Nine Inch Nails drops MTV show over Bush backdrop

From Reuters via Yahoo News courtesy of Eschaton courtesy of Blah3:

"We were set to perform 'The Hand That Feeds' with an unmolested, straightforward image of George W. Bush as the backdrop. Apparently, the image of our president is as offensive to MTV as it is to me," Nine Inch Nails' leader Trent Reznor said in a statement posted on the band's Web site.

MTV said in a statement: "While we respect Nine Inch Nails' point of view, we were uncomfortable with their performance being built around a partisan political statement. When we discussed our discomfort with the band, their choice was to unfortunately pull out of the Movie Awards."

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Clearly this is censorship. I'd be outraged if it wasn't so commonplace in the music industry as a whole. Indeed, the political music of the 60s and early 70s was something of an historical anomaly for American pop music. Generally, the conventional wisdom among what Frank Zappa once called "those sleazy record company pricks" is that the more non-controversial, the better. The last thing those corporate buttholes want to do is alienate part of their bland mass audience with icky politics or, even worse, invite Washingon's scrutiny. Over-the-top sexist imagery, violence, all that stuff's okay as long as there aren't any special interest groups bugging Congress, as happened in the mid 1980s--that was also an historical anomaly; generally sexism and violence in music are deemed to be okay by the recording industry. Really, the only reason those old politically themed records were allowed through the gatekeepers at all is because it was understood that they would sell well given the cultural context of the time. Unfortunately, the anti-establisment culture of today hasn't yet hit the critical mass that it did in the 60s, so sleazy music executives aren't willing to take any risks. Actually, they're not willing to take any risks at all, which is why everything on the radio sounds the same these days.

Good for Nine Inch Nails taking their football and going home. MTV sucks, anyway, and it has for nearly twenty years now.

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