You Are Reading the First 6 FREE Chapters (470 pages)
1.4.2Music Censorship: Banning Songs and Music Generally
Music censorship has been aroung for ages. From time to time throughout history, religious and political leaders, recognizing the power of music to engage people emotionally, have sought to ban songs, sometimes brutally.
A few examples:
- The Christian church obstructed the development of polyphony and harmony because religious leaders realized music elicits emotion, including pleasure, which was contrary to church doctrine.
- The Nazis banned jazz in the 1930s because Black people played it and Jewish people encouraged and financed its development.
- The communist Chinese dictatorship, when it seized power in1949, banned jazz, the music of the bourgeois capitalist West.
- Various American churches with white congregations and racist agendas have periodically banned specific types of “immoral” African American music, sometimes targeting particular performers.
- In Afghanistan, the Taliban seized power and imposed a hideous form of religious fascism on the country. The Taliban banned education for girls, blew up works of art, and outlawed music.
- In Algeria in the 1990s, Islamic death squads specifically targeted, hunted down, and murdered musicians for their “un-Islamic” musical activities.