Is music really to blame?

Kent State graduate Eric Nuzum tackles free speech and censorship in new book

By David Fischer

Daily Kent Stater

In a world of incessant moral outrage, where expressing one's thoughts and feelings can lead to boycotts, protests and even arrests, a Kent State graduate has written a book chronicling the history of music censorship and its effects on society.

Eric Nuzum, who works as the program director for WKSU and as a writer for the Cleveland Free Times, released Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America earlier this month. Nuzum will be speaking about his book at 7:30 tonight at the Barnes and Noble Booksellers in Montrose.

In his book, Nuzum tackles such issues as free speech and censorship. He devotes an entire chapter to Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center. Nuzum also outlines the relationships between music and violence, race, religion, sex, drugs and politics. In the second half of the book, Nuzum lays out the history of music censorship in the United States, beginning in 1865, when Southerners were forbidden to sing pro-Confederate songs in public.

In dealing with free speech, Nuzum is steadfast in his opinion that everyone has the right to speak freely, regardless of what he or she believes.

"You can't assign levels of permissibility to free speech," Nuzum said. "It's either all good or it's all bad."

Although individuals who organize the censorship of music believe they are merely exercising their own rights to free speech, Nuzum said speaking freely and preventing others from doing so are not the same.

"There's a very important difference between protesting something and censoring something," Nuzum said. "It's OK to stand outside with a sign saying you don't like something, but the moment you change from saying you don't like something to preventing other people from having access to it, you've gone beyond your own right to free speech."

Over the course of doing research for his book, Nuzum conducted interviews with individuals responsible for large-scale campaigns of music censorship. Nuzum said proponents of censorship usually spoke in broad, general terms and rarely had any solid facts to support their claims.

"People make outrageous, silly claims that just don't hold water when you look at them in any sort of objective, scientific, journalistic sense," he said.

Nuzum has a relatively simple explanation for why so many groups and individuals attempt to censor music and other forms of entertainment.

"They don't have a real reason for society's problems," Nuzum said.

Nuzum said that as violence among young people increases, politicians feel obligated to give people easy answers to complex problems. Instead of committing political suicide by saying they don't have the easy answers, politicians just blame music, movies or the Internet.

Nuzum said it's a problem when people are willing to accept the easy answers without thinking about other possibilities.

"When people walk into a room where a kid has killed himself, they see the Ozzy Osborne tape or the Marilyn Manson CD, and they immediately assume a connection," Nuzum said. "There's probably a Bible on the kid's shelf and a certain way that he folds his underwear, but nobody ever thinks about that."

The most difficult issue in dealing with music censorship is the fact that the intentions behind most censorship are good, Nuzum said.

"There are 335 examples of music censorship in my book," Nuzum said. "In 90 to 95 percent of them, the original intention was good. Someone was trying to make the world better. Someone was trying to make a kid safer. Someone was trying to keep adults from doing bad things."

Nuzum said the problem is that, in order to make the world a safer place, people have committed very elitist and racist acts.

The biggest surprise Nuzum said he found while doing the research for his book was the apparent lack of evidence to support any connection between music and violent behavior.

"I was expecting to find evidence that music did something bad to people," Nuzum said. "What surprised me was that there wasn't any. Music does affect the way you dress, the type of people you socialize with, the language you use. Music is more of a social calling card. It says what you value and what you don't value."

Nuzum said the idea for his book began while he was taking at class at Kent State in 1997. (The Canton native began college at Kent State in 1984 but quit to pursue other interests in 1988. Nuzum returned and received a general studies degree in 1998.)

In the fall of 1997, Nuzum designed a Web site on music censorship as a creative project for a class called Speech in a Free Society. The site attracted more attention than Nuzum had expected.

"I thought my mother and the professor would be the only ones to see it," Nuzum said.

The site ended up receiving a lot of hits on Netscape, and a book editor eventually contacted Nuzum and asked him if he would be interested in writing a book.

Nuzum received the final contract for his book deal in August 1998, the same day he received his degree from Kent State. After three years of writing and researching, Nuzum's work has finally come to fruition.

"It's kind of a weird process because you have something you've been working on for close to three years," Nuzum said. "Now, over the past couple of weeks, all of these people have found out about it. It's been a really fun experience. It's just a really weird dynamic to have something that's so yours and such an important part of you. You pour so much of yourself into it, and now other people get to experience it."