Today the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression presents a new video series — “Fire with FIRE” — featuring some of the biggest and up-and-coming names in heavy metal and punk rock.
Throughout the summer, FIRE will drop a new conversation every other week on our YouTube channel with the likes of:
Artists can be the canaries in the coalmine. Too often, they are the first to be censored, or worse — much, much worse.
In Nazi Germany, the regime destroyed and banned certain art, particularly Jewish art, and labeled it “degenerate.” Jewish artists like Charlotte Salomon — who some argue created the first graphic novel — were sent to death camps and murdered by Adolf Hitler’s thugs.
The Soviets were no better. Artists who rebelled against the confines of the state-approved artform of “Socialist Realism” were blacklisted, sent to the gulag, or executed. (After the Soviet Union’s fall, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin revived the old regime’s repression of artists, most famously targeting the punk rock and performance art collective Pussy Riot. Most members now live in exile after criticizing Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.)
In 1973, the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet tortured and murdered Chilean artist and folk singer Víctor Jara for his music and political activism. His murderers pumped him full of bullets and then dumped his body on a public road. Message sent.
After the Islamic Revolution engulfed Iran, the ultra-religious government banned Western heavy metal and punk music. The Iranian regime has persecuted, arrested, and thrown in prison musicians daring to play such music. In 2015, for example, the members of the Iranian death metal band Confess were sentenced to years in prison and 74 lashes for blasphemy, disturbing public opinion, and anti-government propaganda. They fortunately escaped to Norway.
America isn’t immune to such crackdowns on creative expression either.
During the McCarthy era of the late 1940s into the 1950s, artists like director, actor, and writer Orson Welles; screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo of “Spartacus” and “Johnny Got His Gun” fame; folk singer Pete Seeger; and many others were blacklisted because of their left-wing politics and Communist ties, real or imagined.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI surveilled artists associated with the Civil Rights and antiwar movements. The bureau maintained files on John Lennon, The Monkees, and the proto-punk band MC5. Even the soul and gospel singer Aretha Franklin had a 270-page FBI file, with G-men monitoring her because of her connections to the Civil Rights movement and “Black extremists.”
During the 1980s, the Parents Music Resource Center — co-founded by future Vice President Al Gore’s wife Tipper — created a moral panic around heavy metal, punk, and pop artists like Twisted Sister, the Dead Kennedys, and Prince. The PMRC’s crusade led not only to “Parental Advisory” stickers on albums but also to what is arguably Glenn Danzig’s best composition ever, “Mother.”
Enter the “Fire with FIRE” interview series.
Every two weeks, FIRE will release conversations with six of the biggest metal and punk artists in music right now about their inspirations, their influences, and why free expression not only makes life worth living, but is also essential to a free society.
First up: Spencer Charnas of Ice Nine Kills. What a bloody mess this interview is. Our host Ryan J Downey slices into Spencer’s musical inspirations, why horror movies infest his music and art, and how Disney censored Ice Nine Kills — with Spencer getting the last howling laugh.
Like it. Share it. Tell us what you think in the YouTube comments. And let us know who you’d love us to interview in the future!
