The US artists too erotic for the Soviet Union
No one gets into the entertainment industry to upset people. There will always be artists that aren’t for everyone, but there’s usually a hardcore fanbase that actually likes what they’re doing and will gladly listen to whatever kind of music, movie or any other creative medium they are working in. But since rock and roll started off as the kind of genre that was meant to be against the grain, no one should have been surprised when the pop artists that followed started playing fast and loose with the rules.
Then again, the pop sphere really needed a kick in the ass when the first flavours of rock and roll began. Had people like Little Richard or even Big Mama Thornton not been able to electrify audiences during their time, there’s a good chance that we would have had to stomach many more years of people like Bing Crosby before someone else decided to show everyone they were tired of easy listening. But there was more to pop music than simply being a bit edgy.
Every generation is bound to have those few artists who push the envelope, but when it comes to everything from recreational drug use to the gall to adopt the same dance moves Elvis Presley was doing during his lifetime, most of the mainstream media were keeping their distance. But if there’s one thing that causes monocles to pop around the world and get everyone uncomfortable, it’s when people start talking about sex.
It’s nothing new, though. Frank Sinatra was known for sliding a little innuendo into his songs while still sounding like the embodiment of good taste, but when things started to get more graphic, that’s when people began to get a bit agitated. And if you thought it was bad on American shores when Presley couldn’t be shown from the waist down when performing, it was about ten times worse when that music found its way to the Soviet Union.
While many American artists were brought to the Soviet Union as safe picks, a handful of artists were never going to be welcome on Russian soil if they sang their songs. Billy Joel may have been the best thing they could ask for, but right as 1985 rolled around, some of the biggest figures in R&B were getting ridiculed for being too graphic whenever they played.
It makes sense for there to be some restrictions for politicians who didn’t know any better, but the idea of banning R&B group the Originals as well as Tina Turner feels completely off the mark. Sure, both of them had songs that were a little bit racy for the time, but if the first thing that you’re thinking of when listening to a song like ‘River Deep Mountain High’ is sex, that says a lot more about you than it does about the actual music.
In fact, you can’t help but see the bans on Turner and The Originals and not see some obvious parallels to what the US was doing around this time. ‘The Filthy Fifteen’ had recently been announced by the PMRC, and despite everyone down in Washington, DC, clamouring to have censors put on albums, it only made the music more appealing for people. And it proved to do the same thing in the Soviet Union, with bands like AC/DC and Metallica eventually playing there in the early 1990s.
It’s noble for some politicians to be wary of what foreign artists are going to “indoctrinate” their kids with, but there was probably no other space in history where this kind of buffoonery could be tolerated than in the mid-1980s. But, really, the parameters they were putting over everything seemed tame by comparison. This was 1985, so in this bizarro-world scenario, Tina Turner is considered too racy for the Soviet Union, but Prince could happily play there with no questions asked?
