had a lot of political guests and now they're not having them anymore because they're having only flashy things. Let's see things. Things that will get ratings. Well ratings have always been a matter of concern if you're in an advertising

driven medium. And even a newspaper is an advertising driven medium. Do you think that if you're going to do an expose on the evil doings of a large department store chain that you had a newspaper that that wouldn't harm your profit picture? You mentioned a bit before about the economics of all this and the government sponsorship of the arts is one thing, but commercial considerations of moral content is kind of a whole nother ball of wax in the last couple of months we've seen threaded boycotts were married with children. Domino's pizza pulling their advertising off of NBC's Saturday Night Live, the whole thing with the last temptation of Christ where boycotts were married. Do you think the economic bottle line is a way of, you know, corporations who own these things of causing content producers to censor themselves? Of course. Bottom line. Bottom line. You know, it's one guy or a board of directors who decides, well, we're going to shove our way around. We have the cash and our cash is the engine that drives the media and we will withhold the cash

unless we have things our way. How did it work 20 years ago when independent record companies, small timers all around the country could could survive against the big time or CBS still existed back then? How come the little guy had a better chance of surviving than that he does now? Well, I think it's a matter of sophistication that the business has become more sophisticated and has gotten smaller in terms of the number of players because a lot of those little companies that you mentioned in this mythological golden era of the past, they did disappear. If everything was so good for them, they'd still be around. Most of them showed up, made a couple of bucks or lost their shirt and got out of the business. And got gobbled up by the big guys? Or just gobbled out of the picture. They weren't assimilated into the larger companies. They're just knocked out of business. The problem of being a little independent record company is, let's say you've got a company with one artist and that artist has a record which is a hit this week and it's really hot and you have to press tons of records and ship it out into the stores. Guess what? They have

90 days to pay you and at the end of 90 days they won't pay you because you've got nothing coming up later that gives you leverage that allows you to collect from the retailers. So the retailers have played a role in putting these guys out of business too. I know because I went through it myself with an independently distributed label in the late 60s and we were put into a position where in order to collect from the retailers, we would have had to sue them and under the laws of every state where the retailer existed and they know that and so that's one of the reasons why small labels have to be distributed by larger labels because the larger label has the muscle to collect from the retailer. I want to get a little bit more on mainstream kind of stuff because we're talking about economic bottom lines and most people get their mass culture from either big record labels as we said or from television and things like that and in mainstream films where producers are getting more and more concerned about not showing a lot of drinking teens and having to show pro-social

values and having to have sex with condoms on. That's Kelly, isn't it? Yeah. Well it's silly and it's boring and you'll get more of it unless people decide that they suddenly don't want to go watch those movies and don't buy tickets to it. Do you think that'll eventually cause a rebirth of independent filmmakers, European films and America? No, no, no. Because there's a distribution bottleneck. All of us hinges on if you make a product how do you get it to the marketplace? In the case of films, look at how they're exhibited. You have a lot of little independent theaters, suppose you're a person and you're given the choice between going to Joe Blow's Little Rattie Theater that'll show anything or to some synoplex situation that's better sound and cleaner seating and all the rest of that. You can't get into those major exhibition facilities unless you're putting in the kind of product that they will exhibit. So an artist can make whatever he wants to

make as long as he can afford to make it, but he can't sell it unless he can get it through the distribution chain. That's the same story with a record, with a film or any other kind of thing. Well you tell me, are you being pessimistic about the future? It seems like if there isn't there a chain in popular arts where things get conservative and things get more progressive, it seems like you're suggesting it's just going to keep on getting more conservative. No, I'm not suggesting that at all. What's conservative about two live crew? Is that conservative? That exists today? Indeed. Wow, so I mean, I don't even think it's outrageous. It's just, you know, it's one of those kinds of things, right? And it does exist today. There's all different kinds of things which exist today. Conservative, liberal, progressive, absurd, you name it, it does exist today. But what you know about is only what manages to get through the distribution channels. There are plenty of artists doing things. I'm taking this on faith,

but I'm sure there are people who are making music and doing all kinds of things which are progressive, but you just don't hear about them. Well, not hearing about it means that for a lot of people, not hearing it on the radio. And we've had now, I don't know if this is coincidence, but now music is accessible through the portability of portable cassette machines and stuff. So is that a way of getting around having to go through a radio station? If you have songs with quota obscene lyrics on it? I don't know whether I would think of that as the way to get around hearing it on the radio. I mean, what's the big deal? I mean, these are only words. Remember that thing about sticks and stones can break your bones? Words will never hurt you? Yes, but words could cause you to lose your radio station license. Yeah, well, I think that that is the product of an administration, which is not to be trusted, installing people who would like to put the, put a clamp on the marketplace of ideas. And they use the whole issue of obscenity to create a mechanism whereby all ideas can be filtered, sorted out, and controlled by the

government. It's a police state mentality. The FCC was originally chartered to make sure that your transmitter doesn't get suddenly turned up and blow out somebody else's transmitter. It was to regulate transmissions. It wasn't to regulate ideas. It wasn't to regulate speech. It was never chartered as a censorship organization. But now we have pending congressional hearings in such something called the Helms Amendment where they're proposing a 24-hour ban on anything questionable at all. Indeed, KPFK, our radio station had to spend lots of money last year to secure with lawyers that when we read a celebrity reading of the grapes of wrath, we wouldn't get our buttness slaying with the government. What are your feelings about the proposed Helms Amendment? Well, they've been after Pacifica for years and years and years. And, you know, Jesse Helms, I have no respect for. I won't say he's a stupid man because I've seen him do some things which are fairly clever. But I think that he's a menace to the Constitution. That's the nicest thing you could say about him. And I hope that his challenger in this senatorial contest that's coming

up is successful. In fact, maybe some of your listeners might want to send a few dollars to the campaign of Helms' opponent and support that candidate to give him some ammunition to get Jesse out of there because a man like Jesse Helms has no place in the U.S. Senate. He would have done pretty well in Hitler's cabinet, but not in the U.S. Senate. So, before all this had occurred, we had, you said before Pacifica had trouble for years, going back to the 70s with the Carlin case and more recently with KPFK, the Jerker. Since broadcasting is everywhere and you can't always stop it from playing if you're in a car in a mall or whatever like that. That's ridiculous. If you're smart enough to turn a radio on, you got to be smart enough to turn it off. And if something is offending your ears, I mean, how much protection do you really want in the society? And what are you willing to give

up in order to have protection from words that some people don't like? What are we willing to throw away in order to make sure that no word that Jesse Helms disapproves of ever escapes the lips or squeaks out through the airwaves on anybody's radio station? What are we really willing to give up in order to have that kind of security? Who are we protecting? And what is the net result of the protection? And how could we be so stupid as to even involve ourselves in a discussion of a matter of so little consequence? It's about little words, not even long words. They had a special committee developed for considering what Helms is proposing and rumor through the grave line says that committee stacked. It's kind of a, it was just a fake thing to go through the motions. But actually, the Helms Amendment is going to pass and material of an artistic or sensitive nature won't be able to be played without risking your license. Well, then I suggest you plan on moving to place like Czechoslovakia.

Might be a lot freer there within the next couple of years than the United States will be, in fact, Romania might look like paradise by the time Jesse Helms gets done with what he's doing here. Certainly, I don't believe it, but the radical right seems to be their biggest argument is that exposure of sensitive material will somehow influence the values of young children, young and impressionable kids who will model or mimic the values or the things that they hear about. We're more concerned that these people would watch religious broadcasting and modeling mimic the values of some of those television evangelists. I mean, if you've exposure a child to years upon years of watching Jimmy Swaggerd, I mean, if he didn't even use any four-letter words, and I think he could be hazardous to your mental health, and how about Jim and Tammy, and how about even watching Ronald Reagan, this, you know, Maraka-brained nothingness, running a country. All of this could be injurious to your mental health. Depends on your point of view. There's some people who think that Swaggerd is fabulous,

and he's a nice guy, and he should be on television, and that Jim Baker got a wrong deal, that he should have been allowed to make as much money as he could, selling those condos, and the Tammy Faye is a wonderful person. There are people who believe that. I happen to think they're wrong. I also happen to think that if you use four-letter words, that doesn't make you a criminal, doesn't make you a sinner either. What does it make parents with somewhat even liberal or moderate orientation nervous then? I have no idea. I think that's probably a mental health problem. A lot of this is a mental health problem. I've said in other interviews, the only way that a person could buy into their argument is if they had gone through 12 years of an American education. Anybody who comes out of this school system could be just numb enough to think that these guys had some merit in their argument, when, if you avoided a lot of that, you might see through common sense that they're wrong. They're wrong. They're varments. We've got to get them. You don't think kids would be socialized by hearing songs that have violence towards women in them or talking about drugs or talking about sex. Two live pre-records. You're a parent.

I don't know how young your youngest is, but you wouldn't mind them being supposed to that. Of course not. What? What's going to happen if you hear a record that says, me so horny, does the world going to stop? I think a part of a lot of people's paranoia is because they're reading into it from an adult's point of view, and a four-year-old might not even know what that means or care what that means. It's just abstract. How many four-year-olds do you know who know what the word horny means? Exactly. And if they do, then it ain't going to harm them, is it? What about videos where we see Billy Eidel with leather and lace, and adults will say that's about bondage in SNM, but a little kid just, you know, he doesn't understand. You've got two four-year-old kids who know about bondage. You've got a four-year-old kid who knows about bondage, does bondage, wants to do bondage. I think you have a unique four-year-old. You might even have a unique 10-year-old. And if they do know about it, what's the difference? Is bondage against the law, is leather against the law? Well, the shoe industry is going to be pretty upset about that.

Some people have called a parallel here saying that Luther Campbell is actually a parallel to the Willie Horton thing that George Bush threw at DeCoccus. Do you see Luther Campbell as being the Willie Horton of the 1990s? Well, I'm not sure if that's really a good analogy, but I do detect there's a certain racist aroma to a lot of the stuff that's going on. And I've been in the Rock and Roll business long enough that I remember the first little leaflets that these Christian organizations were dispensing in the 50s that said, don't let your children buy Negro records. It's just a throwback to that. And the Stereo of Jungle Rhythms. Yeah, it's those ludenless, serious jungle rhythms that will make your teenage daughter gyrate around. And the next thing you know, they'll be having sex with those people. And we can't have that. And basically, it gets into changing the color of the race. And these people who started this years ago, I mean, this has been around since the 50s now. They're lunatics and they are racist

and they are, they're dangerous people. You can't ignore them. It's as if an entire segment of the population has a special kind of mental disorder, which is protected by the Constitution, by the way. If you, you can have the most extreme religious beliefs and you're entitled to them, but the Constitution does provide that those extreme religious beliefs are never to be incorporated into legislation. And that is what we're running into is they're crossing the line. And converting some of their religious dogma into legislation or regulation, which will affect the lives and the conduct of people who don't buy into their philosophy. So you see significance in the fact that a black group was confronted first instead of Sam Kinnison or Andrew Dice Clay? I think that it was not just that they were black.

I think that they were chosen because they're not very articulate and because they're from a small label. I can't really see these organizations going after a guy like Eddie Murphy, because he's got a few million dollars to fight him and he can talk good. From what I've seen of the guys from Two Live Crew, they don't make a very good impression on television in terms of the way they talk. I'm not criticizing them, but I think that the people who chose them as the target did a pretty good job of choosing the target. It's absolutely unfair and I think that the whole premise of the case against Two Live Crew is based on a superstition, which is that certain people believe there is such a thing as a dirty word, and there isn't. There's no, where's a scientific evidence that a word can be dirty? Things that are dirty, that's the world of hygiene. You can deal with it in terms of hygiene. You don't deal with it in terms of legislation. The only place where the concept of dirty language

exists is within the realm of religious doctrine, those people who believe that you shouldn't use certain words because it's just the wrong thing to do because of their religion. That's why I say, it goes back to the church and state issue. The average guy speaks colorful American English with all kinds of words in it. What are we going to turn this country into if you can't talk normal in your everyday life? You think newspapers and all media in general didn't pick up on the other half of the Judge Jose Gonzales decision where they only reported the arrest of Two Live Crew and they didn't report anything about the fact that police were wrong for using a form of prior restraints by telling record store owners if they sold a record that they would be arrested. Before the average guy understands what prior restraint means, remember, the reason why this stuff works is because the educational system of this country has been sabotaged. If you take the money out of the education system and if you censor the books that are available in the schools and you make sure that the teachers that are in the schools are basically incompetent,

then what are you graduating? You're graduating a bunch of people who are fairly easy to manipulate because they really aren't very smart. Nothing, they're bad people. They just never had a chance to get hard data. They were never given real facts about the real world in these times. They've been fed a bunch of nothingness and they come out of these schools completely unconcerned with real issues and it's party time. Now this works to the advantage of a government that is trying to create a police state but it's exactly the wrong thing if you were to look at the nation as a business which has to compete with other nations which are also businesses. You have a bunch of people graduating from school who are virtually unemployable. They can't read, they can't write, they can't spell, they can't count. What do you have them do? You can only sell so many hamburgers. So until we do something about helping people to improve their intellectual machinery, helping them with a job of sorting out all the facts that are bombarding them in a

complex world, then the bad guys are going to get away with a lot of these issues because it's easy to fool the average American because he's just been kept stupid. Is it the media's fault in that side of the story wasn't properly reported? Oh I think there's plenty of blame to go around all over the place. I think a lot of it has to come back to the people who allowed the current batch of legislators to sit in their chairs and to write the laws and to run the nation's business. Most of those guys have no business running any business. Do you think that there was a victory here for a primary strength? Perhaps but the real thing that happened in Gonzalez decision was that in stating that the album was obscene, he stated the reason it was obscene is because when you heard it it led you to have filthy thoughts. Now he's creating the ground floor of legislation for thought control. If an album can induce a person to filthy thoughts and if the album should then be banned because it induces filthy thoughts than any other product or object which induces

filthy thoughts should also be taken off the marketplace because it might harm children like a greeting card or an automobile that had a piece of chrome on it that was too suggestive looking or certain vegetables in a supermarket. All these things have to we have to protect our children from this. I mean that's the logical follow-through on any kind of a decision wherein it says the object induces the consumer to experience filthy thoughts. Thoughts, thoughts. Now if his decision is upheld we have the beginning of case law here. This is a decision that could be referred to by other people in state legislatures and say based on the Gonzalez decision this zucchini is against the law. And what you know obscenity is determined by local standards. What do you think about the whole outgrowth of Dallas and Sacramento and Southern Florida decision? Because the network of all of these right-wing extremists is pretty far and wide and California has always been the home to every kind of a cook and crack pot that you can think of. Unfortunately California still works in spite of

the fact that we have an abundance of these types of people here and so it comes just no surprise that the topic would be taken up by some legislative body somewhere in California. Remember it was a California city that banned Little Red Riding Hood and every state legislator is full of you know little small-time crooks who just got elevated to a legislative chair. Who knows how they did it but they're in there and because of the way government works if they write a law you're stuck with it just because you were too busy to pay attention to who was running for what seat and to make a decision based on whether or not that that guy ought to have a position of power over you. You don't think the average California voter then who has all the propositions to read through and read the arguments for and against actually reads them? Even if you did read the pamphlet that you received they're worded in such a way that unless you were a lawyer you can't figure them out and if you don't if you're a Hispanic and you're not really familiar with complex language

in English you have an clue. So most of the political advertising is based on heart-string tugging. It's not about issues it's not about the intellectual merits of a case it's not about facts it's about buzzwords and pulling on the old heartstrings the statistic that I heard the other day was in the mayoral mayoral race only 10% of the eligible voters voted 10% 10% think about that people in Romania are dying over voting rights and they get really excited about elections because you know it seems to matter to them what do we got 90% stayed away we don't care so if we don't care then we really don't have the right to complain about the way things are we just let it go you stay home you don't participate in democracy then don't expect democracy to work.

How can people even have a clue then as to how to vote yes or no for the various propositions you know what I do what I ask a lawyer what does this say unfortunately not everyone can do that I know but I mean at least I take the time and spend the money to find out what does this actually say now I'm not saying everybody should go out and have a lawyer just in order to read that ballot pamphlet but there are ways to find out now if I find out and somebody asked me at least I've spent the bucks and I can help to explain it why don't we just take a look at it this way if you have difficulty understanding I'll say KPFK could play a role in this anytime that little booklet comes out with all these propositions why don't you get a lawyer on the air to say this is what it says you might even get a lawyer to do it for free to make a radio star out of them please Mr. Lawyer come on here and tell us what does this crap mean in this book however we're coming in second best to Arizona this season because Arizona has a law that

is even it's a law now and it's even more ridiculous than anything it's been passed in California and that's the Arizona Dildo law it has just been passed it is now illegal in Arizona to own more than five Dildos now figure it out they debated this long and hard in the state legislature what is the right number what is the maximum consumable number of Dildos that a human being may possess in the state of Arizona and five was the answer now I want to know how they going to enforce the Arizona Dildo law are we going to have Dildo police coming to your home Dildo police how many you got in there coming in six you're under arrest ladies and gentlemen I present to you six Dildo Bob he's going he's going down the river for 15 years I mean this is absurd now these people are earning a salary for drafting legislation and this is what they did that's Arizona so come on California people we got to catch up don't you think we need our own Dildo law here perhaps with a death penalty

attached to it show show those Dildo owners who's really the boss getting back to obscenity all over the country and at least those way the laws written it says community standards and as you mentioned earlier about you said zucchini do you think that we're local communities aren't going to think for themselves anymore you know they were in Texas they're going to base everything on the local communities won't think for themselves first of all we have a community deterioration the whole concept of a community is evaporating before our very eyes it's every man for himself or head and you noticed how can we even say that in California because the whole idea of a neighborhood what is that yeah so it's even impossible to deal with if you're saying local standards and there really is no local community how could you even who computes them you can't even take a numerical average to create to create a database for the standard if you can't get people to fill out their census forms how are you going to develop any kind of hard fact database to establish what a community standard is two live crew was arrested on on local and state obscenity statutes

but another thing that's looming large over the whole music industry is proposed record rating laws in about 20 states most of it's been killed for now but there's a threat that if they don't police themselves it's going to come back later what's your feeling that threat the people you know the people who are making the threat will make sure it comes back later because they're never going to be satisfied they're they already have albums with stickers on them in fact two live crew had a sticker on it didn't it did that protect them there's no question that the people who want this will do they'll spend money because the money is tax-free for them they can gather up money all you know send out a mailing and there's going to be lunatics that'll send them a fortune the record industry if it wants to hold its head high has got to invest some cash to fight this but I doubt whether they will do you think what happened in was it 85 by even voluntarily entering in with the PMRC to voluntarily label that that was a bad first step absolutely they should have fought them tooth and nail from the day they first got the PMRC letter they should

have told these people go stuff it you got no business meddling in my affairs you're not a government agency we don't need to hear about your concerns your concerns are worthless it's a sham it's just another piece of fundamentalist frogwash get out of my face that's what they should have done and they should have just given in the finger and walked away but no they had two pieces of legislation that they were trying to protect in the Congress one was HR 2911 the blank tape tax and the other one was this anti-piracy bill in the case of the blank tape tax if they could have got the Congress to pass that they would have picked up a quarter of a billion dollars a year and found money and it would have been collected for them by the U.S. government they would be in this weird partnership with the IRS collecting in advance the special cash and the bulk of it would have gone to the record companies not to the artist the thing was designed to be distributed on a 90 10 split 90 percent of the record companies 10 percent of the artist the government would collect it for

them and it was like a dream come true for the record industry they weren't going to throw that away and they knew that the husbands of these ladies in the PMRC sat on the committees that would be hearing their legislation and so they played footsie with them and on November 1 85 they signed an agreement saying they would voluntarily label records this is not news this happened in 85 but on October 30th 1985 was when the blank tape tax got its first hearing in the Congress no coincidence yes so hindsight's 2020 but a tactical error that's set up what's happening now you think absolutely and I think that when the decision was made to bend over all these smart guys the executives in the record company said hey well it's not our problem what are we giving up what what do we care whether the free speech rights of some stupid artist is curtailed by this there's a quarter of a billion dollars a year and free money coming in the door if we can do this aren't we smarter and more prudent and better businessmen if we just say screw the artist and go for the

money and they all shook hands and nodded and you know snorted their cocaine and went on their merry way that's what happened artists there are dime a dozen you have to get rid of one there's another one coming in the door this plenty of artists out there each one with a better hairdo each one with more leather more studs each one cuter each one looking more like a girl okay they had the whole thing figured out it was going to be no problem for them because they were giving up no rights they were giving up the rights of a third party well monkey wrenches a bound now and even though they temporarily beat them in most states right now except for Louisiana which is still pending and the the threat of it all looms large to come back and hon again and a lot of it now is detailing a lot of bills detail something about estrus italic substance abuse for records like that who's gonna who's gonna do that that's what the PMRC started off with they had an eight point rating system over a cult ex for sex and on and on and on they had this multiple rating system in on at the senate hearing they gave up on all that just as per generic rating but now these Christian

groups are trying to bring that back you know when you want to have a satanic rating on a record first of all it validates the idea that there is such a thing as a devil okay prove it to me i believe that once upon a time there was a guy named jesus and he was walking around that's a real guy a guy with red skin horns a long tail smells like sulfur has a pointed stick you know makes you go to place where there's there's fire that's superstition and superstition has no place in legislation so if you create something that says we must protect people from the devil you're saying that the devil's real and you've got a problem because the next step is the witchcraft trials something that's was in the Missouri bill which was temporarily defeated or hopefully permanently defeated was the fact that there was civil liability if someone could prove in court that a record caused someone to do something anti-social whether it's suicide or do whatever how could a record cause someone to do anything if there's any evidence that

spoken material has caused people to have to engage in anti-social activities the preponderance of evidence is against television evangelists whose followers have committed crimes of an even more serious nature for example the guy on the statinidal and fairy who appears with a sword and kills four people because Jesus told them to do it you know the lunatics in this world are in that camp they're not the people who listen to heavy metal records or rap records the sick people are the ones who watch these Christian programs on television these are the ones that you know there ought to be some civil liability there to matter of fact I would suggest liability insurance for the station owner who puts this stuff on the air because if they create legislation that says liability based on hearing somebody say something that could be stretched to the liability for the broadcaster who put the substance the audio substance on the air and if it can be proven

that a person has done something bad because he got the information from watching a religious program and there's more of that there's a lot more of that to deal with and there is of any kind of teenage suicide from listening to Ozzy Osborne I think if they create that law it could backfire on in a court of law who would even say that the Ozzy Osborne song suicide solution was about suicide and it told this person to that's been the trial as far as I know twice and has been thrown out both times and they're still whipping the same dead horse the last time it went to trial was the claim was that tucked away inside the groups of the album was a subliminal 11 cycle tone which drove people to these acts now ladies and gentlemen the human ear functions between 20 cycles and 20,000 cycles on a good day if you got perfect hearing that's what you can hear well as far as I can tell there is no recording medium that will reproduce an 11 cycle tone the

bandwidth on a CD is 20 to 20 and not only that but all of Wilson Bryan Key's work the guy wrote the auto subliminal seduction has never been empirically proven in a test setting it's just all hypothesis so how could how could courts even award civil liability how could the Arizona legislature create the dildo law remember not only is the public intellectually impaired because they've gone through the American educational system guess what the guy sitting next to you at the desk in that bad school you went to he's in the legislation business now I mean you have people in government who are intellectually unprepared to engage in any high level human activity these are basically used car salesmen that got a promotion or lawyers which is worse so you say how can you do it take a look at who's doing it it's been a tricky year what's the next year look like Frank it's gonna be better not much better why do you say that because I don't think that there's

any signal on the horizon that shows me that the American public is gonna wake up and smell the coffee here I think it's gonna be oh isn't that weird look what they're doing in Florida oh that dildo law that sure is strange you know okay you just consume it is entertainment the news is consumed is entertainment it doesn't motivate you when's the point gonna come when people start rebelling in America not sounds pretty bleak well you ask my opinion that's my opinion I can't really see any kind of grassroots rebellion of any description of this country because it's too sedated do you think that's meteor rhetoric always saying that the next decade is gonna be like the 60s and we're gonna return to 60s values what's the future for the 90s I'm not sure that the 60s values were all that terrific I mean they start to look pretty good compared to the 80s and 90s values but I wouldn't say if the 60s was any kind of a golden age because there were a lot of stupid things that occurred during the 60s I will say that is my opinion that the condition that

we're in now is bordering on terminal as far as the political and social health of the country is concerned so we're gonna it's gonna become a fascist state unless we do something about it that's the that is what's at the end of the road fascist state we're talking about Romania too we're talking about having our own personal chao chescu here his name will be easier to pronounce of course probably be a one syllable word like bush or quail or something like that but the result is the same secret police spying on your phone calls how many dildos you got in there that's what you got Frank thanks for your insights welcome you've been listening to Zapper on censorship Frank Zapper in conversation with JB Peterson

this program was produced for KPFK and Pacifica Radio by JB Peterson the associate producer was Lucy Freers the Arizona law to which Mr Zapper referred was twice introduced into their state house it has never been ratified although efforts still continue ironically despite Pacifica Radio's efforts to promote the ideal of freedom of speech portions of this interview had to be censored in accordance with current FCC guidelines your feelings about FCC restrictions on sensitive language can be addressed to the Federal Communications Commission 1919 M Street Northwest Washington DC 20554 for Pacifica Radio this is Lucy Freers they're wrong they're wrong their varments we've got to get them