One thing that frustrates me about your OP is that it's completely vague, (the call for "positive" music, whatever that means).

Many people know, but many more would be shocked, if they knew how much "selective programming" is already in place, as in your instance, to combat the spread of bile and hate, but also, as I have pointed out, many other creative efforts that can be mistakenly interpreted as "offensive" to some person, to certain groups, or even to "the moral foundations of society", to be grandiose about it.

15) What about profanity? Why won't CAMEO allow the use of profanity in the songs performed at their events? What's the big deal? The airwaves today are full of it.

CAMEO chooses to be an organization with a touch of class. The popular music industry survived quite well for many years without foul language. We too will survive and prosper without it.

"CAMEO chooses to be an organization with a touch of class. The popular music industry survived quite well for many years without foul language. We too will survive and prosper without it".

It's not just about gratuitous violence, ideas. It's about the mentality that some feel they are the arbiters of "class". Some believe it's not up to the artist to be allowed the distinction of honest expression over gratuitous, nor is it up to the observer.

A single word can kill? rape?

Late, I see you've done your homework, good on you. I'm actually flattered in a strange sort of way.

15) What about profanity? Why won't CAMEO allow the use of profanity in the songs performed at their events?

CAMEO chooses to be an organization with a touch of class. The popular music industry survived quite well for many years without foul language. We too will survive and prosper without it.

Why does POF disallow profanity

Suppose Paul Martin came out and said "what the fuck are you doing in Iraq anyway, George?"

Nevertheless, it would be nice if you waited for me to answer the questions before you assumed my answer and proceeded to bash my organization and the members of it so rudely and inaccurately.

I have about as much respect for any CAMEO artist as I would for any gangsta' rapper..... they've both sold their "soul".

I would find that offensive and classless whether I agreed with his sentiments or not.

It's interesting that you can post the "F" word here when most of us can't even say "dam*"! Ah, the power of "moderation"!

Nevertheless, you keep hammering away at it.

it is pointless in the context of my original post.

"It's interesting that you can post the "F" word here when most of us can't even say "dam*"! Ah, the power of "moderation"!"


Nope

The power of "edit". (it's to the left, right under your avatar)

can you imagine life without your guitar.......

Music is the most powerful drug available today, like Im sure a few of you will agree

Why does POF disallow profanity

In practice?

Not when used in context, only when the intent to offend is blatant and in violation of decorum.

If this site's policies aren't up to any users standards, the door is just two clicks away.

"Suppose Paul Martin came out and said "what the **** are you doing in Iraq anyway, George?"

My faith would be restored in Canadian politics, I would applaud. I wouldn't see the use of "what the ****" in this context, as being gratuitous, ...I would see it as an honest expression of incredulity.

Just as you are offended by the dreck offered up by pop culture shills, I am just as offended at this dreck being used as a vehicle to drive misguided placing of blame, which to me; seeks to absolve by degree: accountability and responsibility in those who are at the point of root causality of the problem.

I believe that songwriters and musicians have far greater power than they realize -- or perhaps than some would care to acknowledge -- and should therefore take some thought as to how they use that power. Songs that glorify rape and murder, for instance, are a blatant example of musicians misusing their gifts for the sake of the almighty dollar or the fame that such a misuse of their talents may bring them in this world that these days seemingly can't get enough of the worst excesses of human behaviour.

As a blatant example, some years ago a number of women were attacked and sexually assaulted in Central Park, New York by a gang of young thugs who chanted the "lyrics" to a rap song and imitated the action in the video for that song by pouring beer on their helpless victims. Media darling Eminem has made a killing from "songs" about raping his mother and worse things. A sample line: "If you see my dad, tell him I slit his throat in a dream I had". There are numerous other examples that are too sick to even print here. That's what our kids are getting a steady diet of. Some may say, it's only a song.

Do you really believe that if impressionable young people constantly hear musical lyrics that glorify rape and murder, for instance, that it will have no effect upon them, particularly, as you note, upon those who for whatever reason were a little "unbalanced" to begin with? Do you not think that all of this implies that artists should take some responsibility for what they present in their art?

They call it a lot of things – White Power Rock, Oi!, Hatecore, Volk Music. There is even something called White Power Country and Western. But it all has something in common – it is today perhaps the most important tool of the international neo-Nazi movement to gain revenue and new recruits. And those recruits are in turn inspired by this music to engage in acts of racist violence.

The most popular form of such music is a variety of heavy metal accompanied by lyrics which repeat slogans of white Aryan Supremacy, glorify racial violence and Nazism, and call for various forms of "White revolution" and murder.

The Nazi music business has grown throughout the 90s, thanks largely to the internet and the ability it gives skinheads and other neo-Nazi groups to set up internet businesses to sell this music, and the organisational advantages it gives to them in avoiding the racial hatred laws that they frequently breach....

Many people are unaware of the direct connection between music and the growth of the neo-Nazi skinhead movement in the 1970s.The skinhead movement is actually the **stard child of British musical counter-culture mated with soccer hooliganism. Despite a brief skinhead counter-culture in the late sixties, the skinhead "movement" really took off on the back of the punk music revolution in Britain from 1976 onwards.

The skinhead movement was originally tied up with a an offshoot of British punk called "Oi!" music. This was punk music which was influenced to some extent by Reggae and Ska type music, but also sought to be explicitly an expression of the British working class. Certain Oi! bands developed an extensive skinhead following which they were unable to shake even when they desired to do so, especially SHAM ’69, the Angelic Upstarts and the****ey Rejects. Skinheads began appearing at their concerts shouting fascist slogans and starting fights with the non-skinhead punks in the audience. The Oi! movement as a whole, though mostly non-racist, rejected criticism of their racist followers because this was seen as interference by the outside "middle-class establishment." Overtly skinhead Oi! bands such as the 4skins began to appear.

In the late 70s, the Rock against Racism initiative in Britain succeeded in uniting most of the punk movement against the skinhead fringe and against Britain’s National Front, a rapidly growing neo-Nazi political party. As more and more Oi! concerts increasingly led to violent skinhead attacks and riots in the early 1980s, police began to shut down Oi! Concerts and record companies refused to produce new Oi! records.

The National Front responded in the early 1980s by attempting to harness skinhead music for their own purposes. They started their own record company, White Noise Records, and published a series of magazines devoted to overtly racist music. They particularly championed the band "Skrewdriver", led by Ian Stuart Donaldson, a long-time NF activist convicted of a racist attack on an elderly black man. At the same time, racist music began to appear elsewhere as the skinhead movement spread to Germany, the US, and Scandanavia, as well as Australia. Certain alternative record companies in France and Germany began issuing racist records.

Ian Stuart Donaldson later led Skrewdriver and some other bands to split off and form Blood and Honour in 1987, as the National Front was collapsing. By the early 1990s, this had been taken over by Combat-18, a violent thuggish neo-Nazi fringe spinoff of the racist British National Party (the 18 refers to Adolf Hitler’s initials, the first and eighth letters of the alphabet.) After Donaldson’s death in a car accident in 1993, he became a martyr to the cause, and the name of the record division became ISD Records in his memory. Combat-18 successfully turned ISD Records into a major money spinner for the movement and eventually broke into using the internet as their key sales tool. Other racist groups saw the opportunity, and purveyors and producers of purely racist records quickly sprang up around the world, including Sweden’s Nordland Records and Resistance Records, founded in Detroit by a Canadian adherent of the World Church of the Creator, a violently racist pseudo-religion....

Today, there are literally dozens of websites available on the internet where one can buy white supremacist music, and the total number of different albums available in the various racist sub-genres is well in excess of 400.

With the internet, Nazi music is flourishing. In fact, it is probably the most successful part of the international skinhead movement, and clearly serves to provide financial support and recruitment to a variety of racist organisations around the world.....

However, in addition to creating vast e-commerce opportunities for neo-Nazis, the internet is also clearly creating a cooperative trans-national community which facilitates the spread of this sort of music, especially in the face of legal barriers....

The various Nazi bands compete with each other to be more violently offensive in their lyrics, while the vendors use the extremity of the lyrics as a selling point. Thus, for example, one site lauds "Barbecue in Rostock", an album by British Nazi band No Remorse, as "easily one of the most racist, violent, offensive White Power albums ever done." The site is not exaggerating. Not only does the album contain songs such as "Zigger! Zigger! Shoot those ****ing ni**ers", "Belsen was a Gas, Exterminate ya!" and "Zyklon B", but the very title of the album is about the worship of racist violence. It refers to a German city where neo-Nazi arsonists burned to death several asylum seekers in a refugee hostel in 1992, while the cover art of the album shows a skinhead spit-roasting a man with a large nose.

While that album is now several years old, contemporary productions are capable of being just as violent and offensive. For instance, the Combat-18 band Warhammer this year put out an album entitled "Valhalla’s Warriors" which contains songs such as "Die Jew Die" and "Hang ‘em all", referring to "Jews", "Ni**ers" and "Reds".

‘Parasites’ — Fortress (Aust.)

Get outta our country…

Let into this country, to play with drugs and crime
Hold the hands of them all, the’re never satisfied
People who oppose them, are promptly locked away
And those who thought they had a voice, no longer have a say


Get out! We don’t want you around
Get out! Want the people to shout
Get out! Get outta my sight
Get out! Parasites…Parasites…Parasites


Legends of Eureka, turn over in their graves
They can see what has happened to the Southern Cross today
Laws made to put us down, laws are made to keep us quiet
Jail all the racists who wanna keep this country white
Reject an alien government, don’t recognise their laws
It’s time to close the floodgates, it’s time to shut the door
Repatriate, ship ’em out, send the **stards back
If they don’t ****ing like it, it’ll be in body bags

Get out!...

One of the most worrying trends to develop in the international Nazi music scene is the takeover last year of the US company, Resistance records by the American neo-Nazi group, the National Alliance (NA). The National Alliance has been adjudged the "single most dangerous organised hate group in the United States today" by the American anti-racism body, the Anti-Defamation League. The NA is led by William Pierce, the author of two books, The Turner Diaries and Hunter which have probably done more than anything else to promote the current tendency toward acts of terrorism by extreme rightwingers internationally. For instance, these books influenced both the Oklahoma Bomber, Timothy McVeigh, and the London Nazi bomber, David Copeland.

The National Alliance, meanwhile is a growing organisation of over 1000 individuals in 26 states across the US, generally well-disciplined, and includes both skinheads and more "respectable" and older racists. Like many white supremacists, it seeks to create "a racially clean area of the earth" for whites only, and believes that "Aryans" are naturally superior to other peoples. It’s program is consistent with The Turner Diaries, which is a novel that describes how groups of secret white supremacists cells successfully stage a revolution and then systematically exterminate all Blacks, Jews and other minorities.

The National Alliance, which has always been very adept at using technology to spread its message, has made Resistance Records into the giant of the international Nazi music market, especially, after the takeover of Swedish competitor Nordland late last year. The company now has probably the most sophisticated websites in the international nazi music scene, has more than 250 titles for sale, and also publishes a glossy 64-page magazine, Resistance, which promotes both hate music and National Alliance ideology.

But perhaps most worrying is the revenue Resistance Records is clearly generating for the National Alliance. They are reportedly receiving an average of more than 50 orders a day averaging around $70 each. This is well in excess of US$1 million per annum, the vast majority of which is profit which can go into the National Alliance coffers to promote the organisation’s plans for racist revolution.....

The time has come for governments, including Australia, to consider new policy responses to the problem of the developing trans-national neo-Nazi movement, and especially their music scene. If this large and largely illegal industry can be curtailed, so can the neo-Nazi movement and all the racist violence it brings with it.

The point of this thread is a discussion of the power of music and the responsibility of those who create it to do so in a way that is creative as opposed to destructive.

I saw a great Czech movie two years ago (sorry, I've forgotten the name) dealing with the hilarious episodes of a small group of dysfunctional Oi! - ites. The director depicted them with pity and disgust, but not fear.