Editorials

Radio Suckers: The FCC's Arbitrary Attack On Rap
by Eric Nuzum

Published June 13 - 19, 2001

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. During my book tour this spring, I stopped in Portland and appeared on a KBOO talk show. As soon as I mentioned the case on-air, the host turned pale. During a station break he asked me to refrain from discussing the matter. KBOO worried that that those who filed the complaint might still be monitoring the station and that comments on the situation might provoke them further. You see, KBOO, a small station with limited resources, had already spent more than $10,000 defending itself against the ruling. They feared additional complaints could force the station to lay off staff or cut back programming. So not only had the complainants silenced Sarah Jones, DJ Vadim and the entire staff of KBOO, they had also effectively silenced me.

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.