You are what you consume.
If you eat junk food, you become fat. If you drink liquor, you get drunk. Do it too often, you’ll corrode your innards and shorten your life. Take certain drugs, get addicted. It’s an inexorable process.
We try to pretend, however, the same thing doesn’t apply to our cultural consumption and our values. Keep up with the Kardashians all you want; it’s harmless escapism. Mindless slasher movies? It’s just fiction. Violent, vulgar music? It’s not like we’re internalizing it or anything.
The current government of Jamaica disagrees. According to a report in the U.K. Guardian last week, the island nation’s broadcasting regulator has put a ban on “music and TV broadcasts deemed to glorify or promote criminal activity, violence, drug use, scamming and weapons.”
The Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica said the ban aims to curb such art that “could give the wrong impression that criminality is an accepted feature of Jamaican culture and society.”
According to the commission, music and TV that includes depictions of crime “normalize[s] criminality among vulnerable and impressionable youth.”
“The directive also said that channels should avoid ‘urban slang” that has anything to do with making money, wire transfers, acquiring wealth or a lavish lifestyle. It cited specific words and phrases like: ‘jungle justice,’ ‘bank/foreign account,’ ‘food,’ ‘wallet”, ‘purse,’ ‘burner phone’ and ‘client,’” the Guardian reported.
The BBC noted that “near-sounding” replacements for the terms can’t be used, either.
Jamaica has one of the highest violent crime rates in Latin America and the Caribbean. It’s also known as a scammer’s haven; as the website of the U.S. Embassy in Jamaica notes, “The American Citizen Services section in Kingston receives frequent inquiries from citizens who have been defrauded for hundreds and even thousands of dollars by Advance Fee Fraud scammers in Jamaica.”
Should the U.S. take a similar approach to public broadcasting?
“The most prevalent in Jamaica is the lottery scam, where scammers lead victims to believe they have won a drawing or lottery, but the cash or prizes will not be released without upfront payment of fees or taxes. Scammers frequently target the elderly or those with disposable income,” the website noted.
Art that glorifies crime of this sort, the commission said, gives “the wrong impression that criminality is an accepted feature of Jamaican culture and society.”
Naturally, you get the usual objection to this: It’s just artists telling it like it is!
“Art imitates life, and the music is coming from what is happening in Jamaica for real,” Stephen McGregor, a Grammy-winning Jamaican singer and producer also known as Di GENIUS, told the Guardian.
“But because it doesn’t fit the moral mold of what they would like it to look like, they try to hamper it.”
Instead, he blamed the government for creating the circumstances that have created the art.
“People are not going to be creating happy, feel-good ‘one love, one heart’ music in those circumstances,” McGregor said. “You can’t force the creatives to paint a picture that’s not really in front of us.”
While not necessarily defending the wisdom of a ban per se, nor excusing the role government ineptitude has played in the current crisis, it’s important to point out that McGregor’s argument falls short when you consider what the responsibilities of “creatives” are.
Art, necessarily, has a point to make. If artists are merely describing what’s “really in front of” them to someone else — in terms of sex, drugs, crime and violence — not only are they being lazy, they’re normalizing it.
More often than not, however, those who claim to just be “telling it like it is” are, in fact, glorifying these things, not simply recording them. Journalism doesn’t have a beat. Music, by its very nature, must move the listeners. If it doesn’t, they’ll stop listening.
The government isn’t targeting music because it moves listeners to revulsion over murder, scamming, drug use and other forms of crime. If it did so, one can guarantee the authorities wouldn’t be cracking down on it. There’s no need for a ban on art that laments lawlessness and dissuades consumers from it.
However, content that celebrates or normalizes turpitude under the guise of simply portraying life is another matter, though.
Nor, in fact, is the government banning this music entirely — merely proscribing its broadcast. If you want to consume sanguinary, hyper-sexualized cultural junk, fine.
But just as the government shouldn’t be able to force-feed you McDonald’s, there’s a good argument to be made that the authorities have an interest in what goes out over government-controlled airwaves, and promoting vice and glorifying criminal behavior isn’t in any government’s interest — or any society’s.
Established cultural values precede morality, not the other way around.
