TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050790/0507461.000

Text File | 1992-09-30 | 32.0 KB | 612 lines

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▌                                                          SHOW BUSINESS, Page 92

COVER STORIES

X Rated



It's a four-letter world out there: in rock and rap, in movies
and on TV, in comedy clubs and real life. Many love it,
especially kids. Many others hate it or don't get it. Should
anything be done about it?

By RICHARD CORLISS -- Reported by Mary Cronin/New York and
Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles


    He struts onstage, and 17,000 New Yorkers start to cheer.
Andrew Dice Clay tells jokes for a living -- dirty jokes,
stag-party jokes, jokes designed to singe a churchgoer's soul
and turn a feminist's stomach -- but he attracts crowds whose
size and ardor would thrill a rock star. In sold-out Madison
Square Garden, he looks like a samurai biker, with Brando's
pout, Elvis' sideburns and a sequined jacket, its back stitched
with the phrase DICE RULES. And he does too. He is America's
rajah of comic raunch, ready to beguile fans who dress like him
and talk like him and who have memorized his earlier routines
from hit records and HBO specials. "I know you know the old
s---," he slurs between drags on a cigarette. "But it's a new
decade, and I got new filth for ya." And he does too. Again the
crowd roars.

    So are the '90s destined to be the Filth Decade? What has
happened to comedy, not to mention the English language, if a
scoundrel like Clay can twist these fine old instruments to
touch minds and make a mint? Clay may be at the rough edge of
popular entertainment, but he stands there proud as well as
profane, and he does not stand alone.

    There's an acrid tang in nearly every area of modern
American pop culture. Heavy-metal masters Motley Crue invoke
images of satanism and the Beastie Boys mime masturbation
onstage. Rap poets like N.W.A. and the 2 Live Crew call for the
fire of war against police or the brimstone of explicit,
sulfurous sex. Comedians like Sam Kinison and Howard Stern bring
locker-room laughs to cable TV and morning radio. On network
television, sitcom moms get snickers with innuendos about oral
sex. In movies, the F word has become so common, like dirty
wallpaper, the industry's conservative ratings board doesn't
even bother to punish the occasional use of it with a
restrictive R rating.

    Words and ideas formerly on the extremes have engulfed the
cultural mainstream. But have they polluted it? Many people
think so. The moral right wing surely does, and it has friends
in powerful places. Senator Jesse Helms fights to force artists
to forswear any unwholesome intentions before receiving
Government support. Alfred Sikes, the new chairman of the
Federal Communications Commission, leans on radio disk jockeys
to clean up their acts. No less than the FBI sends a warning
letter to a rap group. Susan Baker (wife of the Secretary of
State) and Tipper Gore (wife of the Tennessee Senator),
founders of the Parents' Music Resource Center, lobby for
proscriptive labeling of certain albums. John Cardinal O'Connor,
the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, inveighs against an
Ozzy Osbourne song whose theme is suicide.

    Stranded in the middle are the majority of Americans. They
wonder at the effluence of raw language and worry about its
impact on old-fashioned notions of civilized discourse. Is there
room for subtlety and gentility in a culture overrun by
expressions of gross intolerance? And what impact will this
culture have on the first generation to grow up within it? Does
this stuff have artistic merit? Is it tonic or toxic? Can we
dance to it or comfortably laugh at it? Should we march against
it or just sit back and enjoy it?

    The understandable response would be to ignore the whole
thing. But ignorance is not an option. The clash, however angry
and ominous, is not just the usual dustup between raucous young
stars and the professional squares who oppose them. It's not
just about dirty words and bad attitude. The battle over pop
raunch reflects a crucial fissure in American social and
political culture that was born a long generation ago and came
of age in the Reagan-Bush era.

    On its face -- and as cued by the smiling faces of its
Presidents -- the U.S. has breezed through a feel-good decade
of peace and prosperity. The official culture is breezy too. A
look at our most popular movies and TV shows suggests we are a
nation of superheroes and pretty women, of Cosby kids and
caring, thirtysomething L.A. lawyers. We make funny home videos
and vacation in Disney World. And, at our peril, we let the rest
of the real, dirty world go by.

    Too often official America seems willing to let the rest of
its own society go by too. It pretends the tabloid atrocities
on TV news shows are aberrations. It either closes its eyes to
the human street litter -- the homeless, the junkies, the insane
-- or blames them for not getting with the program of self-help
economics. It largely ignores the ghetto, where the black
underclass has built its own furious culture on the slag heap
of Great Society failures. It discounts much of the young white
working class, in tattered towns and trailer parks, who feel
left out of bland, sitcom America.

    The makers of the new pop do not ignore this rage. They
embrace, exploit and transform it. As the California rap group
N.W.A. announces at the start of its album Straight Outta
Compton: "You are now about to witness the strength of street
knowledge." What they know from the street may not be what the
heartland wants to hear. The message may be cleansing or
hateful; the lyrics and limericks may expand or debase the
language. And if X-rated pop adheres to writer Theodore
Sturgeon's useful rule that "90% of everything is crud," most
of it may be awful -- just dirty, not funny or erotic. But even
at its grossest, the form is a vital expression of the
resentments felt by a lot of people. Get used to it, America:
we live in a four-letter world.

    The evidence is especially strong in two areas:

    Pop Music. "There's no message to heavy metal," says
Penelope Spheeris, director of a documentary on the music. "It's
about being rich and famous and getting laid." Nonetheless,
metal has taken heat for a decade, with its electrified
invitations to head banging and hell raising. Now other groups
are taking the flak. Example: Guns N' Roses, the talented but
loutish rockers whose album Appetite for Destruction has sold
almost 9 million copies. Their song One in a Million says,
"Police and niggers, that's right, get outta my way./ Don't
need to buy none of your gold chains today . . ./ Immigrants and
faggots, they make no sense to me./ They come to our country and
think they'll do as they please,/ Like start some mini-Iran, or
spread some f----- disease./ They talk so many goddam ways, it's
all Greek to me."

    Gore of P.M.R.C., which is in favor of labeling but not
censorship, talks of 14 million children "at risk" and in need
of counseling thanks to the "graphic brutality marketed to these
kids through music and television." Lawmakers in 19 states went
further; they considered proposing warning labels for any song
dealing with such topics as drugs, incest, murder and suicide,
which would conceivably outlaw depraved works like I Get a Kick
Out of You, Die Walkure, Frankie and Johnny and Tosca. The music
industry quickly forestalled such legislation by decreeing that
record companies will decide which material is controversial and
alert consumers with a label that reads PARENTAL ADVISORY:
EXPLICIT LYRICS.

    Whatever heavy metal can do to provoke censure, rap can
outdo. Whereas metal is mostly suggestive, this urban-black
music is often politically or sexually explicit. N.W.A. (Niggers
With Attitude) won an admonishing letter from the FBI for their
song F--- Tha Police, in which the singer warns the ghetto's
occupying force: "Ice Cube will swarm/ On any m----- f----- in
a blue uniform . . ./ A young nigger on the warpath,/ And when
I finish it's gonna be a bloodbath." Another group, Public
Enemy, has been charged with anti-Semitism in their lyrics and
statements to the press. But their songs are also critical of
blacks who reject their roots, of the brothers and sisters too
busy partying to see the problem. P.E.'s new album, Fear of a
Black Planet, qualifies as dance music that is dense music: soul
with a vengeance and the most challenging street art that rap
has to offer.

    Comedy. Stand-up comedy, once relegated to nightclubs and
TV variety shows, is now big business. Its practitioners work
comedy clubs, the concert circuit and cable TV, where their
material is available to children. One way to get attention, to
appear hip, to make a provocative point or just to give a joke
some taboo oomph, is to talk dirty. Plenty of comics don't; the
most popular TV comedian of the '80s is clean (and funny) Jay
Leno. But plenty do. Just watch them on HBO or Showtime. Sam
Kinison, a kind of defrocked evangelist of red-neck rage (and
also, in spurts, funny), provoked the condemnation of gay
spokesmen with his jokes about AIDS. On his new album, Leader
of the Banned, Kinison declares that his motto is "family
entertainment," then proceeds to put the knock on gays, Dr.
Ruth, Jerry Lewis' "kids" and the worldwide female dictatorship.
Family entertainment? Right: the Manson family.

    Even on radio, where the most common four-letter vulgarisms
are verboten, a host of popular "shock jocks" consider giving
offense is Job One. Their humor is guy talk, kid division. The
victims of their gags are familiar from the schoolyard: racial
and sexual minorities, scheming females, body parts and bodily
functions. A few years back, a D.C. radio host was censured for
observing, on Martin Luther King Day, that "killing four more"
would get Americans the rest of the week off.

    Jokes like these gave the FCC an excuse to muscle and
perhaps muzzle the shock jocks, notably New York City's morning
maven Howard Stern. Was Stern hurt by this notoriety? Not at
all: his show is now aired also in Philadelphia and Washington.
Turn him on, and odds are you can't gulp down your morning
coffee before you hear him say "penis." Last year, in the guise
of his comic superhero Fartman, he placed a call to Iran and
mercilessly berated the poor Shi`ite who picked up the phone.
Fans of shock-jock jokery highly prize this rude dude. Trouble
is, anyone scanning the radio dial can accidentally alight on
his malice. You can't put a lockbox on a radio.

    Or on Andrew Dice Clay's mouth. A few years ago, Clay was
playing small clubs and working as a supporting actor. Now he
is poised between stand-up and stardom. He is top-lining in two
summer movies, one a comedy concert film, the other a detective
spoof called The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. With his suave
prole looks and his studded, studied cock-of-the-Brooklyn-walk
demeanor, Clay wears the aura of danger that Hollywood wants in
a movie star. So maybe he'll be one. That still leaves doubts
about his popular appeal.

    In Clay's comedy, woman is only a sexual convenience, a
sentimental slag, a "dishrag hoo-er." For him, all romantic
encounters hover between mechanical sex and date rape. "So I say
to the bitch, `Lose the bra -- or I'll cut ya.' Is that a wrong
attitude?" The obvious answer is yes. Nearly everything he says
is wildly heinous. Clay knows this, and so do his fans; their
laughter is a release at hearing forbidden thoughts twisted into
jokes. Says Leonard R.N. Ashley, an English professor at
Brooklyn College: "Because the seven dirty words are in now
common usage, there are different standards. The new pornography
is violence, often sexual violence. And the new obscenity is
race. For most people, it's O.K. to call someone a bastard but
not a nigger or a kike. But Clay is saying the taboo words we
don't dare use. That's why he's popular. He's telling the
secrets we keep inside us."

    Clay spills his latest secrets on a double comedy album, The
Day the Laughter Died, which, the warning label advises us,
"contains filthy language and no jokes!!!" Talk about truth in
advertising: in 100 minutes of banter there are not half a dozen
good dirty jokes. Yet some of the loudest laughter comes from
women. Good sports at their own immolation, they giggle and
groan along with their beaux. Perhaps proving they are tough is
as important to them as it is to men. Others have found the
spectacle less edifying. One woman at Madison Square Garden
listened to Clay's sluice of abuse and said she felt like a Jew
at the 1934 Nuremberg rally. Remember, she said, when pop
culture was not naughty but nice?

    Once there was a single official pop culture: white, middle
class, mid-cult, status quo. Pretty much everybody hummed the
same tunes, saw the same movies, laughed at the same genteel
jokes. That changed in the '50s with rock 'n' roll. The new
music took rhythm, danger and sexuality from the underground
black culture, cranked the volume up, electrified it and handed
it to a brand new consumer group: white teenagers. The young
connoisseurs of metal and raunch are similarly adrift from the
entertainment that amuses or moves today's adults.

    So the mainstream is now two streams: one traditional and
tranquil, the other torrential and caustic. To kids, the old
culture looks hopelessly square, sounds like Muzak, tastes like
cardboard. To parents, even those who grew up with Little
Richard and Louie Louie, the new culture offers cause for alarm.
Besides, how can they monitor what their kids are listening to
without having to hear it themselves? "The price we pay for
freedom of expression is that some things will be considered
vile by some people," says Danny Goldberg, a manager of rock
acts and chairman of the A.C.L.U. Foundation of Southern
California. "But what's vile to a Mormon family in Utah is not
vile to a black family in South Central Los Angeles."

    The debate keeps coming back to language and race. Just as
rhythm and blues helped create '50s rock 'n' roll, so does black
slang contribute to the linguistic pungency of today's pop
culture. As Brooklyn College's Ashley notes, "In the early years
of the century, the tastemakers of our language were the English
and Irish. Now taste is being defined by different groups. When
times get tough for many people, they seek some outlet to give
them a sense of freedom. This time, the rebellion is coming out
in language." White soldiers in Vietnam picked up blacks' raw
vocabulary, in which "m---- f-----" is routinely used as abuse
or endearment, for emphasis or just filler. Richard Pryor proved
that black anger and slang could find a large audience. Eddie
Murphy, the top movie star of the '80s, turned the anguish into
preening. In his concert film Raw and his period comedy Harlem
Nights, Murphy had nothing new to say, so he said it dirty. It
was raunch with no reason.

    "They're trying to shock my generation," filmmaker John
Waters says of the new crew, "by doing what we did to try to
shock our parents' generation." Waters, who made his early rep
with the scandalous comedy Pink Flamingos, makes a distinction
between "good bad taste and bad bad taste. Good bad taste is
always fueled by rage and anger with humor thrown in. Bad bad
taste is fueled by stupidity and ignorance, and it comes out as
anger." This is precisely what turns some liberal parents off
about the new culture: not the language but the sneering
attitude. Liberals are tolerant of everything but intolerance.

    Whatever they do, they are unlikely to stop the spiral of
taste from class to crass. For the history of 20th century art
is the history of a flight from middle-class gentility. Two
flights, really, in opposite directions, but from the same
despised point of departure. High art moved toward abstraction
and fragmentation and settled in the museums and concert halls.
Popular art went the other way; it frolicked in the profane and
did so on records and movie screens. High culture confused the
middle class; pop culture shocked it. One culture was created
by the intelligentsia, the other by the underclass, but both
groups had the same goal: epater la bourgeoisie, which loosely
translates as "gross out your parents." Your mamma can't dig
modern dance, and your daddy can't rock 'n' roll. The movements
were not so much revolutionary as rebellious. They proved their
value and hipness by excluding the largest group of consumers:
the middle-aged middle class.

    And they created a huge new multibillion-dollar market --
of kids and the underclass -- to buy their product. Parents and
other guardians of tradition are as concerned about the audience
for X-rated pop as they are about the perpetrators. If pop
weren't popular, fewer people would worry about its impact. No
one has mounted a campaign against Randy Newman's songs about
racial and sexual bigotry, for example, because Newman's
audience is relatively small and well educated. The artful
photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, some of which depict
homosexual acts and sadomasochism, took a while to raise legal
hackles because, after all, they were displayed in museums,
where nice people have always looked at pictures of naked
people.

    "There's a tired old distinction that bright people will not
be corrupted, but that the working classes will," says Clive
Barker, the English horror writer whose books have never been
banned but whose films must be trimmed to get an R rating.
"Therefore, television must be scrutinized more vigorously than
pop music, pop music more than pop movies, pop movies more than
art-house movies. Books needn't be watched at all. If people are
reading, after all, they must be bright and won't be affected
by all this stuff."

    Maybe so, but even booksellers have come under fire. For
months, the Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association,
based in Tupelo, Miss., has campaigned to get stores to remove
Playboy, Penthouse and similar magazines from their shelves.
Last week the 1,300-store Waldenbooks chain, the nation's
largest, launched a counterattack in the form of full-page ads
in 32 U.S. newspapers, denouncing "censorship efforts" and "an
increasing pattern of intolerance."

    Books were hot stuff 30 years ago, when Lady Chatterley's
Lover and Tropic of Cancer broke censorship barriers and hit the
best-seller lists. At the same time, Lenny Bruce set the
four-letter standard for comics, and in the '70s Pryor and
George Carlin brought it to the masses, where it belonged.
Midnight Cowboy, which won an Oscar for best picture of 1969,
was rated X, and so were other lauded films, such as Medium
Cool, Performance and The Devils. Explicit lyrics have been in
the pop mainstream since the late '60s; the Jefferson Airplane
sang "Up against the wall, m----- f-----s," and they sang it on
The Dick Cavett Show.

    There are differences worth noting. Raw culture of the '60s
was a political response to a system seen by many artists as
repressive and, in Viet Nam, genocidal. They championed the
underdog by kicking the top dog. And for the first time, thanks
to Supreme Court decisions liberalizing the definition of
obscenity, performers were able to use whatever words they
chose. Bruce, the gifted, tortured pioneer of this mode, aptly
titled his autobiography How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.
In the book's foreword, critic Kenneth Tynan praised Bruce as
"an impromptu prose poet who trusted his audience so completely
that he could talk in public no less outspokenly than he would
talk in private." But Bruce suffered for that trust. His
scabrous truth telling got him arrested in the U.S. and evicted
from Britain. He died in 1966, perhaps the last American
performer for whom notoriety was not a career move.

    Lenny Bruce's triumph was posthumous, and maybe Pyrrhic:
because of him, Andrew Dice Clay can make millions reciting
dirty nursery rhymes in public. Clay and the other new raunch
artists, most of them, are only incidentally subversive. They
don't believe for a moment, most of them, what they're saying.
Metal musicians are no serious Satanists; their concerts are
just theater pieces -- Cats with a nasty yowl. Clay is not the
pathetic strutting stud he seems onstage; that's just a
character. (Was Jack Benny really stingy? Is Pee-wee Herman
really a goony child?) Bruce said what he thought; Clay says
what his character thinks. So Clay and other entertainers on the
edge are playing out fantasies -- their own and their
audience's -- of the baddest boy in school, of the kid your
parents prayed to God you would never become.

    In the wonderfully gross, fiercely moralistic movie
Heathers, a nasty teen queen is asked, "Why are you such a
megabitch?" Her answer: "Because I can be." Because of freedom
of expression, comics and musicians can now be as nasty as they
wanna be. And nasty is the word. In the erotic masterpieces of
literature, sex was an expression of pleasure, and often of
love, between equals. Today's sex talk, from Kinison and Clay
and the 2 Live Crew, is almost exclusively from the male-pig
viewpoint. A woman's role, their line goes, is only to serve and
service a man.

    The new comics' barbs at minorities are just as rank and
rankling. But there is nothing novel about immigrant baiting in
America. It flourished a century ago -- when humor directed at
Irish, Italian, Polish and Jewish newcomers was a music-hall
staple -- and continued unabated in Hollywood's racially
derisive treatment of blacks. The reason then was the same as
it is today: people felt threatened by the outsiders and so made
fun of them. In the new version, a raunch artist taps into the
grudge a white working-class male may hold against the
beneficiaries of affirmative action and liberal sympathy:
minorities, the handicapped, gays. They get all the breaks, he
figures; now what about me? His counterattack is to bad-mouth
them with paranoid intensity. And that's where the sick threat
and thrill come in.

    But is this thrill a threat to the public weal? Since the
traumas of the Kennedy assassination and Viet Nam, many
Americans have gradually closed off their minds to the nature
of atrocity. They cope with the world's horror by numbing
themselves to pain. They can shed tears over cute-tender stories
of stranded whales or a baby in a well, but all too often
everything else -- from a politician's promise to the Chernobyl
disaster -- is so much show biz, ironized with shrugs and sick
jokes. Today's children were bred in this atmosphere. With many
of their parents past caring, how can the kids not be past
shock?

    Lisette, 13, a seventh-grader in Mamaroneck, N.Y., loves
heavy metal and doesn't understand what all the fuss is about.
Read her the lyrics to One in a Million, and she shrugs, "It's
just a song." She loves Motley Crue's You're All I Need, but
"Sometimes it's hard to understand the words because of the
beat. And that's what I like about heavy metal bands. Besides,
they're gorgeous! A lot of adults don't like them because when
they're married and settled down, they don't think about having
action or talking dirty. But teenagers do because of their
sexual peak. If songs have curses in them, they're not going to
bother kids. Everyone knows swear words by the third grade. My
advice to parents is to let your kids grow up and do what they
want to do." What burns Lisette is the idea that her music
should be censored. "I wouldn't ban classical music," she says
magnanimously.

    Talk to a lot of kids Lisette's age; few will say they are
harmed by rock. And few are, according to a study commissioned
by the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development. Children do
spend hours each day with music. But most prefer mainstream
music, and whatever style they listen to, few are tempted by the
siren call to excess. "Kids take it in stride," says Stanford
University's Donald F. Roberts, who helped conduct the research.
The survey should reassure parents that somehow their child will
survive pop culture about as successfully as they did.

    Perhaps today's youth is unshockable. And perhaps that fact
should be shocking. "One of the things we all seek," says Clive
Barker, "is the visionary experiences we had as children. We
seem to have forgotten that those experiences are not soft and
gentle, but often harsh and intense." For several American
generations, a child's first entertainment experience was a
Disney cartoon, with its wrenching traumas of betrayal,
abandonment, a mother's death. An animated film could thrill a
child to pieces or scare him near to death. And it introduced
him to the beautiful and frightening banquet of popular culture.

    That has always been the role of art: to shock, not just to
ratify the prejudices of the generation in power. And no jolt
is greater than the shock of the new. Original styles almost
always look crude and excessive: Picasso's in painting ("My
three-year-old could draw better!"), Brando's in acting ("He's
got marbles in his mouth!"), Elvis' in music ("Photograph him
from the waist up!"), Bruce's in comedy ("Book him!"). In their
first outrageousness, these artists seemed to signal the end of
the world; instead, they were heralding a new one. "A creator
is not in advance of his generation," said Gertrude Stein, "but
he is the first of his contemporaries to be conscious of what
is happening to his generation." Like them or not, today's blue
comics and shock rockers know what is happening to this
generation and are speaking to it. That is why they are popular.

    And that is why, by any close reading of the law, X-rated
pop deserves its First Amendment cloak. No one can predict
whether, in a cool retrospective glance a decade or so from now,
today's raunch will give evidence of artistic value. Odds are
that, as in any group portrait, the members of the blue brigade
will soon emerge as individuals, some gifted, some not. But
because it speaks from the gut of disenfranchised America, and
because it has raised the crucial issue of freedom of expression
vs. public propriety, the form already has political value. And
clearly, because of its popularity, it does not offend
"contemporary community standards": a lot of the community is
laughing and singing along.

    Other Americans are outside picketing, agitating and getting
agitated. That is, last time anyone checked, still the American
way. You may despise the work of Clay or Mapplethorpe, Crue or
the Crew, and still embrace the concept of an America that
allows them to find or lose an audience. They have the right to
offend; you have the right to be offended.

    You can be excited by their work and still care about the
future of children. You can mourn the fact that the end of
innocence now arrives at about the age of reason -- that toxic
pop culture, not just from entertainment but from school and
home, from the news and the street, reaches young children. If
you are a parent, you can take responsibility for steering them
toward maturity. It's your job and nobody else's.

    After that, you're on your own. Entertainers shouldn't have
to act as baby-sitters or Sunday school teachers. And the
government should quit playing hall monitor to blue comics,
metal defectives, rap randies -- and the real artists among them
who, through subtlety or obscenity, will help us navigate our
trip into the 21st century.


____________________________________________________________ X
METAL

    Rock 'n' roll was born an outlaw. With heavy metal, it grew
up to be outlandish. Concerts given by Motley Crue, a longtime
metal favorite from Los Angeles, play like big-budget Halloween
parties: spooky stories in rhyme, about sex and death,
illustrated with Grand Guignol tableaux.

    Some of the Crue's songs possess a certain lumpen poetry.
From Wild Side: "I carry my crucifix/ Under my deathlist./
Forward my mail to me in hell." This is the sort of thing that
might be written by that cool-creepy high school kid who reads
a lot of Poe and William Burroughs. It's forthright
exaggeration, often with a wicked grin, as in the Crue's
top-of-the-charts ballad You're All I Need, about a man in a
padded cell reminiscing about his late girlfriend: "Laid out
cold./ Now we're both alone,/ But killing you helped me keep you
home." Is there anyone out there besides Tipper Gore who
doesn't see that it's a joke?

    Metal musicians promote themselves as the beyond-bad boys
of rock, and they make good on the promise. These guys are
performers, and their audiences get revved up on the lurid
theatricality. That same zest for overstatement may explain the
puppy lust that metal's young fans lavish on their heroes. Some
years back, a San Antonio radio station offered free concert
tickets for the best reply to the question "What would you do
to meet the Crue?" A 16-year-old girl provided an elaborate
sadomasochistic scenario. A boy, 14, said he would give the band
his mother. A 13-year-old girl wrote, "I'd leave my tits to
Motley Crue." Hey -- bring back Menudo.


X MOVIES

    It used to be the director's job to yell "Cut!" Now it is
the movie censor's. The ratings board of the Motion Picture
Association of America, which routinely awards R ratings to
rancid slasher movies and airheaded teen sex comedies, has
recently slapped X ratings on three serious, accomplished films:
John McNaughton's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Peter
Greenaway's The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover and, last
week, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! from the lauded Spanish auteur
Pedro Almodovar. Since an X rating means that fewer theaters
will play the film and fewer newspapers advertise it,
distributors for Henry and The Cook the Thief have chosen to
release the works unrated. Almodovar, whose new film features
an urgent but tender three-minute scene of lovemaking, has
decided to do the same.

    Some critics have proposed a new rating, "A," to designate
adult films that deal with violent or erotic themes but do not
contain the explicit sex of pornographic films. The A would put
films off-limits to those 17 and under; the current R rating
allows that age group to attend only in an adult's company.
M.P.A.A. president Jack Valenti is opposed to the new rating:
"I do not think that mortal man or woman can make the
distinction between what is a serious film featuring incest,
cannibalism, bestiality, sadomasochism, necrophilia or
undisguised sex, and what is not."

    Hollywood used to be accused of making movies for
twelve-year-olds. If Valenti prevails, it will keep making films
that its censors deem acceptable for 17-year-olds.


X RAPPERS

    Rap music is ghetto machismo you can dance to. If the singer
isn't picking a fight with imaginary police, he's coming on like
a bulldozer to any girl in the neighborhood. The reductio ad
obscenitatem of this attitude can be found in the lyrics of the
Miami quartet the 2 Live Crew. They are numbingly, impossibly
blunt -- or not so blunt, depending on which Crew you listen to.
The group released a sanitized version of their double album As
Nasty As They Wanna Be called As Nice As They Wanna Be;
predictably, the hard copy has outsold the soft, 1.3 million to
400,000. The titles of some Nasty cuts (Dick Almighty, Bad Ass
Bitch, Me So Horny) give only a hint of the songs' grossness.
The posture is one of menacing studhood that expects every woman
to lie down and submit in silence.

    Florida Governor Bob Martinez has denounced the group's
lyrics and asked a prosecutor to investigate. After a Sarasota
record dealer sold Nasty to an eleven-year-old girl, a state
circuit court declared the album obscene and banned all sales
-- the first such ruling against a musical group in the U.S. Two
weeks ago, the Crew was threatened with arrest if they performed
their Nasty lyrics in Gainesville, but they appeared anyway, and
no action was taken. Luther (Luke Skywalker) Campbell, the
group's leader, at first enjoyed the notoriety, but now he's
angry. He was one of the first to have a cover warning. "And I'm
the only one who makes a clean version."

    Take the 2 Live Crew's songs as street talk, piled thick and
spat out. Just be grateful if it's not the street where you
live.