Could lax Music Censorship Lead to Lack of Creativity?
If you take a look music history, you’ll see that there was a point in time in which music was heavily censored. The censorship was very strict. Radio stations would go so far as to ban songs from their if they contained certain words or topics. As such artists were forced to get extremely creative when trying to slip certain topics past radio stations. In the 60’s and 70’s the censorship on music relaxed a little and songs were typically safe if they were not too blatant about certain topics. Naturally, today censorship on music is far laxer than ever before. But does that damper creativity?
It is important to note that creativity has many flavors and just because one isn’t forced to be creative in one aspect does not mean that they cannot or are not being creative in another aspect. Still, there is a certain creativity that existed when people were trying to be really discrete. Artists did everything from using metaphors or descriptions to hide the true meanings behind the song to pumping up the volume of their instruments to act as a sort of embedded censorship.
Though creative methods such as these still exist and are actually still used in songs today, one cannot help but wonder if the ‘self-censorship’ methods would have only become more and more innovative if they were still necessary today. It is worth noting that simply because censorship on music is lax does not mean that creativity is not being used in music. In fact, one could make the argument that lax censorship allows not only for more creative freedom, but that it also inspires it. Thanks to that people can focus on other aspects of their music instead of just how to code a message into it.