George Was Right #4387

One of my first essays dealt with the rise of book burning on the Left.

In that essay I argued that modern book burning is not just about books, it’s about content of all kinds, as we’ve seen with the recent controversy over Dave Chappelle’s new Netflix special.

To illustrate the point a year ago, I told this story:

“I first noticed that we appeared to be on the road to a new culture of Leftist book burning in 2014 when I read an op-ed by a woman called Lynn Stuart Parramore who was shopping in Trader Joe’s when she heard the Rolling Stones classic UNDER MY THUMB played on the store speakers. Deciding instantly, as everyone must in these problematic times, that the lyrics were potentially damaging to any female shopper who might have been a victim of domestic violence, she approched the store manager and heroically demanded that he stop playing that particular song and remove it from all future playlists. Ms. Parramore herself was not offended by the song (or so she claims), she was only worried about the well-being of a hypothetical woman who MIGHT be offended at some point in an unknowable future, and so the song had to go.

UNDER MY THUMB is three minutes and forty-one seconds long, what are the chances that in the less-then-four-minutes it took Trader Joe’s to play that song that a women who is both catastrophically emotionally damaged by abuse AND who knows the lyrics to UNDER MY THUMB would happen to walk into the store? Perhaps “remote” does not entirely cover it. Now imagine having nothing better to do with your day than to worry about the emotional wellbeing of such an unlikely hypothetical person. This is not healthy behavior.“

That was me lightly sounding the alarm on popular music. Lightly, because I think pop music is still too physically widespread, too decentralized for any censorship effort to succeed quickly. That’s very unlike Movies, about which I’m very worried.. so worried, in fact, that I’ve started my own library of cancelled films.

The difference, for now, is that movies are increasingly digitized and available only from a couple retail chokepoints, mostly at Amazon. If Bezos wanted to make a movie go away overnight, he could do so with the flick of a switch. Almost no one has physical copies of movies anymore.

But that’s not as true of Pop Music.

That said, it doesn’t mean they won’t try. And almost on cue, we have an op-ed today in the New York Times arguing that it’s time tro cancel Classic Rock (Link is safe, it goes to the Washington Free Beacon, not the NYT).

I hate to say it but it may be time to start buying physical copies of our favorite songs as well.

And I really hate to say this again, but…

George was right!