PARENTAL ADVISORY, YOU’RE AN IDIOT!: Sam Walton Gets His Filthy Mouth Washed Out With Soap
Can you believe it? After nearly a half-century, we’re still getting our britches in an uproar over supposed “dirty” rock lyrics. People have been pissing and moaning and tearing their hair over this probably since before Elvis assured us that there was, indeed, “good rockin’ tonight.” What sort of terrible, mind-rotting effect will this have on impressionable young people? Will it turn them into blithering idiots? Will it send them to hell and damnation?
I raise the topic once again because of recent events involving Wal-Mart. A couple in Hagerstown, MD, is suing the retail giant because they bought an Evanescence CD there, and it just so happened this CD contained a naughty word. Of course, Wal-Mart makes a righteous point of not carrying any album sporting a parental-advisory sticker. The record label can either tell them to fuck off and potentially lose millions in sales, or they can offer an edited version, much as they would to radio stations. What constitutes editing can range from alternate cover art, bleeped or dropped-out profanity, or leaving whole songs off the record.
As you might guess, some things slip through the
cracks, just as they did when the arbitrary
parental-advisory sticker was adopted in the early
’90’s. Frank Zappa garnered a sticker for his album
Jazz From Hell, which was an INSTRUMENTAL
album. Meanwhile, Godsmack’s debut, which is rife
with shits and fucks, has no sticker.
Don’t get me wrong, at the ripe old age of 24, I can afford not to give a damn one way or the other if a CD has a sticker on it, but that wasn’t always the case. My mom and I fought this battle many times when I was growing up. It all began when she overheard me playing Guns n’ Roses’s Appetite for Destruction, and noticed that Axl Rose peppers the music with a few choice words. I was eight at the time, and so it must’ve been quite shocking to her. Me, I couldn’t understand most of what he was singing anyway, and was only upset that she’d taken my tape away. I eventually got it back when she called the store and they said they wouldn’t take it back. But for the next few years, she was always on Cuss Watch. If I carelessly left a tape case sitting on my desk while I listened to the tape, and she walked in, she would often snap it up and peruse the lyrics. Consequently, this made me paranoid. I began hearing profanity in music where there was none, and fearing for my burgeoning music collection.
But luckily, that’s all in the past. For me, anyway. Some poor embarrassed kid in Hagerstown is dealing with it now, while his dumb parents sue Wally World over a damn Evanescence CD. For Chrissake, it’s EVANESCENCE! The so-called “Christian goth” band (although I hear Amy Lee bristles at this designation, a la Scott Stapp.) How much more squeaky-clean can you get and still play an electric guitar?
Granted, these people have every right to raise their kids however they please, and if they want to shelter them and keep them in a buble until they’re 37 years old, I guess that’s their business. But suing Wal-Mart? Come on!
It’s partly Wal-Mart’s own fault. If they never made such an issue over lyrics in the first place, this suit would never have been filed. But the couple points out that Wal-Mart “promises” that anything they sell is profanity-free. At least in the music department; cursing, violence and sexual content is apparently A-okay in books or video games. Wal-Mart have effectively painted themselves into a corner with their chock-full-o’-wholesome-goodness approach.
I’ll admit, I don’t particularly like Wal-Mart, for a lot of reasons. I don’t like the way they try to force-feed their values onto everybody. I don’t like the fact that their employees are one step away from indentured servitude. I don’t like that they help drive our balance of trade farther and farther out of our favor by importing cheap junk made by Asian slave labor. I don’t like the way they reportedly treat their female employees, holding meetings at titty bars and requiring that women attend, etc. And I don’t like their ubiquity. Outside the major cities, you can close your eyes, spin around and walk into one in no time. And towns love it when the Ghost of Sam Walton sets up shop. When my town got its Wal-Mart in 1997 (a Super-Center, no less, the first on Delmarva), the mayor called it “the biggest thing to happen in western Sussex County in fifty years.” That is a direct quote, and the hell of it was, he was probably right.
And yet I’m as much a part of the machine as the employees whose stock options that they think are so great are actually helping to feed the monster. I shop there. It’s one of two decent grocery stores in town (the other two are the pits). They make it easy for you, the conniving bastards. Need anything? It’s right there at Wal-Mart.
Having said all that, I side with Sam on this Evanescence deal. Sanctimonious attitude aside, Wal-Mart isn’t a babysitter. Their policies regarding lyrics are just as inconsistent as those of the labels themselves. Now if this couple really wanted to shield their kids from every possible bad word that might come their way, they could have easily gotten online and looked up the complete lyrics to nearly any CD for themselves, before buying it. They could just pay a little more attention to what their kids are into, but oh, I guess that would be too time-consuming. Instead, they relied on somebody else, albeit a self-proclaimed purveyor of decency, to do their job for them. And guess what? It didn’t work!
I recall a similar case a few years ago, of a dad suing Wal-Mart over a Godsmack CD he bought for his son that he assumed would be clean, and it wasn’t. That case got thrown out, and so should this one. Ice Cube put it best: “If you need a sticker to tell you to guide your child, you’re a dumb fuckin’ parent.”
Incidentally, I happen to own a cassette copy of Jackyl’s debut album, which my sister gave me for my birthday one year. It came from Wal-Mart. The song “She Loves My Cock” is omitted for obvious reasons, but I count four fucks scattered through the rest of the songs, and also some pornographic moaning and obvious sexual references. I wonder, if the Hagerstown couple wins this case, will I too be able to make a buck out of this?
Get my lawyer on the phone, quick!
Today’s inpsirational song lyrics are brought to us by Jackyl:
“I got my records on the shelf in the Wal-Mart, you know they’re open all night. They sell my records and my guns!”
12/17/04
