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Show National movement for warning labels on LP's, cassettes and discs - m TO Cyclops By BRYAN GRAY So who is going to decide which songs receive a sticker? Will Neil Diamond's "Red Red Wine" get a marker for its focus on romance and alcohol? And, as an Associated Press article pointed out, should Kurt Weill's satirical "The Threepenny Opera" be labeled for its reference to murder, bigamy and prostitution? It's not a matter of morality as much as it is judgment. Donny Osmond Os-mond understanas that, and the pop music world's leading LDS enter-.", tainer has condemned the labeling effort. Today's hard rock music too often glorifies violence and un-, . sound sexual behavior. The answer is for parents to police their own;, record cabinets, not check to see if the Rolling Stones' cassette is-cholesterol is-cholesterol -free. The attempt to make Elvis stop-wiggling stop-wiggling his pelvis didn't work. -J Record labeling is unfortunately the same old song. Last week's column emphasized the horror of rock 'n roll music. This week, a reader told me he had an answer. He had just read a newspaper article ar-ticle which mentioned the national movement to place warning labels on LP's, cassettes and compact discs. The Pennsylvania House of Representatives has agreed with the movement and has passed a bill requiring re-quiring a fluorescent sticker which reads: "Warning May contain explicit ex-plicit lyrics descriptive of or advocating ad-vocating one or more of the follow-ing: follow-ing: Suicide, bestiality, sadomachism, sexual activity in a violent context, murder, morbid violence, illegal use of drugs or alcohol. ' ' Other states are getting into the action. A Missouri law would add "nudity" to the sucker, and a Florida law would include "sexual activity." As the reader said, "Utah probably leads the nation in moral laws, so it would be easy to pass it here. The parents should know what . their kids are buying." And, he said, after last week's Cyclops column, he assumed I'd be supportive of the warning labels. But I'm not. And for two simple reasons. One, the labels could backfire. Teen-agers who listen to hard rock music are hardly budding MBA's. They generally rejoice in rebellion-and rebellion-and placing a warning label on recorded music would only make the disgusting more enticing. A more important objection, however, is the problem with defining defin-ing which lyrics get pasted with the sticker. I do not know too many people certified as official "lyric police". ..And, as any card-carrying Baby Boomer knows, music history is Uttered with moralistic absurdities. absur-dities. A few examples: We all remember Peter, Paul and Mary's lilting "Puff, the Magic Dragon." Elementary school choirs sing it today, but when the song was first released it faced a wall of criticism. Detractors said the song was really about marijuana... and when Peter Yarrow laughed at the suggestion, they claimed that his whimsical attitude was living proof that the song was the anthem to drug dealers. And we can remember the controversy con-troversy over ' 'Louie Louie. ' ' Parents were abhorred by the nameless dirty term supposedly hidden in the Kingman's hit. Only 20 years later did syndicated writer Bob Greene interview the song's composer, a down-and-out black blues singer in San Francisco. The song, he said, had nothing to do with sex. It was merely an off-the-cuff piece he had written about a sailor leaving for sea duty. And we can also recall the flurry of demeaning comment when those nice young Everly Brothers sang "Wake Up Little Suzie." Of course, the song was banned, right along with initial copies of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man." |