Why should Wal-Mart provide the medium by which a singer can spread
derogatory comments about Wal-Mart?

For profit. The CD's sell for more than WalMart pays for them.

I can see you're not a Sheryl Crowe fan.
(The reference to WalMart was extremely benign.)

If someone wanted to hold up a sign
saying "Gould is...(gay, a pedophile, etc)", would you offer them your front
lawn to carry it around on?

Not the same thing. You're comparing a
single mention of a business name in a recording to a group of organized
pickets making disparaging remarks.

"NOYB" wrote in message link.net...
"Gould 0738" wrote in message
...

I hope we would both agree that hate speech directed against racial
minorities,
sexual non-conformists, drug abusers, and liberals does *not* truly
epitomize a
true conservative philosophy.


I'd agree with you...except for the part about liberals.

So, you are admitting that a "true conservative philosphy" INCLUDES
"hate speech"? For once we agree, conservatives are hateful.

"NOYB" wrote in message link.net...
"Gould 0738" wrote in message
...
I wouldn't think you'd be conspiracy theory type of guy, Gould.

Fact: Recording artists have had their work removed from WalMart stores
because
lyrics could have been interpreted to be disdainful of WalMart. Example:
Sheryl
Crowe

Why should Wal-Mart provide the medium by which a singer can spread
derogatory comments about Wal-Mart?

Why was the comments by the illustrious Cheryl Crow "derogatory"? Guns
ARE sold at Wal-Mart.

Why was the comments by the illustrious Cheryl Crow "derogatory"? Guns
ARE sold at Wal-Mart.


Here's a little more information abut censorship at WalMart. Not only do they
ban certain products, but they force the record companies to alter the content
of other recordings and packaging to conform to WalMart's (supposed) moral
standards.

And hey, Democrats! Guess who has been right in the thick of this drive for
censorship, (at least in the recent past)?
Joseph Lieberman. :-(



Banned in Rohnert Park: Is Marilyn Manson too nasty?
The nation's biggest retailer is under fire, not for gun sales (sorry, Sheryl
Crowe), but for censorship of rock and rap CDs.

By Hank Hoffman


SNOOP Doggy Dogg is being executed in the aisles of my local Wal-Mart store. A
dozen or more display TVs in the aisle next to the compact discs department are
tuned to MTV, airing the video for "Snoop's Upside Ya Head," a cut from the
platinum-selling gangsta rapper's hit Tha Doggfather album.

In the video version, a white actor playing the warden of the prison in which
the controversial rap star is held addresses a press conference in the voice of
a circus ringmaster. "Ladies and gentlemen! It is with great pleasure that I
welcome you to the first execution of a gangsta rap singer, Snoop Doggy Dogg!"
he exclaims with a flourish. "Our country and its people will be renewed by the
elimination of this scourge to propriety, this menace to wholesome values."

He pauses to wipe some unsightly dust off the electric chair. "So, without any
further ado, let's juice him!"

In Wal-Mart, consider him juiced.

I ask a clerk where I can find the Snoop Doggy Dogg disc. "Hmm, well, I don't
think we have it, but if we do, it would be here," he says, thumbing through
the "S" bin of pop CDs. Sure enough, we don't dig out that Dogg. This isn't
really a surprise. Wal-Mart has a policy of not carrying any CDs that carry the
notorious parental warning label.

Still, I ask the young clerk why they don't have it. "It's a family store," he
elaborates. "We don't carry other things that might bother people, like Marilyn
Manson or Korn either."

These are hit records. Up the street at a chain record store, they are arrayed
on the wall in the Billboard Hot 100 display. Does anybody at Wal-Mart--which
has an outlet in Rohnert Park and another planned for Windsor--ever complain
about their absence? "Some people do," he shrugs. "But it's Wal-Mart; it's not
a real record store."

Perhaps not, but it is a real power in the retailing biz. In some areas of the
country, Wal-Mart is the only place to buy CDs or tapes. While it is well known
that Wal-Mart doesn't carry labeled CDs, the New York Times recently detailed
in a front-page story how the chain and other big retailers are having an
insidious effect on music and movie production. Like cancerous cells,
adulterated censored CDs are proliferating in Wal-Mart's bins, in many cases
without being identified as such.

In some cases, CDs are altered to bleep out "bad" words. For instance, the
cover of a White Zombie disc, Supersexy Swingin' Sounds, was cleaned up by
airbrushing a bikini onto a nude model reclining in a hammock (even though no
naughty bits were visible). A song on the back of Primitive Radio Gods' Rocket
CD is identified as "Motherfker" in the aforementioned record store, but as
"Mother" at Wal-Mart.

The New York Times also identified creepier instances of corporate power being
used to suppress ideas. Wal-Mart won't carry Sheryl Crow's new record because
she chides the company for allegedly selling guns to children. The figures of
Jesus and the Devil flanking John Mellencamp on the cover of his new record,
Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky, are airbrushed out of the copies available at Wal-Mart.
Mellancamp reportedly OK'd the change in the interest of record sales.

In a sanitized world, apparently, we can't acknowledge moral conflict. Since
then, Usenet newsgroups have been buzzing with calls to "Boycott Wal-Mart!" and
dialogues over whether it's really censorship if the pressure on the artists
comes from private corporations rather than the government.

And record companies are running scared.

This makes Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., very happy. For the past few years,
Lieberman, along with virtuecrat and former federal drug czar Bill Bennett, C.
Delores Tucker of the National Political Congress of Black Women, and ex-Sen.
Sam Nunn, D-Ga., have been leading the charge against the entertainment
industry. Lieberman and his cohorts have targeted violent video games and
trash-talk TV and, accepting the baton from Tipper Gore (who's been quiet on
the issue since hubbie Al Gore became vice president and L.A. record execs
eagerly opened their wallets to the Clinton presidential campaigns), have
lambasted record companies for promoting products that feature violent and
misogynistic lyrics, particularly in rap.

"Some of the rap music and other music is just the most violent, anti-woman,
pro-drug stuff that I've ever heard. So three cheers for Wal-Mart," says
Lieberman. "There is freedom of speech in this country--we've always said that
in our appeals to the record companies to try and clean up their act--and just
as there's free speech, in a free market Wal-Mart doesn't have to carry
anything it doesn't want to carry, and of course that has an effect because
they're such a big retailer."

But does Lieberman--who says he got involved with Wal-Mart in the campaign to
get ratings on video games--find the Mellencamp or Crow cases worrisome? "I
have felt that the record companies, the big businesses that produce music,
have been so irresponsible that my first reaction to the Wal-Mart story was,
'Thank God that these people are being responsible' and, generally speaking, I
think that's true," explains Lieberman, who says he was briefed about the
article and was not familiar with those particular details.

"But you have presented me with some cases where, if I were Mr. or Mrs.
Wal-Mart, I would have done it a little differently, sure, but this will all
work itself out." He allows that "in the best of all worlds" Wal-Mart would
inform the customer that CDs have been altered.

"My guess is, knowing how fast information flies, this will make people who are
buying records skeptical and they may ask questions at the counter or they may
decide to shop elsewhere," Lieberman says.

And anyway, he adds, the consumer market is so big in this country that anyone
can get anything--by mail even, if Wal-Mart is the only retail game in town.


Wal-Mart Rebels: Is Korn not wholesome enough for local consumption?


SINCE the censorship story broke, Wal-Mart's PR flacks have been in
damage-control mode. Although the retailer's bins bulge with bleeped "****s"
and sanitized airbrushed covers that would be the envy of any Stalinist, the
company's corporate face is frozen in an expression of wounded innocence. There
are no boastful statements on how they've muscled sleazeball singers into
washing out their mouths with electronic soap.

Instead, the huge Arkansas-based retail chain founded by patriarch Sam Walton
presents itself as a warm and fuzzy family-friendly company that stands for
"traditional values."

But the corporation is a bare-knuckled, sharp-elbowed competitor with a
reputation for going into a community, engaging in predatory pricing, and
leaving local storefronts empty. Wal-Mart denies using its corporate power to
create an alternate market of bowdlerized CDs. In the official pronouncement
posted on its Web site, the company states that it "does not alter CDs, albums,
or other music that is offered in our stores." (It's a disingenuous statement;
no one has accused non-manufacturer Wal-Mart of altering the discs itself.) Nor
does the company feel it has any obligation to identify such altered discs for
its customers.

"We do not talk to artists, we do not go to the recording industry and say you
have to do a, b, and c for us to sell your product," says Betsy Reithemeyer, a
spokesperson at Wal-Mart headquarters in Arkansas. "If a manufacturer wants to
sell their product in Wal-Mart, they have to meet certain standards. If a
manufacturer chooses to place a warning label on their merchandise, we have to
look at that and consider it. If they want to put two CDs out on the
street--one with one set of lyrics and one with another, that is certainly
their choice."

According to Reithemeyer, it is the distributors and record companies that have
the responsibility to identify product as altered, not the retailer.

The consumers, it seems, have the choice to trust Wal-Mart's judgment, not to
use their own. Wal-Mart's denials aside, it's counterintuitive--as one
individual who works with both producers and retailers on free speech issues
told me--to imagine that manufacturers would change their product without
impetus from the retailers. And Wal-Mart is the most outspoken. As the
retailers act to advance a conservative cultural agenda and protect record
consumers from their own tastes, the music industry is running for cover.

"The most telling thing in that New York Times article is the dog that didn't
bark. There's not a single record executive quoted," says rock critic Dave
Marsh. "In the wake of the Tucker-Lieberman thing, that's how cowed they are."

Publisher of the politically oriented newsletter Rock and Rap Confidential,
Marsh is a stalwart opponent of censorship. He rejects even the parental
warning stickers, pointing out that they result in the blacklisting of the CDs
that carry them. He believes retailers have a civic obligation to make
available a wide range of material, even--perhaps, especially--material that
makes people uncomfortable.

"The point of the First Amendment is not to protect things everyone agrees on.
It's to protect things people don't agree on," Marsh argues. "If they're
eliminating what is controversial, they're not being good citizens.

"This is not about protecting people. Wal-Mart sells guns, they sell junk
food--how many carcinogens do you think they sell at Wal-Mart?" asks Marsh.
"It's about forcing people to think like Christians from Arkansas."

Imagine if, instead of banning obscenity-prone rappers, a major national retail
chain announced it would no longer carry Christian pop music. Not because it
doesn't sell--it sells big--but because it doesn't comport with the values the
retailer likes to think it shares with its customers. And, imagine further,
that the store had a demonstrable, if unstated, policy of accepting those same
recordings if all references to Jesus or God were expurgated.

Christian conservatives would be up in arms at attempts to pressure their
brethren and sistren into denying their faith.

I didn't get very upset a decade or so ago when Tipper Gore and the Parents
Music Resource Center were pushing for warning stickers on records. What's so
bad about letting the consumer know what's on a disc?, I thought. And even now,
as the father of an 8-year-old son, I find the ratings on videos helpful in
deciding which are appropriate for him to watch. But it has turned out that
so-called alarmists such as Dave Marsh and the late Frank Zappa--the avant
rocker who led the charge in the 1980s against the PMRC--were right. The
warning labels are used to compile blacklists. And the surrender on the warning
labels has just led to further surrenders, which has led to censored compact
discs in the bins of Wal-Mart.

They look the same but they aren't the same--they're different by a factor of
fear.

Censorship is easily recognizable when it's practiced by the government. But
this is censorship, too: It's the attempt to impose the conservative values of
Wal-Mart and Joe Lieberman on the public by denying access to cultural products
that differ from those values. It is argument by suppression, intimidation,
and--in Wal-Mart's case--stealth.

It isn't just Snoop Doggy Dogg who is being executed in the aisles of Wal-Mart.
It is also the idea of an open and lively culture, one in which values are
debated rather than imposed by authoritarian fiat, a culture in which the
mainstream still has access to the margins and vice versa. Wal-Mart has a right
to act as a cultural censor.

It's just wrong to do so.

[ Sonoma Independent | MetroActive Central | Archives ]






--------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
From the January 9-15, 1997 issue of the Sonoma County Independent
This page was designed and created by the Boulevards team.
Copyright © 1997 Metrosa, Inc.

I like Sheryl Crowe. But if she wrote derogatory remarks about me in a
song, I'd suspect my opinion would change pretty quickly.


"Gould 0738" wrote in message
...
Why should Wal-Mart provide the medium by which a singer can spread
derogatory comments about Wal-Mart?

For profit. The CD's sell for more than WalMart pays for them.

I can see you're not a Sheryl Crowe fan.
(The reference to WalMart was extremely benign.)

If someone wanted to hold up a sign
saying "Gould is...(gay, a pedophile, etc)", would you offer them your
front
lawn to carry it around on?

Not the same thing. You're comparing a
single mention of a business name in a recording to a group of organized
pickets making disparaging remarks.

"basskisser" wrote in message
om...
"NOYB" wrote in message
link.net...
"Gould 0738" wrote in message
...
I wouldn't think you'd be conspiracy theory type of guy, Gould.

Fact: Recording artists have had their work removed from WalMart
stores
because
lyrics could have been interpreted to be disdainful of WalMart.
Example:
Sheryl
Crowe

Why should Wal-Mart provide the medium by which a singer can spread
derogatory comments about Wal-Mart?

Why was the comments by the illustrious Cheryl Crow "derogatory"? Guns
ARE sold at Wal-Mart.


"Let's watch our kids kill each other with guns they bought at WalMart"

Kids aren't buying guns at Wal-Mart...adults are. And how does Cheryl Crowe
know that it's Wal-Mart guns doing the killing?

On Wed, 08 Oct 2003 17:11:00 GMT, "NOYB" wrote:

[snip]

Why was the comments by the illustrious Cheryl Crow "derogatory"? Guns
ARE sold at Wal-Mart.


"Let's watch our kids kill each other with guns they bought at WalMart"

Kids aren't buying guns at Wal-Mart...adults are. And how does Cheryl Crowe
know that it's Wal-Mart guns doing the killing?

Poetry is a symbolic, often oblique means of communication. Literary devices
are seldom meant to be taken literally.

In the critically acclaimed[1] essay, "Like Buttah," for example: "The water is
glass" does not mean that what was once H20 has been somehow literally
transfogrified into glass, any more than "contemplative coffee" refers to a
beverage that is sentient.

There will be a short quiz. This will count on your final grade.

Joe Parsons

[1] Well, three or four people did say they liked it. That's good enough for
me!

"NOYB" wrote in message link.net...
"basskisser" wrote in message
om...
"NOYB" wrote in message
link.net...
"Gould 0738" wrote in message
...
I wouldn't think you'd be conspiracy theory type of guy, Gould.

Fact: Recording artists have had their work removed from WalMart
stores
because
lyrics could have been interpreted to be disdainful of WalMart.
Example:
Sheryl
Crowe

Why should Wal-Mart provide the medium by which a singer can spread
derogatory comments about Wal-Mart?

Why was the comments by the illustrious Cheryl Crow "derogatory"? Guns
ARE sold at Wal-Mart.


"Let's watch our kids kill each other with guns they bought at WalMart"

Kids aren't buying guns at Wal-Mart...adults are. And how does Cheryl Crowe
know that it's Wal-Mart guns doing the killing?

I would suppose that, because of sheer volume, there are probably
several instances in any given year, of guns that were sold at
Wal-Mart being used to kill other humans. In some states hunting
rifles can be boughten at 16. Also, adults by guns that kids have
direct access to. It's the same old same old. 90% of felons in prison
whose crimes included guns, weren't, by law, able to purchase guns.
Most of them were bought by either relatives, who the stole them from,
or others, who they stole them from.