Prior Restraint in Music

Contestant apparatus is like a game show with paid guests and judges that mold the collective message. The corporate editor then can more easily control the content and info flow. The U.S. Governmental Agencies can regulate the corporate media “monopoly” in a quasi-prior restraint mode. There hasn’t been a cohesive “alternative” platform like the one which existed in the United States after the British Invasion of 1964 since the nineties. “How now brown cow?” “Your ass is mine!” Principal Edward R. Rooney of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986). Control the message, control the Mob.

“When I hurt you daddy…tears, tears like rain fall from my eyes.”

Copyright 12-27-2012

John Rubens

Ref: “A New Monza!” The Tubes (1975)

Just saw a Fee Waybill interview (2009) from Kalamazoo MI. He said the A&M label executives treated The Tubes like their own “Pet Band”. Then watched a YouTube rendition of “What Do You Want From Life” recorded at Foxboro in 2010. Didn’t hear the line in the diatribe (like a rap) “A New Monza!” Modern audiences might not understand what a “Monza” means (promoted item). “We coulda been somebody.”

Reference: On the Waterfront (1954) “I could have been somebody… . I could have been a contender.” Re: Fee Waybill’s retrospective from the 2009 Kalamazoo interview regarding the commercial promotional of The Tubes by A & M Records in the late seventies (we want to be stars not a cult band). Fee shows the many cross-currents: Capitol Record execs tell him post A&M: “You’ve got to sell records.”
Similar to what happened to The Beatles in the late sixties: they had to care what the gatekeepers and critics wrote.