Dee Snider knows a thing or two about censorship, namely when he testified before the Senate against the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) alongside John Denver and Frank Zappa. The PMRC sought to introduce a system of warning labels for albums that contained "offensive material", though it ultimately never happened.
Now in an interview with WGN 720, Snider compares cancel culture to what he was battling against in 1985. He also touches on the writing process for his new album Leave A Scar, adding that writing lyrics became difficult when keeping modern culture in mind.
“It’s censorship. And censorship has changed quite a bit. I mean, you go to when I was in Washington testifying. By the way, it was a bipartisan effort — it was the Democrats and Republicans who were joined together in putting a leash on rock and roll. But it was definitely a conservative attitude — it was a more conservative attitude, wanting to censor music. Now censorship still exists, but it’s gone from the right more to the left. We’re in this P.C. world where we have to be careful about what we say and who we offend, and it’s a very odd thing.”
“I’ve been working on lyrics for my new album, Leave A Scar, which comes out in July, and I found myself questioning the metaphors I was using — metaphors. I mean, where is art without metaphor? Where is lyrics and writing without metaphor? Yet I was going, ‘Can I say this? Can I say this?’ I have a song called ‘In For The Kill’, and it has all these metaphorical [lines], ‘Fire at will, I’m in for the kill.’ And I was talking about going for it — just going for it — yet here I was censoring myself lyrically because of the current state of things.
“What is censorship? What’s not censorship? Boy, I would say, as long as you’re not screaming ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater, you’re cool.”
[via MetalSucks]
