Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008...7:30 am
One From the Archives
I was poking around the New Times archives this weekend, and I looked up an article that I remembered from 1990. The legislative session that year was notable for its anti-youth tilt, with bills against cruising, limiting drivers licences and imposing a curfew (all this at the same time the lege was moving a bill exempting golf carts from pollution statutes, done at the behest of people in Green Valley). But the hallmark of that session was Jan Brewer’s (yes, that Jan Brewer) bill that would have made it illegal to sell records (remember those?) with explicit lyrics to people under the age of eighteen. The bill even included the possibility of jail time.
The episode led to all sorts of fun, culminating in a hearing where Donny Osmond testified. Osmond was invited, presumably, because he would talk about how immoral modern music is and so on. ‘Cept he went and said that he thought the bill was a bad idea. He is a little bit Rock and Roll, ain’t he?
Needless to say, the bill died shortly there after. What can you do after you lose Donny Osmond?
The New Times grabbed a hold of the story and reporter David Koen wrote this piece which is pure comedy. I never would have known that Brewer was such a fan of W.A.S.P. Unfortunately, I could not find the chart that accompanied the piece where various legislators, including Tucson’s Jesus “Chuy” Higuera, were asked a series of questions about current music. If memory serves, none did very well.
NB - When interviewing Brewer and other legislators, Koen used a false identity, which earned the New Times a great deal of grief from other media outlets.
3 Comments
July 22nd, 2008 at 6:49 pm
I am sure Jan Brewer’s focus on the lyrics was related to a series of trials in Fort Lauderdale I witnessed during the fall of 1990 as well as January 1991. I wrote a couple of articles about the prosecution of 2 Live Crew down in South Florida for New York Newsday (a short-lived city version of the Long Island newspaper, just bought out by Cablevision from the dying Zell-Tribune family of papers) and elsewhere.
There were several Florida prosecutions of 2 Live Crew’s CD “As Nasty as They Want to Be” that spurred action on the part of right-wingers. In Florida a Federal District Court judge (I can’t recall his name, though possibly Gonzales — a Cuban-American Bush I appointee) declared the album obscene in the three counties of Florida’s Southern District.
Then sheriff Nick Navarro (another Cuban-American Republican) of Broward County started undercover operations that led to the arrest of a record store owner, Charlie Freeman, a friend of my family, for selling the CD. In NYC for the summer, I organized Radio Free Broward and sent the albums to people from a place where it was legal to buy it (I was on CNN and elsewhere). There were also prosecutions of 2 Live Crew itself for performing the songs at a Hollywood, FL, nightclub and then of a white suburban NY group who came down to protest 2 Live Crew’s arrest by singing their songs. It threatened to become one case after another.
In Oct. 1990, after a short trial, a six-woman jury found the album was obscene and record store owner Freeman was convicted. Walking with Charlie and his aunt, on NBC Nightly News, the woman and I were referred to as his “supporters” and my comments about the album being available in Moscow but not in South Florida were also put on the air.
Bruce Rogow, the Nova Southeastern law prof who’d handled the first case, realized they made a crucial mistake in jury selection; they let six wealthy white women on the jury. The next trial, of 2 Live Crew itself, a national media circus, they spent a lot more time on the jury. Yes, they did let an 80ish white grandmother on it — but she’d been chairwoman of the sociology department at Wesleyan.
It was like an opera. They had, as they’d had in the first trial, people testify about “rap” but they brought in heavy intellectual hitters like Prof. Louis Henry Gates as expert witnesses. The evidence was pretty absurd. At one point the jury passed the judge a note and she read it aloud: “We want to know if we have permission to laugh if we can’t help ourselves. Some of us are in physical pain from restraining the laughter.”
It took about two hours for the jury to find the band innocent. The January trial of the other group was a two day trial, and the jury spent about 10 minutes deliberating before finding them not guilty. That ended three more prosecutions down the road. They’d spend several hundred thousand dollars on these prosecutions, such a waste of money that Navarro lost the Republican primary when he ran again. Later the Eleventh Circuit overturned the one conviction and the obscenity declaration.
But 1990 was a year of nationwide frenzy for ambitious rightwing politicians aimed at rap lyrics. Donny Osmond was helpful to 2 Live Crew, too, so he never should have been invited to testify in Arizona. Jan Brewer has never been too swift, I guess.
July 22nd, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Sorry for the long-ass comment, but those cases were really important in my own life. Wanting to find out how a man in the US could be sent to jail for selling a music album, I applied to law school and started the next fall.
Oh, and I learned a lot there. For instance, I hated the co-prosecutor, but after the first not guilty verdict, I happened to be alone with him in the elevator and he said aloud, almost not to me, “This was the worst piece-of-shit case I ever want to have in my life.”
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:19 pm
As I recall, the one of the stranger things about that whole affair was the arrest of smart-ass college rock band Too Much Joy. TMJ went down to Florida to perform a set of 2Live Crew songs as a protest against the arrests and were promptly arrested. I think they thought that the whole thing was driven by racism and that these white kids could prove it by playing these songs and not getting arrested. They failed to see that the whole anti-music frenzy at the time was motivated by simple fuddy-duddiness and not bigotry.
Oddly enough, as I rembember, their drummer avoided arrest because he didn’t sing.
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