5 Times the Courts Chose Censorship
If you don’t live under a dictatorship, you expect to have certain rights and freedoms: to enjoy a Western Bacon Cheeseburger during any of Carl’s Jr.’s posted business hours, to sing along to Chappell Roan as loud as you want in your own home and to express yourself however you want, as long as you’re not hurting anybody (probably with Chappell Roan lyrics).
Still, supposedly free countries have ruled against artists’ rights to free speech, free song, free painting, etc.
BG Has to Clear His Lyrics With the Government
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When rapper BG was released from prison on weapons charges in 2023, one of the conditions of his parole was the submission of any song he intended to record or perform to the government to make sure it wasn’t “inconsistent with the goals of rehabilitation.” Specifically, he’s not allowed to glorify gang life or violence, soooo he’s supposed to just get a new job or something. His lawyers are challenging the requirements on First Amendment grounds, but they totally arrested him for performing such songs with Boosie and Gucci Mane, so yes, apparently, they can do that.
2 Live Crew Were Too Nasty for Strip Clubs
In 1989, 2 Live Crew released the album As Nasty As They Wanna Be, whose cover featured four nearly naked pairs of women’s butts and whose contents upheld this thematic tone. There were probably 12 albums on the shelf just like it — this was the 1980s, after all — but a Florida judge declared the album obscene, and the group was arrested for performing the songs in a Broward County strip club. Yes, the boob store was deemed an inappropriate place for lyrics about boobs. They were eventually acquitted, but not before dealing with the only reason they’re known today.
Radclyffe Hall Was Too Gay for the ‘20s
Today, The Well of Loneliness would be considered a fairly standard historical romance whose love interests happen to be two women, but it was a pretty big deal in 1928. After it was declared obscene by the British government, author Radclyffe Hall rallied her famous friends to defend the book’s literary merit, but they mostly noped out on her. Virginia Woolf herself wrote that she was relieved such a defense wouldn’t be permitted because she thought the book kind of sucked. Hall had more luck getting the book published in America, where she gained famous supporters like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who Virginia Woolf also thought kind of sucked.
Stass Paraskos Was Fined for Normal Art
Naked people rubbing butts has been the most popular subject in art for as long as art has been made, but cave paintings be damned, you couldn’t do it in 1966 England. That’s where Stass Paraskos was charged with “lewd and obscene” conduct for a Leeds museum exhibit that depicted cartoonish figures in various states of sexy times. He became the last artist successfully prosecuted under those particular laws, but he did have to pay 25 pounds for the trouble, which was probably an artist’s entire annual income back then.
Ulysses Was a Tool for Corrupting the Youth
When The Little Review began publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses in serial form in 1918, the U.S. Post Office responded by burning every copy of the magazine featuring the story that entered the country. You might be thinking, “Well, hey, it’s a little confusing, but it’s not that bad,” but the issue wasn’t quality. In particular, a scene in which protagonist Leopold Bloom masturbates while a young woman exposes herself to him got its publishers arrested and eventually convicted on the grounds that the story could “deprave and corrupt” young minds.
The novel wasn’t published in the U.S. again until 1933, when it was unbanned as a result of the United States v. One Book Called Ulysses. We really don’t name our court cases sassily enough anymore.
