'I would argue sex, drugs and rock and roll no longer exist, particularly for younger people.'

Check out my appearance on FIRE's So To Speak podcast, hosted by Nico Perrino and featuring Bob Guccione Jr.

Me, Nico Perrino of FIRE, and Bob Guccione Jr.

“I would argue sex, drugs and rock and roll no longer exist, particularly for younger people.” That’s part of my opening statement on Nico Perrino’s So To Speak podcast, a great show he produces for The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). The broad topic was “transgressive music” and the other guest was Bob Guccione Jr., the founder and longtime editor/publisher of Spin, a music magazine that I read religiously back in its first decade (it started in 1985) when I was really into music.

It was a real honor to be on with Guccione. Spin was a great alternative to Rolling Stone, which had started to turn into more of a catch-all celebrity publication rather than one focused on music per se. Rolling Stone was mostly standoffish to punk and rap, evincing a bit too much of an old-guard attitude for me in my 20s (the great writerly exception after Kurt Loder left for MTV was P.J. O’Rourke’s incredible travel writing for them and the early, real-time draft of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities).

Guccione stood up loud and strong against the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), the group spearheaded by Tipper Gore and aimed at cleaning up “The Filthy 15,” a ridiculous list of songs by artists including Prince, Cyndi Lauper, Black Sabbath, and others that dangerously promoted masturbation, occultism, sex, and violence. As we discuss some in the podcast, one of the most galling aspects of the whole thing was the way very few rock stars or music label heads defended their rights to free expression—it was really Guccione and a few others such as Frank Zappa and John Denver (!) who showed up to the debate. Also frustrating: Just four years later, Tipper and Al Gore recast themselves as life-long rock and Grateful Dead fans as they joined the Boomerific Bill Clinton/Hillary Clinton presidential ticket.

We talk about all that and recent controversies, such as the way Lizzo and Beyonce removed the verb “spaz” from songs after some disability activists protested. As I explain, while I’m bothered by artists (and labels) immediately caving to protests (esp. protests that are based on mistaken premises), I’m especially disturbed by the ease with which digital media gets revised without leaving a trace.

Enough throat clearing! On with the show:

The podcast went live just a few days ago—click above to watch via YouTube or go here to listen— and I’m happy to post a VERY ROUGH AND UNCORRECTED AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED RUSH TRANSCRIPT (please check any quotes against the actual audio of the podcast):

Nico Perrino [00:00:09] You're listening to So to Speak, the Free Speech Podcast brought to you by finding the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Welcome back to, So to Speak, the Free Speech Podcast, where every other week we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through personal stories and candid conversations. I am, as always, your host, Nico Perino. And today, we're going to be talking about music, censorship, transgression. You know, there's been some thoughts that I've been having recently. Some people who follow fire very closely might have seen the new video series that we have out with Spin magazine called Free Speech and Other Dirty Words, where we interview popular musical artists about their careers and about their run ins with censorship. And when we were collaborating with Spin on this program and we're asked to kind of come up with a list of artists that we'd want to interview. I asked the staff, we got the list back, we put it into a spreadsheet, and one thing stood out to me. They happened to be artists who were most popular two or more decades ago. Now fire staff is fairly young, right? But I did give them the advice or sort of the requirement that we need to have known that they are interested in these topics before, that they have said something about it before. And so if the question came into my mind, like, why did we get all of these older artists being recommended? I asked myself, Well, is it because music censorship isn't really a thing anymore? It isn't a thing that artists feel like they need to talk about anymore. Or is it because free speech, artistic expression, These are concepts that have become polarized in our ever polarizing times. Or is it something different? Is it that maybe musical artists aren't singing like a virgin on the radio anymore, like Madonna did, or, you know, saying, we're not going to take it anymore? If you can see it for my viewers out there, you can see I've got this t shirt on that says censorship. We're not going to take it, which is an homage, of course, to Snyder's 1980s song. Maybe musical transgression isn't a thing anymore. Maybe we're more talking about self-empowerment, like Katy Perry's firework. I don't know. But I do know two people who might have some thoughts on this, and I thought I would invite them on the podcast to kind of talk about the current era of music. Transgression is sex, drugs and rock and roll still a thing, or is that something that's going to get you canceled? Now to talk about how radio stations, for example, are banning certain songs from being played on their own volition, not being told by people on the outside to do it, including one famous Christmas song. So one of our guests today is Bob Guccione Jr. He is the founder of the music publication Spin. And I actually met Bob down in Austin at South by Southwest. And he regaled this little salon that we were having with Killer Mike, the Rapper and other music professionals with his stories from the 1980s fighting the Parents Music Resource Center and sat in some cases with Oprah Winfrey. Yeah. So I thought he was the perfect guy to come on the show. Bob, welcome.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:03:42] Thank you so much. Thank you. I'm going to just quickly answer your questions before we lose your question.

Nico Perrino [00:03:47] Can I get Nick introduced first?

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:03:49] Oh, please. Yeah. No, no. Yeah.

Nick Gillespie [00:03:53] All right.

Nico Perrino [00:03:54] And I needed to get Nick Gillespie, who I'm sure is right. Yeah, It's okay, Nick. We apologize. Bob's just ready to get in.

Nick Gillespie [00:04:02] I, too, am ready to roll. So.

Nico Perrino [00:04:04] But Nick is going to be familiar to many of our listeners. He's editor at large of Region Magazine. And in my personal opinion, one of the most astute observers of pop culture. Nick, I was listening to your recent interviews when I was in college and just kind of the you do what Virginia POSTREL used to talk about. It's like you used to you're like a deejay. You mix in all these different areas from culture and philosophy and politics and managed to kind of come up with something new and insightful in a way that many other kind of leading thinkers out there don't. And I heard you on Eli Lake's podcast last year in which you did a deep dive with him into the history of punk music. And I was like, This is the guy. If I want to talk about music, censorship, transgression. There's a lot of intersections with punk rock there. I need to get Nick Gillespie on the show. So, Nick, I'm happy to have you on the show. Welcome.

Nick Gillespie [00:04:55] Thank you. It's a real pleasure and an honor. And it's a fantastic honor as well. To be big footed by Bob Guccione JR is a huge spin fan. And, you know, between Rolling Stone and Spin and a couple of other magazines, I mean, that's you know, that's where the action was when I was younger. So it's it's an incredible honor. Thanks.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:05:18] Thank you. Well, thanks so much. There was a lot of action in those days that's missing a lot today. And I wanted to make a comment, perhaps uneducated, but it's coming anyway about transgression in music today. First of all, sex, drugs and rock roll. Sex and drugs are with us. I'm not sure what goes with this interview. Steven Van Zandt a year and a half ago and he said, rock and roll is dead. You can go hear it live, but no one's making it. And I thought that was kind of astute, actually, to a great degree. He's right. Not a complete degree with a great degree. And I think the notion of transgressive music, I just don't think we shock anymore. You know, we we probably all remember the ghetto was kind of poisonous. Truly shocking because in context, go back to those years, the early nineties, no one had ever talked about these things. I mean, we had just had American Psycho, the book, which was similar in the way it was about mutilating corpses and women in complete misogyny, complete, you know, violence and terrible. But there was a book and kind of be kind of like, okay, literature is literature, but music a record that people put on in their home maybe while having dinner. No one had heard this before and just put out. Who life crew is considered incredibly shocking. They're all utterly protected. Free speech, by the way. And as you remember most and I talk a lot about free speech. Hate speech is protected speech, by the way, and should be and should be. We should flush it out like bad toxins. You know, we should be able to flush out of our system.

Nico Perrino [00:06:54] So if you can define it right, If you can. If you can.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:06:57] I think you going to define hate speech. I mean, you know, whatever's hateful is probably hate speech. But the the thing is, people don't realize there's a lot of forms of speech is not protected. Free speech is not a, you know, blank check. There are there are 17 forms because some people say it's less because lying to a law enforcement, federal law enforcement is not protect your lying iris They there are unprotected from speech. That hate speech is not one of them. But we don't have. The ability to be shocked as much as we were. And I'm not so sure there's much sense as you happening in music per se, except for self-censorship from political correctness where people are afraid to say anything. Well, I mean, no one's going to criticize. Well, that goes.

Nick Gillespie [00:07:46] If I can if I can pick up on that and extend it into the conversation about transgression, I would argue sex, drugs and rock and roll no longer exist, particularly for younger people. They're not having sex the way that people used to. The drugs they take, by and large, are in order. They're mood stabilizers. They are not intoxicants and they are not you know, you don't take drugs to obliterate yourself and either touch, you know, the face of God zooming out there past Pluto, which isn't even a planet anymore. You're doing it so you're not overwhelmed with anxiety. So you can get a get out of bed in the morning. Right. And then I agree completely with what Bob was saying and what little Stevie was saying. You know, rock and roll have become this thing. You know, it's started in the in the mid fifties by the mid-sixties. It had evolved into this incredibly robust and varied kind of form of expression, which continued for at least another 20 years. But it's it's not the main mode of popular music making anymore. It really is rap or hip hop or something like that, which has also gone through this incredible baroque renaissance and a profusion of styles. And that's the backdrop. So, you know, on a very basic level, I would say sex, drugs and rock and roll are dead. Some of that I lament the passing of others. It's, you know, it's a sign of progress. I mean, I think I and I say this as somebody who loves rock and roll. I grew up with that. It's what speaks to me. And I don't understand hip hop in the same way. I have two sons who are 29 and 21. They're in the way. My parents had no fucking idea who the Beatles were. I really don't understand. Most of the people they're listening to, that's great. I mean, that's just the way things work when it comes to transgression. I think we're transgressing less, you know, from a top. There's no top down censorship the way there used to be. There aren't six or seven record labels. There are in three networks. There isn't a series of law enforcement people who can really stamp things down or choke off cultural commerce. And the, you know, the dissemination and distribution of product. Everything is better because all of us can consume and produce culture on our own terms in ways that were unimaginable 20 years ago, much as 50 years ago. But to get to Bob's point, this is where, you know, so it's hard to transgress when Sam Smith at the Grammys came out, as you know, in the seventies, we used to talk about, you know, fat Elvis and skinny Elvis. Now we can talk about Fat Satan and Skinny say, you know, the skinny satanic rockers of the seventies are gone. And we have a chubby guy doing a kind of satiric version of Satanism. It can be fun or what, but it's certainly not transgressive because, you know, everything is permissible. We live in Alastair Crowley's magical universe, and that's a real triumph, I think, for liberty and individual freedom and expression. But now it raises this problem that Bob was getting at, which is about self-censorship, and that is that is really hard to combat, even if it is in some profound way an artifact of, you know, of a massive increase in our abilities to express ourselves.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:11:04] So it's not a panic for me because it's Taliban. It is exactly in the public square. It's social media. You are stoned to death if you say something that is not the ascribe proscribed ideology of the times. And so most people don't do it. I personally could care less. I'll say whatever I want saying I invite anybody to address it and debate me anytime, anywhere. But if because a group like that in that in that spirit. But frankly, most people don't want to have those debate. They don't want to be attacked. They don't want to be singled out in social media. They want the opposite. They want to be praised. So we have virtue signaling. We have, as you alluded to, nuclear. So Christmas song, Baby, It's Cold outside, which for 50 years the lifespan of, well, a middle aged lifespan, no one ever, ever once thought that song was about. Somebody invented that the virtue signaling that causes the great cause celeb. And it's all been done by that idiot John Legend, who could be going to the balcony. So, I mean, this is the kind of the crazy thing for liberals like me is that we're shooting ourselves in the foot and we'll run out of bullets. We ask for more.

Nico Perrino [00:12:27] Hey, Bob, can I push back on some of the points you made earlier where you said you invite a debate, so I'm going to.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:12:33] Give it up.

Nico Perrino [00:12:35] So I grew up I was in a metal band. Some of our listeners might know this. I talked about before I was in a metal band in high school called Angel Fire. We had like a little kind of record deal and yeah, yeah, it was, I think, a town in Arizona that one of my bandmates drove through one time or might be in New Mexico, I forget. And he thought, Yeah, this is a real metal name. We were a death metal band, right? Swedish death metal. So it's a little bit more like the scream, the verses, sing the choruses. But I grew up idolizing metal music, Metallica. And then, you know, you get into more niche artists that many of our listeners won't be familiar with, like children about them and flames up there, up there, they like burn churches and stuff like that. Yeah, that's what they did. But I grew up reading like Motley Crue's The Dirt or the biographies of Led Zeppelin or the Memoirs of Aerosmith and Holy shit, the stuff that they did and they admit to doing. I just could not see being done by artists today. You do not hear about that sort of that sort of stuff. And they were often, you know, criticized, but they had this sort of devil may care. I don't give a fuck attitude about it. Now you have Beyonce who uses the word spouse a number of times in her songs, and it's accused of being able, as it apparently spouse is a word for pimp. I mean, I don't even know. I didn't know that it had that those connotations. And I don't think Beyonce did either. So the disability community came after her and then she removed the songs from her lyrics. The same exact thing happened with Lizzo when they removed. So I just can't I have a hard time believing that, like rock and roll artists or transgressive artists would have done that. In the past you talk about baby.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:14:21] They would not have they would not have taken that well, no.

Nico Perrino [00:14:24] But but that's still so. The use of the word spaz to these people is shocking. In the same way, for example, like a virgin with shock in or little Nicky. You know, the Prince song was shocking to people. It's just a different sort of shocking. Darling. Nikki. Excuse me. It's just a different sort of shocking. And so it plays against kind of the the the mood of the moment. Right. And we have a we have a conversation right now about consent. So then you look at songs like Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke, which got banned at like over 20 universities in the U.K., which Robin Thicke likes to say it's not about consent.

Nick Gillespie [00:15:02] That's about plagiarism, right?

Nico Perrino [00:15:04] Yeah, right. Yeah.

Nick Gillespie [00:15:06] Well, there's also the like, the ultimate rock and roll tradition. I mean, there are like three songs that get endlessly repurposed. So. Yeah.

Nico Perrino [00:15:13] And then and then, you know, Baby, it's cold outside. I'm looking at the lyrics here, you know, it says, My mother will start to worry. Beautiful. What's your hurry? My father will be pacing the floor. Listen to that. You know, I could see how if you're looking to be offended, you can find offense in that song and you can say this is a song about consent or date rape. This reminds me of the great Christopher Hitchens anecdote about the lexicographer Samuel Johnson. Samuel Johnson creates the first dictionary, of course, and he's waited upon by the British women and the aristocracy. They come to him and they say, We must commend you on writing this dictionary and we must also commend you are not using any vulgar language in the dictionary. Samuel Johnson says, I commend you for knowing where to look. I feel like in a certain sense that's what we're doing, is we're trying to bend over backwards to be offended because there's something in the culture right now that gives you a certain status if you can find offense. And so that's why you go comment got coming through Beyoncé or Lizzo's lyric. That's why you go and look at a song that nobody found offensive for 50 years, say, Now we can't play this on the radio. I mean, it's just a different sort of shocking, though, isn't it, Bob?

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:16:20] Well, no, I don't. I don't think it's genuine. I think you go back to darling, Nikki and I never found it offensive. Clearly, most people did, But masturbation wasn't talked about in popular music. Definitely. I think Madonna also talking about it at some point like a Virgin was touching on a very sensitive spot for Catholics and Christians across the country. And Madonna's Catholic, and she knew that she did deliberately. And I. I applaud that. I like probably provocative movies. I think it stimulates the culture. And, you know, it was a great line on Saturday Night Live once when they said, you know. Who, like Cruz, being sued, prosecuted for obscenity. Why are we always having to send to life group? Why can't we defend Jimi Hendrix? You know, because it is true. You get the the most, you know, the roughest and the rawest and the toughest stuff is what you have to do. Otherwise nothing is meaningful. So, no, I don't think we can justify this this virtue signaling, listening, what I call Taliban. It is literally like the Taliban. They are laying down. I described way of thinking. I say ironically, this very, very far, far left, which I have no association with. I am a liberal. I will die, perhaps after this podcast when somebody comes and shoots.

Nico Perrino [00:17:52] Or does what the Taliban does, which is bad people.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:17:54] Taliban probably like me more. But the element of the far left being the most destructive to free speech is mind blowing. It's mind blowing. You know, conservatives just don't like things that are understandable. None of us like things that they don't really, really go out of their way to try and stop you. You know, the left will cancel you and that. And there was a point I made that when talking South by Southwest was that for all of its vitriol and figuring Donald Trump in four years as a president and two years afterwards hasn't been able to succeed in suppressing one story about him, not one. He hasn't had one tweet taken down in all of that time. Well, he.

Nico Perrino [00:18:45] Had his account taken down.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:18:47] Well, his own account was taken down. But, I mean, he has not succeeded in taking the losses, then succeed in getting anything else suppressed in 5 to 6 years of art and drawing. And he was president United States before that.

Nico Perrino [00:18:58] But let's look in here.

Nick Gillespie [00:19:01] Too, you know, to touch on this question of transgression. It's kind of fascinating. And when the spaz, you know, Spaz Gate came out and you had in rapid succession two of the most successful recording artists ever, but of the current moment, pulling back from that, it reminded me that a band that I've always loved, Devo, in 1977, their first single was called Mongoloid, and it is about a Down's syndrome retarded person who masks himself as he goes through an everyday life. And to their credit, you know, Devo right now, I don't know. They're like in their eighties practically, they still perform that live. And that was very much part of a kind of punk or transgressive ethos that was everywhere in a lot of different popular culture. And, you know, at the same time that was happening, there's a famous sketch with Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live where they say it's a job or it's a job interview where they're doing free association. And it is unbelievable to think I'm one of the most popular shows on NBC. The words that were being spoken there that can never you know, that will never be spoken on on cable or even on a podcast like this. We would shy away from using some of the terms they use there. There hasn't been an abortion on TV since Maude got one in the early seventies. You know, the need for transgression in that old form seems to have abated. And I think actually, you know, Madonna in a in a profound way in the in the mid to and especially by the late eighties and with something like her sex book which is hardcore pornography and and kind of fantasizing about violence, about bondage, about all sorts of stuff which came out I think in 92 We've lance that Boyle we don't need that kind of transgression in our popular culture anymore. And I think we have in a very positive way of pushed through to just a general plateau of more freedom of expression. And to Bob's point, you know, it's harder for official sources to shut things down. They still try to. I'm very worried by conservatives in Florida and elsewhere who are trying to govern, you know, what is considered an acceptable book, you know, for local schools to kind of teach or not to.

Nico Perrino [00:21:21] Travel and public libraries where we're dealing with this story. I mean.

Nick Gillespie [00:21:24] There's there's a lot to worry about. It's also true that the the left, the identity politics or the identitarian left is really going hammer and tong to kind of just, you know, quarantine certain topics, certain types of phrasing, certain types of thinking out of public discussion. And that's all messed up. But we need to think about why do we you know, why is popular culture less transgressive than it used to be? And I think, you know, this is a place where we can well, it's partly that some some people are scared. Lizzo and Beyonce are scared. And on some level, from a capitalist point of view, you can say, okay, well, you know what? Like, you know, it's a it's a it might be a smart move. Rather than going through boycotts and possibly being pulled off of Spotify or something like that.

Nico Perrino [00:22:10] Can I just.

Nick Gillespie [00:22:12] I just want to say we should take the win, because the real win is that more people everywhere can say whatever the fuck they want at any time that they want, and it's not up. We don't have to we don't have to change the structural arrangement of society. What we now have to do, and maybe this is harder. We have to, you know, we have to encourage people to have a backbone and to say what they mean and to be, you know, and to defend their points of view rather than backing down at the slightest hand.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:22:42] I totally agree. So, Nicole, you want to jump in? I must say I have to go on record. I totally agree with you, Nick, by the way. Yes. Conservatives are probably not listening that completely. I'm just saying they weren't as much ironically as a problem or as successful as the left to be in suppressing speech. You say we can say whatever we want, We cannot say retarded. Go say that in public. I'll say it. I recently said I thought somebody was retarded. Somebody as we don't use that word. I said, why not? It's perfectly valid word. It happens to be the correct word. This person is worried. They again.

Nick Gillespie [00:23:15] You know, part of it is, you know, I agree with you, literally the vice principal of the Catholic high school that I went to in the late seventies and early eighties, when he would pull you into the office for discipline, the first thing he would say in a thick Jersey City accent was, what are you were taught, Ed? Which what, you know, created a whole secret language for people there. But, you know.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:23:37] Things I don't see, you know.

Nick Gillespie [00:23:38] It's not like, you know, to me it's much more important that it is virtually impossible possible to be prosecuted, much less actually convicted of obscenity. Now, Yes. That that in that the record labels don't matter. They don't control what music is made and what and what music is heard.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:23:58] In that case.

Nick Gillespie [00:23:58] But there are still real issues.

Nico Perrino [00:24:00] Yeah, I I'd like to make a few points in response to all you know, just on the book banning stuff. You know, fire has been a part of Banned Books Week for as long as I've been at fire. And it, you know, for a while sort of an anachronism. Right. And they even change it from banned books to abandoned challenge because like, no one was banning books anymore. This is something you did years ago. And that's why why when I'm coming to this music conversation, I'm like, it could all come back, right? Just in the same way book Banning has come back. And there is there's this case in L.A. County, Texas, going on right now where a federal judge or they tried to remove a bunch of books from the library for viewpoint based reason, narrowly political reasons. And the judge said, no, you can't do it for those reasons. And so they were forced to put the book the books back in. But then they considered a motion in the city council to just get rid of the libraries altogether. They're like, We have to put these books back in. We're going to get rid of the libraries.

Nick Gillespie [00:24:55] Which is deeply, you know, analogous to the massive resistance movement against integration of public schools. After Brown versus Board of Education. There were two counties in Virginia that when they were told, okay, you're going to have to desegregate schools, you got to integrate the schools, they're like, okay, we're just not offering public high school anymore. I mean, that's what I thought of when I heard that move. It's so fucking insane.

Nico Perrino [00:25:20] It's cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:25:23] It's also. It's also. So it's not minimal, but well, minimal. There's not a lot of that happening. And we have always had in my entire life I was born in 1985. So in the nearly 70 years I've been here, both being banned, books being burned, you know, libraries being told they can't have books. That's not a new story. But I'm going to tell you something. I think it's worse than that because you can ban books, library books, and you've got a library buying it. You can buy it on Amazon. I mean, it's not perfect world. We don't live in a better world. Tell you what's worse.

Nick Gillespie [00:25:59] Rewriting books. Yeah.

Nico Perrino [00:26:01] Oh, jeez. Yeah. I mean, a podcast.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:26:04] Is more insanely censoring and and defaming to not only the artist that individuals, but all of literature, all of history.

Nick Gillespie [00:26:16] The rewrite. I think the left is really and this is directly I'm playing with Lizzo and Beyoncé and Taylor Swift as well who has done this in an age of electronic media, which again is extremely liberating and convenient and whatnot. You know, places like Amazon, and they do this all the time. You don't own the book or the music. You own a license to listen to it through them and they change and revise things all the time. And like Lizzo and Beyoncé were able to effectively recall everything and then put out the burglarized version without comment. And I think for me, I don't I don't get too worried up, you know, I don't get too worried about artists changing their mind or, you know, copping out and stuff like that. But the fact that we are now in a world and this is very much a Fahrenheit 451 kind of world where censorship happens almost retrospectively, you know, without anybody really being hip to it. And in fact, you know, reason we ran a great essay by Kat Rosenfield not too long ago that talking about this very topic and in that she tells a story of how Fahrenheit 451. You know, the great Bradbury Ray Bradbury book about, you know, the evils of banning books and whatnot. And it turned out like the the version of that book that most high school students read between the mid-sixties to the end of the seventies was actually. Whereas, like the publisher, without telling him, changed some of the words to make it more palatable to a high school audience. And he only found out about it in the late seventies and flipped his way and forced his publisher to put out the original text. This is the world we're living in where, I mean, I think it's great in a in a digital world, you can iterate endlessly and slightly improve things, but if we don't have a record of tracking what was, we very quickly get lost in a kind of, I don't know, you know, epistemological, you know, closure that is deeply, deeply disturbing.

Nico Perrino [00:28:15] I mean, I was a history major in college and I have a deep respect for history. And when all those publishers started going in and changing Roald Dahl's book or the Goosebumps books or Agatha Christie's books, you know, we're look, I mean, I stopped buying physical books after my first move in which I had to pack up 24 records.

Nick Gillespie [00:28:37] I had 5000 records at one point. I have none.

Nico Perrino [00:28:40] Now. Yeah. I mean, anyone who's.

Nick Gillespie [00:28:41] Very hard to.

Nico Perrino [00:28:42] Move, anyone who's had a pack of books knows you can't fill the box all the way. Otherwise you're not going to be able to pick up the box of books. So I started going to e-books, but apparently now Amazon can go in and just change the text of that book. And, you know, as someone who cares about history, I want to know how people wrote in the past, you know, there's this famous quote that says, yeah, the past is a foreign country. They do do things different there, right? Like, I want to know how it was. And and.

Nick Gillespie [00:29:05] You know, having said that, we agree. You know, you mentioned Agatha Christie, You know, the original version of the novel, Ten Little Indians was called Ten Little [Unrecognized]. It was never marketed under that title in America, and it was changed to England. But I think we can also understand, okay, you know what? Like that's a bad title and a distracting. Yeah, no offense, but then we don't want to live in a world where we've never known, you know, where we've always been have war with Eurasia or East Asia or whatever. And we don't know.

Nico Perrino [00:29:36] This is the Ministry of Truth, right?

Nick Gillespie [00:29:38] The version history. I mean, this is what I love about Wikipedia, even Google Docs. And, you know, there are these tools in place in this world where you have version, you know, version histories. And that's what we need because that's what history is. That is what public discourse is. We're always changing and iterating and whatnot, but we need to know what we were, where we were to know, understand where we are now and where we might end up.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:30:02] In the future. Such interesting point. I totally agree with you on the very interestingly put, I use the phrase we we defile history by rewriting books. Interesting. Let's do that little contextual issue. Agatha Christie I'm one of the few people, one of the only people I've ever heard that correctly knew the original title. I actually had the original title in England in 1960 when I was growing up. I read Agatha Christie at 16 was always a boy, not the teenager. I read voraciously. I read all the language and thousands of other books, and I had that version and then later on is called Terminal Indians. No, that can't be the same book. Then. It is. It is now. Let him go and let Indians go to school. But yeah. But I think, yes, there's some words that really just carry such horrific toxic portent that you have to say, You know what? We've got to go past this. I mean, if we go back to the age of we we went past slavery, thank God. But if you go back to the roads and the Greek slaves gone places eating bread. So we have to get past we have to have all we have to be more, you know, compassionate and changing. The title of the book, I think, was a good thing then, Lynda. And they changed that again. Indians. I think that's getting a little bit silly, but okay, you know, whatever. We let people work that out between them. But when we go in and we change Ronald Dowd's language so that when he says someone is fat, they now call it enormous, is just defiling literature, defiling our own. Legacy or own history, which is imperfect. That's what people forget. We're imperfect. Our history is imperfect. But let's at least have a chronicle of that. So I like your version that keeps track of all the versions. But I think more importantly or more fundamentally, we have to have a spine as a society. You know, my argument against political correctness, my problem with it, my great beef with the whole notion of is criticism is one of the most valid parts of the human experience. I only ever really learn from criticism. I don't think I ever learned some anything except those dynamite reviews. That criticism I used to like dismissed some of it as being not necessarily what I thought and agreed with when I said some what I'm not it, but that's kind of accurate. And I learned and group so this as an individual but as a society we grow the ability to criticize. Bill Maher is a good buddy of mine of course rails against this often. One of the things he said, you know what? He's upset about talking about people being sad, but maybe we should talk about people being fat because half this country is a beast and that's a health condition that precipitates early death. You know, for the first time in the history of the country, the life expectancy has gone down slightly. So maybe we should talk about it. You know, maybe everybody shouldn't be just so. Oh, my God, you said that.

Nico Perrino [00:33:06] Can I. Can I.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:33:07] Just say.

Nick Gillespie [00:33:07] That? So the controversial I. Speaking of lives, how instead of worrying about wet ass pussy, we should have been focused on her cholesterol levels.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:33:16] I think it would have helped her.

Nick Gillespie [00:33:18] I think if I could just turn the question back on you, Nicole, because you mentioned, you know, kind of death metal and particularly Swedish death metal. But, I mean, do you think like our bands like Metallica, do they no longer have the transgressive urge or impulse or, you know, has that genre has does it has a has a, you know, kind of fight against everything it needs to fight and now is doing, you know, love ballads or going acoustic or what I mean.

Nico Perrino [00:33:49] Yeah. Well, I mean, I'll say this. I'm like many other people who tend to gravitate to the music they listen to when they were between the ages of 15 and 23, right? So I don't really keep up with Swedish death metal in the way I used to. I still listen to it all the time, but I listen to the albums from the mid 2000s, right? And when I was growing up into this music, I felt kind of a part of that transgressive culture. This was at a time when kind of old hair metal metal with guitar solos were on their way out and new metal was coming in. And I remember I used to wear baggy pants, you know, with my pants below. My boxers uphold the principles.

Nick Gillespie [00:34:28] You were part of the declared. That's what ruined everything, right? You probably wore a baseball cap backwards.

Nico Perrino [00:34:33] You. No, I didn't. I had a chain, though. I did have a chain. But I was also you know, there were some bands I liked. I like Slipknot, but I wasn't a big Korn fan. It was so I felt like there was some transgression happening at the time. And actually we didn't like those bands that you're referencing. Nick Although we kind of adopted the style, right? We didn't have long hair, but we did wear the baggy pants and the big black t shirts. We called them sellouts because they weren't doing the guitar solos anymore. You don't hear the word sellout anymore. It was like uncool to be popular back. And this was a time when mall culture was just on its way out. You used to be able to identify with the people who shopped at the same stores with you as others bands or Hot Topic or Spencer's or Claire's, you know, And, you know, so it's hard for me to say, but I remember it being cool to transgress. I remember people, you know, when you're 12, 13, 14 years old, reading the dirt, you know, you think all that is really cool. I just don't know that that's I think our society is a little bit more empathetic than it. And there are good things that come with that and there are bad things that come with that.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:35:39] We're imperfect, so we're imperfect. Always going to be.

Nick Gillespie [00:35:42] It's fascinating when you mention a hot topic or, you know, fans or Spencer's, you know, Spencer's, because that's what I mean. I remember going to Spencer's, I guess, in the eighties, maybe the seventies, and it's I'm sure it's the first place where 99% of people alive in America saw a vibrator and probably a blacklight poster. But, you know, these things are kind of stuck in time. But, you know, hot topic isn't such a big deal anymore. But Wal-Mart, which has a fascinating history with popular music, you know, is now the biggest purveyor of Goth stuff. I live for a long time, full and part time in rural Ohio, and I spent a lot of time in Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart has more Goth stuff in it than hot Topic because it's gone from being kind of a transgressive subculture to just being a background culture for for many parts of, you know, middle America. I mean, it explains why a group like Slipknot, you know, is I mean, it makes sense. They're from Iowa like in a. Weird way, you don't act like that if you come from New York City, particularly Manhattan.

Nico Perrino [00:36:46] Right. Well, I mean, it's cliche to say at this point, right, that the coasts and those in media tend to have an outsized influence on society. But, Nick, you were mentioning earlier that artists would self-censor because they, you know, of market forces and market pressures. But at the same time, I actually think the market is behind a lot of this transgressive art or these transgressive podcasts. You know, when Dave Chappelle famously, when tried to get himself canceled with his closure, Netflix and Netflix fortunately didn't take it off of its streaming platform as many asked to, You could just go to Rotten Tomatoes and see that it had a 99% approval rating from from the general public. And yeah, it was a it was a splat with its own means. And the same thing happened to Rogen to write, you know, he became more popular than ever after folks tried to cancel him from Spotify. And then Bill Marr, you mentioned Bob, I've put folks from fire on a number of different podcasts, TV shows. You know, we've been quoted all over the place. Nobody has as much influence and drive in the conversation as Bill Marr does, but you don't.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:37:55] Hear about it, much less.

Nico Perrino [00:37:58] He has a huge audience of people and it's just.

Nick Gillespie [00:38:00] Hard to run from. You know, he went from Comedy Central basic cable to ABC to HBO, you know, and it's fascinating because he's he is, you know, I think the South Park guys are like this There there are Dave Chappelle, certainly where they actually become more and more, I don't want to say transgressive, but like they have more and more serious integrity of who they are and they gain a bigger and bigger audience without having to curtail it. Having said that, you know, when you're doing transgression and art, you know, we love transgressive art, at least throughout the 20th century and into the 21st. In many ways, it's always a you're on a razor's edge because, you know, I mentioned Madonna's sex, but Madonna had a string of incredible records and really was such a profound agent of change in American culture. I mean, like we don't talk about the virgin whore complex anymore, which we had for 2000 years before Madonna. She wiped that out. But she did go too far with the sex book. It was too much for her fans. And you've read it now and it's still like, wow, this is pretty stunning stuff. And it's, you know, 40 years old. So, you know, you you have to you're always playing a little bit of a game, you know, Nico And let and doing a little prep for this I found out which I didn't know before this, but Van Morrison, who is now a transgressive artist because he's recording songs with Eric Clapton, that our anti-vaccine mandate and being attacked by Rolling Stone. But Brown Eyed Girl, like probably his single best known song, was originally called Brown Skin Girl. And he he flipped it into brown eyed girl because he thought it would be too much for his audience, You know, in the late sixties, early seventies, to deal with a love song that is, you know, openly about a trans racial love thing. So, you know, people are always artists are always trying to be a little bit ahead, but not too far. And I'm trying.

Nico Perrino [00:39:54] To sing the lyrics in my head and I'm like, Which one is better brown skinned or brown eyed? You know, which one, you know, which one is musically has a better rhythm.

Nick Gillespie [00:40:02] As somebody who was part Irish-American and spent too many college parties at the end of the night, everybody wanted to be Irish, would put on Van Morrison songs and get blind drunk. And I no longer like Van Morrison. I like him more because he's anti-vaccine, I'm pro-vaccine. But the fact that he is willing to fucking say what he believes is kind.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:40:22] Of what I think is tremendous about censorship. I interviewed Robert Kennedy Junior about two years ago right in the middle of the pandemic, and he came out with a book about Celgene. What drew my attention was I had had run ins with algae in the eighties and nineties and spearheaded its AIDS call, and we found that Fauci was lying to the public. We found that he was being supported by the pharmaceutical companies and we undid the whole mythology around AZT and we proved it was killing people, thought AIDS. And we probably I say we've changed the way the world's media coverage because we were leading with such fantastic reporting showing that people really didn't know. So when that thing came out with can be has become fallacy. I reached out to some people that they sent me up an interview and I interviewed him over two days and I checked him over two weeks but saw that they actually didn't do much else. Maybe I was infected with scientific studies, and so I took out at least a third of what he said, and I challenged him on some of the other things that we ran this piece. And of course, we was savaged by people so upset. You're giving room and space and credence to an ANTI-VAXXER. So we remember he's not wrong. Everything that we did was right. That's all factual. You don't agree with it? That's fine. I don't agree with. I'm pro-vaccine because I think on balance, we stay healthy. We might not always still have polio and smallpox and God knows what else. But it's not untrue to say that some people get seriously ill in vaccines and die. That wasn't untrue. And the to remove it from the arena of truth is worse than to let it be heard and that people make up their mind and say at the end of the day, we have to face you. Niko and your podcast had to faith that he was smart enough to hear different opinions like mine and mix and whoever else your guests are next week and the week before and that they will make up their own will be intelligent enough to say, Well, I accept some work of something that I don't accept, but it's all part of a debate, especially when you suppress that debate. That's when we go backwards. And I always say essentially it is very simple and very empirical. Look at apartheid in South Africa. Look at the Soviet bloc where you weren't allowed to speak. Look at the places today where you're not allowed to speak. And what kind of society do you have? How awful and how, frankly retarded is that society?

Nico Perrino [00:42:51] Hey, can I ask about platform you mentioned, you know. You know, you wrote this article and people were mad at you for writing this article. We had an experience yesterday. We did a webinar for Fires Faculty Network where we invited the law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Amy Wax. She is being brought up on charges, could lose her tenure because of things she's alleged to have said about students, that some incendiary commentary she's made about immigrants. And, you know, she's she's pretty right wing and pretty unapologetic. And Penn is trying to punish her. Up to and including termination. And it's probably the biggest academic freedom case going on in the country right now. So we asked Amy WEX, come on our webinar and defend yourself. Right. We'll give you we'll we'll give you the opportunity to defend yourself, but then we're going to turn it over to our faculty network to ask you incisive questions about your case. And she, to her credit, agreed to it. And and I haven't had a chance to watch it. I had a meeting while it was happening, but we're going to post it on Fire's YouTube channel here soon. But we were being asked by reporters, people on Twitter, why would you platform this person, right? Why would you platform this person? We. And and it's just it's such a departure from the way at least I feel things used to be a where it where you know you want to hear from these people and then you want to have an opportunity to ask them incisive questions. You want to hear them make their best case.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:44:26] To hear everybody say.

Nico Perrino [00:44:27] But putting up and now there's like, there's this there's this whole line of of argumentation that's happening. And right now it's like just listening to these people or giving them the up or calling them in your article is giving them a platform and there's something immoral and unethical about it's.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:44:41] An attempt to censor is an attempt to intimidate you, to censor. I want to go back to 1980s PMRC and my music sensibility. There's a flap In the late eighties and early nineties, I was the most proficient guest on shows and debates and lectured and lectured and I debated around the whole country. I must have lived in universities and I was on perhaps a thousand different individual radio on some of them. But one of the places I went regularly was the 700, and I went on Christian radio perhaps as much as they went on rock radio. I accepted every invitation. At one point my thought is of me, you're you're crazy. You're giving these people credibility. I said, the father.

Nico Perrino [00:45:30] Was the publisher of Penthouse.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:45:31] So right from the get go. And I said, Credibility. They have God. They don't need credibility that they got in space. Well, they don't have an alternative view. And the first time they ever heard this may not be as bad as they think they can, as we're told. And it was Bible thumpers selling Bibles that were telling them this stuff was bad because it because it sold Bibles to frighten them. Their kids were going to go to hell in listening to rock and roll. So I debated a lot of these guys and I became friendly with some of them. And the 700 Club called me the House Liberal because those liberals show up. But I thought it was incredibly important to go talk, get inside. I used to say to my side, since the two sides here we have sides and liberals and I was a liberal. Wait a minute. You want free speech, right? You have to have their free speech, too. It includes their free speech. So free speech. We don't like that. We have to defend that as well. So if a Christian says, I'm going to hell, you have to defend his right to say that you can't close that down. That's hypocritical.

Nico Perrino [00:46:33] I do want to think.

Nick Gillespie [00:46:34] That the De-platforming movement is disturbing. And, you know, it's not completely unprecedented, but it's different than it used to be. And I think it's worse when I when I was in college in the eighties and in grad school people, you would invite unpopular speakers, but they would mostly be allowed to speak. And then there might be a debate afterwards, either with the person and a bunch of other people or, you know, groups talking obviously preferable. And I think, you know, Nika, what you're talking about is a shift to a post liberal world, you know, And by that I mean both, you know, kind of liberal as of, you know, circa 1970, but also classically liberal. The idea of, you know, drawn out of the enlightenment that we need to be in broad conversation with all sorts of people all the time, because each of us is limited, we have bias. We don't know what is true. This is the best way to check our math, kind of that our worldview makes sense or is good, or that we can learn from other people. And I you know, I'm very interested in seeing that Amy Wax thing because everything I've read about her is that she is a kind of unapologetic white nationalist, you know, scientific, racist. So I'd be curious to actually know that because you never really get a chance to see her talk. But there is a real. This, I think, is the main problem that is driving a, you know, bad discourse in America, which is that you don't have to listen to people you disagree with. It's enough to know you disagree with them. There is a version of that on the left, particularly among identity politics people. It's extremely bad. There is a growing and ominous trend among post liberal conservatives. And these are, you know, oftentimes the nationalist conservatives by people like Patrick Deneen and and a couple of people that, you know, both at Notre Dame and at Harvard. I mean, these are like not marginal characters.

Nico Perrino [00:48:31] For me over at Harvard.

Nick Gillespie [00:48:32] For me all, and Deneen at Notre Dame. And I, you know, as a as a libertarian and as a classical liberal, I want to engage these people and kind of, you know, because I feel like, you know what, in an open argument, I think I have a better point of view, I think have a better framework for knowledge and for societal progress. And I think that's something that is generationally changing. And, you know, part of we started by talking about popular culture. People always speak through, you know, culture. You know, that culture isn't it isn't didactic in the sense that if you watch, you know, if you listen to Darling Nikki, you're going to start masturbating with a magazine in the lobby of a hotel, which is the way that Tipper Gore talked about it. It was this insane idea. But like you speak through the culture of your moment because it expresses you and you can you can talk through things. And, you know, we need to understand culture as a conversation. And it's always better when that conversation is more open and engaging. Everybody is going to put their own curbs on it. But we need to have as big and as robust a conversation. And so I want.

Nico Perrino [00:49:45] Yeah, I want to ask about. So you mentioned Tipper Gore and darling Nikki, and I want to ask Bob about this because this is one of the more interesting things that I learned from the salon that we had back at South by Southwest. Bob, as you said, when the PMRC first started kind of going after Darling Nikki and other artists, that there were few voices on the other side willing to push back on them. So you were getting married?

Nick Gillespie [00:50:07] I just, you know, thank you, Bob, for what you did back then. And it was people like him and John Denver, of all people who was not particularly in the sights of the PMRC and to a degree, somebody like Frank Zappa, who was not really that popular. And artists like these guys put stuff on the line where, you know, most of the people who were being attacked, the big artists and certainly the big record labels were, you know, conspicuous by their absence. Well, fuck you, I'm singing. What up?

Nico Perrino [00:50:35] Well, Rocky Mountain High was a stoner song, right? That was an allegation against that one. But I was. So you look back and this is often the case with censorship, right? As they went after movies, they went after comic books. You had the comics code, they went after music. And we all look back on it as like, this was silly that this happened even with the Skokie case, where you had literal Nazis marching and ton of Holocaust like that's sort of revered today. Right? And I know this working at fire is like when you're in the thick of it in a free speech battle, it feels like the world is against you. But over time, people tend to respect that you stood for the principle and cultural norm shift. So it's hard for me. Bob I didn't know because I grew up a metal head that a vast majority of the country was on the PM asses side and that the few people were willing to stand up to them, at least initially, and that you were taking a lot of those requests because you were the only one that was able to speak on their end. So but but like so can you talk a little bit about that going on Oprah show? And can you also for our listeners who might not know what was the PR hour, see if you can explain that briefly.

Bob Guccione Jr. [00:51:36] Yeah. No, no. You tell the story very well. The PMRC was the Parents Music Resource Center. It was completely bogus organization created by Tipper Gore to brand name for husband Al Gore when he ran for president, which he did a few years later, because Al Gore was never going to get the moderates, it was too far left. He certainly wasn't getting conservatives. So what they tried to do was was create something which was actually a conservative movement that would make him sound more appealing because he never once, ever saw all of his left credentials ever criticized the PMRC, which is right. And so I called that very early on. But anything before that happened, what happened was the policies called for these Senate hearings. It was going to go off the record, so they were going to make records banned. And so the news media naturally started calling all the top editors what was down musician Green magazine. That's no way. I don't I don't want that debate motivating senators wives. And they got to me, that was cool. Literally, it was like most people spent maybe five. We just got it right. Tiny magazine. And because of this guy, get out of this, maybe this young guy, I'll do it. So I kept saying, I'll do it every time. So it's funny, I. Became the thorn in their side and they didn't turn up for debate, I suppose, on Nightline. I was actually sitting in the studio at night one and typical would enjoy. They debated Susan Baker on Fox News when it first started Fox News, and she didn't come back for it. And even Sean HANNITY said, you know, I got to say, I agree with Bob. And he's being very he's being welcoming, gives your viewpoint and he's saying, you know, if you if you can prove any of this, he'll give you two pages free and spend the three months on the road so everybody sees you do change your mind. Just show it to me. Show it to me and I'll I'll publish it. I don't agree with you, but I'm just afraid because truth is truth will never happen. So I debated these people and they're, you know, satellites like Jimmy Swaggart. Because no one else would. And I grew up in the penthouse. But it was always my intention to stand up to spin and spin subject matter. But because I grew up in my father's home as the publisher of Penthouse, where he was constantly assailed, the people tried to preserve it. There is no law that the judge said, you know, this is not upstanding, redeeming value as a magazine. But he knew he had to fight, that we'd get subsumed and he was in his way. One of the only people that actually gets a lot of credit, which he doesn't deserve. He just didn't want his magazines banned. And he was definitely on the coattails of my father, who was literally fighting. And my father indemnified every newsstand in America or a hundred thousand newsstands. He said, I indemnify everyone. If you go to court, I will pay for it. And he did have to pay for some school someplace. They used him. They did that. But so I grew up in that environment knowing you had to stand up with this stuff. And one reads, History has got to stand up to people. We're trying to be oppressive in any way, which is why, frankly, I'm sitting here today standing up against the notion of the of all and wokeness, which I find equally damaging the AMC, maybe more so because with digital media it is fuels like, you know, nitrous fuels, nitrous oxide implied by that. So so yeah, the PMRC that was an accident that I was the one who was brought in because nobody else would talk about the media. I want to say Frank Zappa deserves most credit because he wasn't effective to being just jumped in, as did Snider, who was somewhat effective, and General Biafra, who they tried to destroy. But these guys stood up and encouraged. And so, as did, you know, so many of the rappers to attack them. There was a racial component against that with the rappers, for sure beginning. But, you know, when Ozzy Osborne was attacked for that song, Suicide Solution, some kid was said to have died because of it. I was on a show he was asked about and I said, Well, I said one person, let's just say he actually did kill himself because he listened to that song, which I don't agree with. Let's say he did. Tens of millions of others didn't. Let's look at the data here. You've got tens of millions of people exposed to that song who didn't kill themselves. So maybe that song doesn't drive this or say, I then was the person I person was the person who broke that case because they're sitting in my office one day looking at a bunch of stuff. And I realize that the date the kid killed himself was before the single came out. It had not been released. And I called up Sharon Osbourne. Why didn't I never get around it? And I called her and I told her that. Jill, thank you very much. Case was dismissed a few days later. Thank you. Thank you, Bob. You didn't seem like we'd still be fighting these days. So that's the kind of. Guess what? No one killed themselves because of that song. Not even one bit. But, I mean, we do. We do live in the stereo. We always have. Now, old enough to say. I've seen it for a few generations. But the important thing is to stand up. You have to stand up against oppression. And of course, my bias being in the media means I deal with words and language and thoughts and opinions. That is what I have done my entire adult life. So naturally, my bias is towards that being the freest possible with the understanding that there was some form of speech in there. Not free cannot say you will kill someone for the goods that you want. But I do believe that it's important to identify the enemy wherever they. Even if they're on your side.

Nick Gillespie [00:57:19] Yeah, I do want to recommend everybody. You can buy copies for a couple of bucks on Amazon or Abebooks. Tipper Gore is 1988 manifesto. Raising PG kids in an X-rated world is the type of thing every time you think you're in a moral panic or you're witnessing one, go back and read that book, which among other things, has a chapter on how Dungeons and Dragons are leading, you know, millions of kids into Satanism. And, you know, it's a game they can't win it. Is it presented then, too? I think anybody with a brain as insane. But, you know, we were in a moral panic, so people were taking this stuff seriously. Read it now and then just drop in. You know, all of the contemporary buzzwords. One of the things you brought up, Suicide Solution and Ozzy Osborne and there was in the eighties, this, you know, moral panic over backward masking, you know, the idea that somehow certain rock bands and, you know, this goes back to the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and whatnot, but, you know, it really hit a high note in the eighties that they were encoding, you know, secret messages. If you played them backward, those the records backwards and stuff like that, that would command people to worship Satan, to kill themselves. All of this. And, you know, it was taken seriously. I mean, people at the Senate, Al Gore went from being. You know, the husband of the woman behind the PMRC in 1992 when he became vice presidential candidate with Bill Clinton, he and Tipper presented as we were, lifelong Grateful Dead fans. We love the Grateful Dead. We've always loved rock and roll. And nobody was like, What the fuck are you talking about? Four years ago you were accusing Cyndi Lauper of glamorizing masturbation in the song She BOP, which was one of the Filthy 15, the key list of horrible, horrible songs that the PMRC wanted to draw attention to. Where in other types of moral panics. Now with that, because the point about moral panics is that there's an idea that some kind of force is taking over some segment of society, typically children, and getting them to do all sorts of things they wouldn't otherwise do. Back then it was, you know, it was rock music, then it was backward masking or, you know, heavy metal or satanic rock. Now we talk about algorithms and other magical terms that are always presented as scientific because the PMRC in the eighties was able, you know, they could marshal endless an endless parade of psychologists to say, no, this kid killed themselves because they listened to a fucking Ozzy Osbourne song, or they did this or they did that, or, you know, the West Memphis Three, a famous group of kids who were wrongly imprisoned for years for a crime they didn't commit because they had listened to, you know, certain kinds of dark metal. Always, you know, think about when you when it smells like a moral panic, it virtually always says and we just need to remember like it always moral panics, always present as cutting edge science psychology or serious thought. And they're inevitably revealed to be as idiotic as things like the PMRC and its fixation on Dungeons and Dragons Satanic imagery, the ability of rock music to, you know, drive kids insane and live lives their parents don't approve of.

Nico Perrino [01:00:40] And there's a you mentioned backward masking. And my colleague Bob Gordon Revere, who's actually he's in the office next to me, he was formerly a partner at Davis Wright Tremaine, but he started working here at Fire a week ago. He wrote a book called Mind to the Censor in the Eye of the Beholder. And in there he talks about the case of the King Briggs cover of Little Richard's Louie Louie, which became the subject of a year long federal investigation, I believe two and a half years, the federal government, several U.S. attorneys looked into the corrupt in, you know, lyrics of Louie Louie playing it back, trying to figure out what the songs I mean, anyone who listens to the song knows that kind of slur. The word Louie Louie, Right. Oh. And so it's kind of hard to hear what they said. But it's it's a it's a lovesick sailor's lament is pretty much all it is. And, you know, there were there were kids singing it on the schoolyard change, changing the lyrics themselves. But, you know, in some cases they interviewed the artist, literally read them their rights just to try and find some dirty word here that they never ended, ultimately finding that however many dollar dollars at the taxpayers expense. But I want to close here because I think some of our listeners might be listening to this and saying, you know, okay, you're talking about the end of transgression. You know, censored music isn't really happening and anymore or isn't happening at the scale it used to. And they're going to say, you know, what the hell, Rap rap music, right? Like, you know, we if you look back on the history of music, censorship, rap has been under constant attack. You know, you look at ways fuck the police. You can look at two life crew. Bob, you mentioned the nasty as they want to be. I mean, rap artists are still being prosecuted. Nick Eric Nielsen. Andrea Dennis wrote a great book called Rap on Trial. Eric's actually going to be at Fire's gala next week with Killer Mike, who wrote the intro to that book. And they found approximately 500 cases where violent and aggressive lyrics and rap music were used against defendants in court. Now, you have some states that are trying to reform the rules of evidence so that these lyrics can't be introduced or there's a higher bar to have them introduce. For example, the state of California passed such such a law. But, you know, rap artists are still on it. You know, and Bob, you mentioned kind of a potential racial component there. And I think that's probably apt. I mean, you're not going after Johnny Cash for, you know, shooting the man in Reno, right. It just to watch him die.

Nick Gillespie [01:03:07] Or Tom Jones celebrating, you know, spousal murder in Delilah, which, you know what, like an Ivor Novello award? Yeah.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:03:16] Yeah. No, you're so right. That one thing that we have to say is that some of the rap songs are deliberately provocative and shallow, and that's fine. And I like that. I love provocative it, and I like people pushing the edge of the envelope. And I'm sure the man in Reno is kind of like a cowboy song. And so we kind of we were all right with that, but. Some of the some of the stuff really is tough. I love the cop killer story because there's a great irony there.

Nico Perrino [01:03:46] I don't know.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:03:46] So it's not at the point that thank you for setting me up so beautifully at the time that Charlton Heston was railing against cop Killer and was on the board of directors at Warner Communications, which owned the record label Ice-T was on and body count. So it was part of that label. At the time that John Huston kicked up that fast and got Ice-T kicked off the label, got the label kicked out that became Interscope and got Vibe magazine, kicked out black people, and it was all good thing. That was the thinking at that time. John Huston was the spokesperson for the NRA and they were trying and lobbying desperately to get approval for a bullet that was known as the cop killer and was protested by every law enforcement agency in the country because it penetrated the Kevlar. So they didn't want this bullet around because it actually killed them. It was literally a cop killer, which he was advocating for while attacking Ice-T from some kind of hypocrisy that you can find if you just scrape out of the tops. Almost always.

Nick Gillespie [01:04:53] There's just a side out. A couple of years ago, I was playing early rap music for my kids, you know, stuff from the eighties really, and even the late seventies. And because I was like, well, you know, this is the music you love. You should listen to its early roots. And they were like, Dad, this is awful, too. You know, it's great to slow it down. But the and it would have been like if somebody in 1975 or 1980 had sat me down and, you know, played me Gene Vincent's stuff or whatever, you know, I would have been like, what the fuck is this? You know? But they loved Cop Killer by Ice-T and Body Count because it it really it holds up in in in an incredibly strong fascinating way. The other irony, of course, is that Ice-T ended up playing a cop for the past 25 years, Law and Order. But but on Law and Order SVU. But it's also you know, what's interesting here is to go back to this question of transgression, because, you know, he no longer talks about being a pimp or he doesn't dress his son as a pimp for Halloween anymore and kind of parade him around. You know, societies have these kinds of life cycles of transgression. Individuals do, all these forms do. And it's kind of interesting. Think about that. But I agree with Bob and I think with you on a profound level, Nicole, which is that, you know, for me, it's it's it's hugely liberating that individuals now are more in charge of what they can consume and produce. You know, technologically, the end of all sorts of gatekeeper cultures, both cultural as well as economic and whatnot, you can do more and more, but it does mean that censorship has been devolved to the individual. And among some of the people we would most expect to say no to censorship. And I'm thinking of creative artists like Beyonce and Lizzo and, you know, Taylor Swift and others. They have taken it upon themselves to, you know, kind of collapse the minute that they you know, they think that they're going to go into some kind of downward, you know, fan spiral. And that's ultimately not you know, I don't I don't begrudge them their particular decisions. But on a broader level, we need to really start thinking about, you know, what does it mean to protect not just my right to say what I want, but the people that I disagree with. This was not this was just taken for granted for for about 50 years. I would say from, you know, right after World War Two through some time in the tooth in the in the 21st century, in the aughts, it is now very much under attack or reconsideration. And I think it's up to people like us and certainly groups like Fire to really make the case that it is it's just it's a better world for everybody when all of us are talking and, you know, and we're arguing rather than censoring or just ignoring people.

Nico Perrino [01:07:50] Can add some context because we brought up Taylor Swift a few times and we didn't say exactly what she did. She had a song called Picture to Burn that was on her, I think, first album, 26. I know a lot about Taylor Swift. I'm kind of a big fan of Taylor Swift's early music because I grew up with her. She was born in December 1989. I was born in February 1990. And so when she you know, she talks, she uses that her age and a lot of her songs. And she had an album, I think, called 1989. And there's a famous lyric in that song, you know, So go and tell all your friends that I'm obsessive, being crazy. That's fine. I'll tell mine you're gay. By the way, You know, that was back in the early 2000 when calling people gay or fag was just something you did in everyday parlance. I mean, it was part of the culture there, and now it's become verboten. Right? And so she has rewritten her songs, at least those you can get on string and versions in the music videos to remove that. But I have a kind of a factual question for you, too.

Nick Gillespie [01:08:46] If I may. She also rerecorded a lot of those things in order to capture more revenue because her early contract I mean, this is always fascinating, particularly with music, because music is such a marriage of art and commerce. You know, sometimes sometimes the motives are not really about esthetics or anything principled. It's about how do you squeeze a little bit more money out of it? And she rerecorded her, you know, her early catalog and, you know, and I mean, in order.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:09:12] To have the rights to the catalog. Yeah, yeah, because.

Nico Perrino [01:09:14] She did she owned the sync rights, I think, but didn't own the master rights. So, you know, sync rights for those who don't know are the right to, like, rerecord a song and view it. Yeah, go ahead.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:09:24] Let me let me make a comment of what you just said about Taylor Swift. Look, I think. Although hate speech and offensive speech is protected as it should be. Let me be very clear it. It's not necessarily speech that a reasonable human being would use. I wouldn't use that language. I will fight for the right foot to exist. I don't want you to call somebody a fag. There was a case where a rapper explained back in the late in the early nineties called our photographer the time he was gay. He was tiny. And this guy was a big, outdated schizophrenic. 30, 40 years ago. But the rapper is a big, tough guy. And he called us little guys like five foot four and various that. So I called him up, but I didn't get him. I said, Tell him to come here to spin on 18th Street. Called me. We'll see how that goes. Because I'm the same size as your boy. Let's see if he calls me. If we didn't, he apologized. It wasn't because I'm not five foot four. Know that big butt, and I just wasn't going to put up with it. So I don't. I'm not for racist, misogynist, homophobic language in any respect. I want to be clear about that. And I'm not doing that. Virgil saying. However, why can't we admit some of these guys? We can't use that phrase. So until we get it right, they're usually pretty much open about what we found out from them. Why do we have to walk on eggshells? We're good that I can't use this word. Can't use retarded. I can't use anything that might possibly make somebody feel very aware of who they are ethnically, including Italians and Spanish or sexually. You know, I think it becomes so precious, so wide. I ask why we it. Well, I think.

Nico Perrino [01:11:25] I want to take on.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:11:26] Nico, but let me just say, it was like this is the point is that of cowardice is easy to go along with. The flow is harder to say, Wait a minute, folks. Come on, let's not be so precious. Let's have a language that those have language. Let's not let's not sacrifice language on the order of words.

Nico Perrino [01:11:46] Yeah. Words change meaning over time, right? You know, you used to call an African-American Negro, and now that is seen as offensive. You know, and you see people in these communities try and try and kind of reclaim these words. That was the case with the band The Slants, which was a which was an Asian-American rock group who I've had on the podcast before that case go all the way up to Supreme Court. I think they tried to trademark their name, The Slants. They turned.

Nick Gillespie [01:12:12] The tide. They won their case ultimately.

Nico Perrino [01:12:14] Nine zero. Yeah, nine zero. Because, you know, it's the you know, the Patent and Trademark Office said you can't this is a slur. You can't you know, you can't trademark this. And they said, well, you know, so the name of our band, right? And we're an Asian-American rock group and we're trying to reclaim this word that was once used as a pejorative. So words change. Steven Pinker talks a lot about this, but I, I, I do. I do want to. Yeah, I know. And I do want to ask kind of one closing question because I know I'm keeping you guys longer than I had promised. And I appreciate you. Yeah, I appreciate you guys staying on. We were talking about Ice-T and Body Count, right? And Ice-T did an ad for Fire, which very, very kind of him in which I was doing research for this podcast and looking at two live crew. And there were album Banned in the USA and somewhere the research I found this was the first album that got the explicit sticker which for those who are viewing, can see my shirt is kind of a play on the explicit sticker. But in our ad, Ice-T said that his album was the first one Stickered. And I'm.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:13:17] Like, Yeah, it was, What.

Nico Perrino [01:13:18] The fuck did did we get our ad wrong? And I remember trying to fact check that, but I don't. I mean, they yeah, I thought, I thought, I thought Ice-T album was but someone said band in the USA was, I don't know the two Live Crew album. They said I don't know.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:13:34] Oh I'm sorry. You're right. I think I thought it was Rose as well. But let me just say one thing about this sticker. So we fought hard against any form of censorship, which included the sticker signed by a record executive saying to me one day in the lunchroom, he said, Bob, don't fight it. We sell more records with it. We're going to put it on every record we're getting. We're getting milquetoast records, and we're saying to the band could use a few words on two songs. Well, that was the.

Nico Perrino [01:14:03] Compromise, right, with the PMRC, right.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:14:05] That the record industry realized they sold more records as soon as they realized that they were like putting on everything that Bush would have had when he was still active in those days.

Nick Gillespie [01:14:15] Well, his version of Tutti Frutti is filthy like versions of Tutti Frutti.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:14:19] He missed an opportunity, put a little sticker on. And so they were it was exponential. The higher the sales would be the sticker. So the record industry went like, Yeah, thanks. We love this. Happy to do it.

Nico Perrino [01:14:32] Well, gentlemen, I think we have to leave it there. We've been going for an hour and 15 minutes. I could go even longer and maybe we might need a part two.

Nick Gillespie [01:14:39] You're just bragging.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:14:42] Yeah, I find that offensive. Those of us. Those of us who don't go from.

Nico Perrino [01:14:48] My one disappointment, and I might have to get you guys back on to do this. I'd love to talk about, you know, you know, punk rock, which is not my genre. I have a colleague, Matt Harwood, who I know Nick knows whose way into punk rock. We can talk about Joe Strummer. We can talk about what's his name. You mentioned him. Bob Jello.

Nick Gillespie [01:15:07] Afraid of the Dead Kennedys. Yeah, yeah.

Nico Perrino [01:15:10] Yeah.

Nick Gillespie [01:15:11] Part of me.

Nico Perrino [01:15:12] Part of me is like. I mean, did folks go after them? Because part of me thinks it's like punk rock is like. So it's like so deliberately.

Nick Gillespie [01:15:20] The Dead Kennedys in particular for obscenity. I mean.

Nico Perrino [01:15:25] They were some of the band from Britain. Were they one of those artists that were because I know there are some there's been some artists over time, like Lenny Bruce, I think couldn't perform in Britain, for example, but I don't know if.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:15:36] They were all in America. They arrested him almost every day.

Nick Gillespie [01:15:39] You know, just as a teaser. If you want to have a punk rock episode. I mean, one of the ways that I've come to think about punk. Which was, you know, is more than music. It's a it's a sensibility, a temperament. It's not even an esthetic in any specific way. It's just it's kind of an attitude. But it it can't last. But it functioned in the, uh, in the seventies and into the eighties as a kind of cultural antibiotic. I think they cleaned out a lot of bad infection in the way that culture was going. We definitely need something like that. I think that, you know, just a kind of, you know, something that lasts for two or three years in its peak form and just kind of resets the tables because.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:16:23] What do we do to get this this Yeah. This version of.

Nico Perrino [01:16:26] Yeah, we might have to do a version. Yeah. I'll circle back with you guys on email and we can we can do a version too. We can focus on punk rock because I know I'm it's not my genre. I don't love it, you know? Yeah.

Nick Gillespie [01:16:39] And, well, the more you learn about it not to be, you know, because all pop music, you know, and rock and pop hip hop, it all builds, you know, it's it's a synthesis, antithesis, you know, thesis again and again. And the more you learn about it, Nico, the more you'll find elements of it in the music you love because it incorporates everything that came before. It adds something and then gets incorporated into what comes next. And the, you know, the impulse behind metal in all of its iterations and punk are very similar because it is like, I need something, I need a new language to express who I am and what I'm feeling in this particular moment in time.

Nico Perrino [01:17:20] No, I understand that because, you know, I grew up Metallica was kind of my first love and is from Metallica. That was the gateway drug to the all these other. Yeah, I, like many people, had a friend who had an older brother who you kind of look up to and had listened to a certain kind of music. He happened to listen to Swedish death metal, and the first time I heard it, I was like, You guys are just screaming, This is just noise, right? This is just noise. But after you become, you know, accustomed to it, you learn about the background. I loved it because I was like, they're so intricate on the guitar fretboard. And it soon became like I couldn't listen to Nirvana because it was just so boring on the front word. It was so easy to play and the screaming and the dynamism and was Black band called Black Dahlia murder that has this like low guttural scream matched with this high pitched frame. It's like very few people can do that. This singer for our band could. Fortunately, we covered one of their songs. What was the name of that song? But yeah, I can understand because of my progression in metal, how you can grow accustomed to a kind of music that just on first blush you don't appreciate and because they don't appreciate it, but they don't appreciate, I appreciate what it's done to the culture, but because I don't listen to it, I also am not familiar with the history. So we'll have to do a part two.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:18:32] All right.

Nico Perrino [01:18:33] Don't be afraid. And the history of punk rock. So and learn about all your time there. Bob at CBGB's, which apparently didn't pay the rent. Right. And that's why it went out of business.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:18:46] Yeah, right, Right. Yeah.

Nico Perrino [01:18:48] Which is a very punk rock thing to do to not pay your rent. Right.

Nick Gillespie [01:18:51] Well, the rent, the rent guard jacked, but like, you know, it's like Brigadoon. I mean, you know, these are these are moments. These are floating islands that exist and then disappear, as they should.

Nico Perrino [01:19:03] So ought to become too commercialized. It would have sold out after time, probably.

Nick Gillespie [01:19:07] But selling out is not a bad thing. I mean, this is this the, you know, the lesson of the Sex Pistols?

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:19:13] Yeah.

Nick Gillespie [01:19:14] Yeah, yeah, that's.

Bob Guccione Jr. [01:19:17] True.

Nico Perrino [01:19:17] Yeah. This is a do version to our.

Nick Gillespie [01:19:19] I think it's two.

Nico Perrino [01:19:20] Guys. Bob and Nick. Thanks for being on the show. Yeah. And Bob, if you could just hang out, I'm going to read an outro really quick here. That was Bob Guccione Jr, the founder of Spin magazine, and Nick Gillespie, editor at large of Reason magazine. This, of course, is So to Speak podcast, which is edited by my colleagues Alan Ross and Aaron Reece. If you want to learn more about the podcast, you can follow us on all the social media channels, including YouTube, where we post videos of these conversations. And if you do want to get in touch with me, you have any comments about this podcast or have questions for part two, which it sounds like my generous guests have already agreed to do it sometime in the future. You can email us at, so to speak, at the Fire Dawg. And until next time, I thank you all again for listening.