Did you hear that “Money for Nothing” is now banned on Canadian radio stations? Banned! This is incredibly startling news for me, given that the song originally came out in 1985. So, twenty-six years later, it has been decided that the word “faggot” – when used by derogatory men who are moving the singer’s fantastic possessions including but not limited to a colour TV and a microwave oven – is unacceptable and the song must be taken off the air. Really. Have you heard “Shake That” by Eminem? It is possibly the freakiest song ever, given the details about a) getting so drunk that one barfs and then gets drunk again, immediately, b) going to a strip club, c) popping the date rape drug into one of the strippers champagne glasses, d) looking for a slut to fuck in a Hummer truck. Among other things. As far as I know, that song is still on the radio, but the word “fuck” is censored. Thank goodness we have standards.
Censorship is a sticky subject. Clearly hatred and derogatory terms are not acceptable in this day and age, but is retroactively changing art and literature a fix? There’s a whole debate currently raging about changing parts of Huckleberry Finn, a novel I never liked, but recognize its importance in American literature. Is sanitizing art really the thing to do?
Here’s the thing: the n-word currently is used in nearly every hip-hop song by Kanye West and Jay-Z, and a lot of other artists whose names I do not know because I’m pretty out of the loop and I mostly listen to radio stations that play songs like the Pina Colada song and Margaritaville. Also that song Santa Maria, about everyone on the yacht getting loaded. I hear that song all the time. But if the n-word is erased from Huckleberry Finn, then shouldn’t it be taken from rap and hip-hop songs? Where does it stop? Should that entire musical genre be banned?
I remember reading Laura Ingalls Wilder books when I was a child. There was a lot of abject racism in those books, especially in Little House on the Prairie, where the Ingalls family moves to Indian Territory. The plot of the book is that settlers move to Kansas to take the land from the Indians, and are pretty angry that they are forced to move at the end of the book, as the land is going to remain with the Indians. There is a lot of fear and hatred in that book. There are a lot of non-flattering descriptions in that book, about Indians wearing skunk pelts and smelling badly, about Indians stealing all the corn bread and Pa’s tobacco, about terrifying war cries keeping the Ingalls family awake at night.
But yet it is a time piece. Those feelings were real. Those things did happen; settlers did fear and, possibly, hate Indians, white settlers believed that the land was inherently theirs and not the Indians’. The whites in the book say frequently that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, which is horrifying to modern ears. But what I also remember about that book is that Pa realizes that there are good people and bad people, whites and Indians both, and he shows immense respect for one person in particular, referred to as the “Osage”. I remember the Osage catching and killing a panther that was on the prowl.
“Laura asked if a panther would carry off a little papoose and kill and eat her, too, and Pa said yes. Probably that was why the Indian had killed that panther.”
Despite the racist undertones, there is a thread of common humanity in that book. Reading this book today, it strikes me that it is better to use art and literature as tools to teach about the roots of racism – fear and ignorance come to mind – rather than erase and sanitize. What do you think?
