Pussy Riot: Band Members’ Conviction a Blow to Free Expression (Huffington Post)

Musicians being arrested for performing material deemed “obscene” was, in large part, responsible for my becoming such a political animal over twenty years ago. Music has always played a huge role in my life, and as I was growing up in the 1980s faced with a nauseating pop music scene, hair metal and a huge wave of untalented pre-packaged teen acts, I turned to rap music for a refuge. I wish I could say that I was deeply into the more politically influenced acts of the time like Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions, or the high-quality work of EPMD and Eric B. and Rakim. I did have cassettes from all of them, and I still do, somewhere. Unfortunately I was more interested in some of the more vapid and forgettable MCs of the era, and if I ever get famous then the embarrassing stories that will come out about that phase of my life might fill multiple books.

I watched a lot of MTV back then — there wasn’t much else on television, and my MTV habit paid off in the mid-90s when pop music stopped stinking for a few years — and being obsessed with dirty words like most pre-teens are, I couldn’t help noticing that the standards for what got bleeped or censored in rap videos were much more strict than for other videos. Looking at the skin colours of the performers, and hearing what got cut out of songs, it was hard not to notice the correlation. (I was too young to remember the controversies about the scarcity of African-American artists in MTV’s first years.) That made me realize the realities of race in this country much more than anything I’d been taught at school, and was my first real introduction to modern identity politics. The portrayal and treatment of minorities has been a strong interest in my life ever since.

When 2 Live Crew’s landmark album, As Nasty As They Wanna Be, was declared legally obscene, I had a hard time believing that I was living in America in 1990. All the members of my immediate family are George Carlin fans, so I had some idea of how boundary-pushing artists had been treated in the relatively recent past when it came to obscenity laws, but I’d thought that was history. When 2 Live Crew were arrested for performing tracks off of As Nasty As They Wanna Be, I was incensed. Free speech soon became another huge concern for me (and also remains so to this day). Even after I lost interest in rap in the early 90s its politics has remained important to me, and the arrests and obscenity trials surrounding As Nasty As They Wanna Be remain among the most formative of my political identity.

The parallels between what happened to 2 Live Crew over twenty years ago, and what has happened with Pussy Riot this year, almost go without saying. In one very important way, though, the cases are not parallel at all. No one was ever convicted of obscenity in the wake of all the arrests surrounding As Nasty As They Wanna Be. Three members of Pussy Riot just got sentenced to two years in prison for engaging in non-violent civil disobedience, and when I heard the news it literally sent chills down my spine. (Another of the key differences between the two cases is that what’s happening to Pussy Riot is happening in Russia, and perhaps I’m not being culturally sensitive by applying my political beliefs to a country I know comparatively little about, but that’s a risk I have to take.)

First of all, I believe the values and principles of non-violent civil disobedience transcend cultures, if not history itself. It was impossible to listen to as much rap as I did in my early teen years and not learn about the legacy and lessons of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and that in turn led me to study Gandhi and other practitioners of non-violent civil disobedience. It’s an honoured practice that continues even to this day, although (probably because it’s non-violent and thus “doesn’t make good TV”) it doesn’t get so much press these days. Earlier this month the Green Party candidates for President and Vice President (whom I plan on voting for in November), Jill Stein and Cheri Honkala, were arrested for taking part in a sit-in protesting Fannie Mae evicting families from their homes. Non-violent civil disobedience has been one of the most powerful tools for creating positive change in the world, and I sincerely hope that it hasn’t lost too much power in this media-driven, short-attention-span age.

We artists have also played our roles in history as engines of social change through our work. Although 2 Live Crew’s sex-fueled (and highly misogynistic) lyrics were hardly everyone’s cup of tea, the resulting arrests and trials surrounding As Nasty As They Wanna Be transcended their material, as is usually the case with artists whose work merits such strong public response. In these cases the response to condemn the work and/or the artists behind it is often counterproductive, calling public attention to what you’re trying to silence, and in this age of global media, repression of any kind is going to get a lot of scornful eyes looking your way. The international response to Pussy Riot’s arrests and sentencing has been heartening, and I can only hope it forces Russia to reconsider its actions.

One of the most bothersome parts of the Pussy Riot case is how so much of the vengeance they’ve had to contend with seems to stem from the idea that what they did was offencive. I really dislike the idea some people have that they have a right not to be offended, and when that idea becomes law, and people are thrown in jail for it, it creates a positively frightening effect on a culture. Being offended goes hand-in-hand with being an engaged citizen in a culture where people are free to express ideas. If you go to bed at the end of the day and you haven’t been offended at least once by something you read or saw or heard about, then you did something wrong.

I wish I could say that this idea of people having a right not to be offended wasn’t prominent in America, but it definitely fuels a lot of the far right of this country, especially the  religious right. You’re not going to see a lot of them leaping to Pussy Riot’s defence in the coming days; their blood probably boils just at the mention of the band’s name. (I have to admit to a certain juvenile pleasure in typing the word “pussy” so often in this post, knowing how it affects them.) We may not have obscenity trials like we had as a result of As Nasty As They Wanna Be any longer, but the relative success of Rick Santorum in this year’s Republican primaries shows that, despite the current public focus of Republicans on economic issues, there’s still a sizable chunk of the party that is deeply culturally conservative and would love nothing more than to censor huge swaths of media as they impose their morality on all of us.

That’s why I have to join others in strongly condemning the convictions and prison sentences of Pussy Riot and demanding their immediate release. What happened to them is not only too evocative of what I’ve seen happen to artists in my past, but I fear that unless we all raise our voices in protest, it could be a part of my future as well.