Dec 31 2008
Spin Magazine’s David Merchese spotlights a scary trend in racist music sales
In a world where digital vendors such as itunes and Amazon are quickly becoming buyers’ method of choice to shop for music. Spin Magazine columnist David Merchese notes an all too insidious down side to it all: the white power rock movement.
In a short essay in the January 2009 issue of Spin Merchese tells the little-told tale of white power music’s rise in the digital age:
“Like any musician, Brutal Attack’s Ken McLellan wants to be heard. Only, what he wants people to hear are self-described ‘white power’ anthems with lines like ‘This is the Final Solution / Our turn / They’ll burn,’” says Merchese. But whereas in previous brick and mortar times, patrons would be reluctant to purchase the music of aryan revelers, it’s all now one click away.
Bands such as the questionably named Brutal Attack have spent many years being banished from retailers for the fear that those stores carrying the titles would face sales-eviscerating protests and logically enraged shoppers. So for many years mail order and concerts were the main line of both promotion and distribution. But now that the digital era has allowed a much more faceless and clandestine distributor to sell through a third party on sites like Amazon and itunes with out much of a middleman or content filter, these titles creep into the growing plurality on content from excellent to horrible.
“For $9.99, you can download Brutal Attack’s anti-immigrant, pro-white Tales of Glory from iTunes. It’s a buck cheaper on Amazon. A physical copy is yours for $16 on CD Baby,” says Merchese. However, impossible it may sound, in America under the First Amendment, it is perfectly legal to sell songs of any type of protest so long as it does not directly advocate unprovoked injury, or death to another living being. But according to Nora Flannigan of the anti-defamation organization Turn It Down, it has never been a legality issue, but simply an issue of right and wrong. She tells Merchese, “Companies could choose not to sell this stuff. Instead, they hide behind the First Amendment. Refusing to make money from racism isn’t censorship; it’s the right thing.”
But Amazon spokesperson Patti Smyth and others present a slippery slope agrument that if they were to censor one, than any number of others may equally be in trouble. Smyth says “[Amazon] doesn’t feel it should be deciding what’s right for consumers. That’s a slippery slope that we don’t want to be on.”
Finally, Merchese points to the recent election of Barack Obama as a mark agaist the white power rock moment saying that though Ken McLellan and others like him may have a right to an opinion, like the opinion of the world being flat, it is just wrong.
After reading the piece, one might consider online retailers’ changing their tunes (for risk of a bad pun) and realizing the voice of consumers. But with the ever-expanding diversity of product available online, that voice becomes increasingly schizophrenic. So it may be that that old mantra of Libertarianism of “If ya don’t like it, don’t buy it!”
(Read the full article here).
Stop the hatred from the Outskirts.
