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Show J5" Cyclops By BRYAN GRAY Mormon Choir comment worthy of Dumb Quote of the Year The competition is heating up for the annual Cyclops Dumb Quote of the Year Awardand, not surprisingly, surpris-ingly, it's heating up due to fiery issues. So far, the summer has been swamped with explosive topics, and one would expect that Dumb Quote nominations might be linked to hot items like flag burnings, school prayer or whether a Layton couple can legally keep their pet ferret within the city limits. Combine these issues with the normally touchy political season and it's not difficult to find Dumb Quotes worthy wor-thy of Cyclops consideration. But the most recent Dumb Quote nomination is related to none of the above topics. It's tied instead to the continuing battle over musicand whether the music should be legal to purchase. In the past month, the entire nation has been introduced to a musical act which had previously been rightfully ignored. Before conservative right-wing zealots began blathering about four black men-a rap group called Two Live Crew this musical act had an abysmally small following. Their cassettes were selling at the rate of perhaps one per day at local record ft shops, their songs received little airplay on local radio stations, and the group was toiling anonymously in Miami and playing small clubs in southern burgs like Pensacola, Florida and Huntsville, Alabama. The group did not have a major recording contract and the only people who paid attention to them was the band members mothers whose principal reaction was to tell their sons to wash their mouths out with a bar of Ivory soap. But that was four weeks ago. Today, To-day, Two Live Crew music is being banned throughout the country and, thanks to the publicity, teenagers teen-agers have been gobbling up the group's existing cassettes. In Utah, Joy Beech probably sold about 50 of the cassettes when she said the music made her "regurgitate." Banning the music and threatening threaten-ing music store owners with arrest for selling the cassettes sent Two Live Crew sales soaring. And it also had the effect of allowing normally rational people to say stupid things. Which brings us to our Dumb Quote nomination. The owner of an Ogden music store was defending Two Live Crew when he chirped up the following statement: "I don't feel 4 I'm in the position to judge anyone's taste. We stock Mormon Tabernacle Choir recordings, too, and I'm sure there are people in Utah who would find them obscene." ob-scene." Oh, I doubt that There are people who might find Choir records listless or boring and there are people peo-ple who say the Choir songs are hard to dance to. But it's downright silly to think that any human being along the fruited plain would find the Mormon Tabernacle Choir records obscene (unless a listener is concerned about the word "bosom" in the Choir's "Battle Hymn of the Republic. ' ) Community standards might vary, but no clear-thinking person could find anything nasty in 'Amazing Grace "or anything mean-spirited, sexist or demeaning in ' Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam." The entire Two Live Crew incident inci-dent shows how censorship can backfire. Before the spirited debate over a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning, there were only a handful of torched flags in the entire en-tire history of the nation. Now, with the publicity, every spumed wacko with an itch is looking for a book of matches. ..Before a Michigan matron began a campaign to censor "Married With Children," the Fox network television show was buried . in the lower reaches of the TV ratings. But with the publicity, the show now comfortably rests in the Top Twenty of the nation's pro-grams...An pro-grams...An elderly man telephoned a local radio station last week to say that the only time he ever bought a girlie magazine is when he saw protesters pro-testers outside a Bountiful Circle K store. For a no-talent bunch like Two Live Crew, the best action would have been to ignore them. With pitiful sales and Utile radio airplay, the group would soon have disar peared, leaving its raunchy language lan-guage for those on truck loading docks. But due to the publicity Two Live Crew now have a Gold Record, are spouting inane comments com-ments to millions of viewers on network news programs, and have thousands of Utah teenagers making mak-ing illegal copies of the filthy cassettes... And also led to a music shop owner being nominated for the Cyclops Dumb Quote of the Year Award. |
