The power of music

Of course, the fact that the song was banned did not mean that we did not know about it. Friends with satellite television came back and told us about the video and would sing the words for us. Soon, the playing field was littered with pockets of students clandestinely singing the song — mostly incorrectly, of course — bolstered by the heady feeling of doing something that was considered taboo. Half, if not most, of us didn’t really understand what he was singing about. The song soon lost its luster and we returned to the more conventional recess and lunchtime activities, until another attraction came along.

I heard the song for the first time years later when I was much older. By then, songs like "I want your sex" and Color me Badd’s "I wanna sex you up" were considered cute, homespun ditties in comparison to what was then being played on air. It seemed such a silly, innocuous song to have set off such a tempestuous reaction. But, of course, by then I was reacting as an adult, a product of the maxi generation that had been exposed to compositions a great deal more obscene and detailed than these.

I remembered this episode after reading recently about certain schools in America banning music from the rapper Fifty Cent being played at proms.

Teachers and parents found the lyrics — which dealt with such topics as gang violence and fellatio — to be explicit and encouraged negative behaviour in the students. The problem was, playing censored versions of the songs or refusing outright to play them at all could not change the fact that the students knew the lyrics anyway. The songs are played uncensored on cable television and many had the rapper’s CDs at home. When the DJ blocked out the offensive parts the children happily filled them in, together with corresponding reenactments of the acts being sung about.

Last week, I happened to be travelling in a maxi. Seated behind me was a boy, clad in the prerequisite blue shirt and khaki pants of primary school.

Marlon Asher’s "Ganja Farmer" was playing. The little boy — he could not have been more than eight — was singing the song in its entirety, including (no surprise here) the parts that had been edited out.

When this song had first started getting airplay, it was not edited. DJs happily wheeled the track and sang along to the lyrics which outline the tribulations and persecutions facing the bucolic lifestyle chosen by the much maligned planter. In fact, most of the songs that end up being edited start off being played in all their uncensored glory. It is when they have entered heavy rotation, usually after a few weeks of play and by which time everybody knows what is being said, that a more politically correct version appears on the airwaves. By which time the damage, as they say, has been done.

Now music is a powerful thing, in all societies. Learning the lyrics for George Michael’s "I want your sex" did not turn those of us that heard it into lascivious pre-teens eager to go out and discover what he was speaking about.

The thrill for us was knowing that in singing it, we were doing what was wrong, what grown ups did not want us to do. Plus, his song was essentially a positive one, maintaining that sex was something good, especially when in the context of a monogamous relationship. So that any message we got out of it would have been positive.

Back in convent the nuns sat us down and explained to us the evils of rock music — they were hopelessly out of touch, for who was listening to rock music then anyway? They played us "Hotel California" which everyone started off singing then stopping because of the black looks we got. Then they played "Another one bites the dust" and a few others that I can’t recall now. It was explained to us that our subconscious heard the songs backwards and that when played backwards, they carried such lurid messages as "Smoke Marijuana" and "Worship Satan." Most of us dismissed these "revelations" as nonsense, highly offended by the fact that anything as silly as a song — and one played backwards, no less — could force us to do something we didn’t want to.

I think the same still applies. I don’t believe that hearing Fifty talk about his "magic stick" is in itself going to make the average young person go out and partake in oral sex. Young people are capable of rational and logical thought, once they have been taught to think that way.

The problem is, in today’s world that prizes instant gratification and indulgence over everything else, how many young people are actually being brought up that way?

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