Music Censorship Essays

Again, the public imagination is manipulated to service neoliberal interests.Serious considerations of economic and historic factors are quickly swept aside for a deliberately glib focus on surface expressions of pain found in music, because it’s convenient for the powerful to do so from a safe distance.The gradient of blame runs inverse to gradient of power.

Public behaviour and the culture that springs from it is in thrall to the policy that is thrust upon it, and this is felt most acutely by those who perceive themselves as having the least amount of security.

Corruption at the top leads to destruction at the bottom.

It is part of larger class struggle which only deepens as wealth disparity grows whose subtleties when applied to us acutely, have many names; Jim Crow, redlining, high-density housing, acute unemployment, the war on drugs, police brutality, unfair sentencing, juvenile criminalisation, apartheid, slavery.

As that trauma travels it makes landfall in our lived reality.

Ethnic or class-based self-interest is ultimately futile, there is no validity in the choice to ignore or vilify the nihilism expressed in drill (or any) music while simultaneously and supporting the mass murder of civilians, in war for profit.

Both here and in the United States, black males are perceived to be more likely to be the victims of violent crime and the perpetrators of violent crime than any other group.

Hydra-like conflicts driven by a toxic sludge of thinly veiled corporate interest and unilateralist foreign policy engulf the world in cycles of arms trading, war, regime change, terror and counter terror.

Images of which are beamed into our consciousness 24 hours a day.

It drives profit for these newspapers, adds a layer of justification for gentrification, and supports an anti-immigration narrative that has been used to buttress conservative power for the last 50 years.

It’s true, young people killing and dying on our streets for nothing, but sensationalised reportage and kneejerk responses do nothing to address the underlying problem – the lack of coherent functional social contract between young urban males living at the fringes, and those that hope to successfully govern them.