Band's banishment, Manson's gyrations illustrate free-speech line

By Phillip Taylor
Special to freedomforum.org

09.05.01

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Rock star Marilyn Manson performs at 2001 Reading music festival in Great Britain on Aug. 26.

The end of the summer concert season saw police officers in Massachusetts pulling the plug on a musical act deemed too vulgar for festival attendees and Marilyn Manson facing assault charges for allegedly gyrating on an unwilling security guard in Michigan.

And there's the rub, so to speak, when it comes to drawing any lines between freedom of expression and inappropriate conduct, some First Amendment advocates say. Normally, they would decry attempts to stifle Manson, but they aren't coming to his defense now.

David Greene of the First Amendment Project in Oakland, Calif., explained that Manson would have stayed within the bounds of constitutionally protected expression if he had kept his sexual antics on stage. But when he wrapped his legs around the guard, as officials claim, he crossed a tenuous line.

"If it had happened to me, I would hope someone would charge him with assault," Greene said. "As much as I would like to stick up for Marilyn Manson, he can't go around doing that."

But the ban of Prognosis Negative from a festival in Fall River, Mass., for reportedly using vulgar language troubles Greene and others, who say police and civic leaders overreacted from a fear of how young people relate to music.

"At least in our recent history, music has been the medium where young people choose to express rebellion or at least explore culture outside their parents or outside their community," Greene said.

Officials, Greene added, often raise the specter of the "corruptive influence on youth" to stifle musical expression.

But officials in Fall River and Oakland County, Mich., all say the various musical acts crossed the line between protected expression and offensive conduct.

In the Marilyn Manson incident, prosecutors claim the musician approached an unwilling security guard from behind while masturbating during a July 30 concert in the Detroit suburb. They said Manson spit on the guard, wrapped his legs around the guard's head and gyrated against him.

"It was definitely offensive conduct," Prosecutor David Gorcyca said in a statement. "It's one thing to shock the audience by some kind of behavior, it's another to involve an unwilling participant who was there to protect him."

Manson faces a fourth-degree criminal sexual charge, a felony that carries up to two years in prison. Prosecutors also charged the musician with a misdemeanor count of assault and battery.

In Fall River, Mass., Police Chief John Souza said one of his officers halted the performance of Prognosis Negative at the Fall River Celebrates America Festival on Aug. 11 because parents complained that the band sang a profanity-laced song. Souza said the group kicked into a song about cop killers after the officer told the band to stop cursing.

But Nina Crowley of the Massachusetts Music Industry Coalition noted in a recent e-mail news alert that details of the incident are in debate. One member of Prognosis Negative said the band played for their allotted time and left the stage without playing any songs about cops or laced with profanity.

Festival director Donna Futoransky told the Fall River Herald News that the band violated a contract that said the group couldn't use vulgar language or other inappropriate song content.

"They will never be back here again, and I will get the names of the people that played in this group," Futoransky said. "These musicians will not play in FRCA again. It doesn't matter what band they're in."

Attempts to reach local officials for further comment were not successful.

Greene of the First Amendment Project said that while the band might have violated a contract with festival organizers, such contracts are problematic.

"They are basically driven by the same absolutely abject fear of the influence of music over youth," Greene said. "It's this idea that young people as consumers of media are marionettes. They take everything literally and they don't have the intellectual ability to decipher messages.

"They have these clauses in contracts with the assumption there's this nasty, disgusting music out there," he said. "And that's a problem. We don't treat other arts and media in the same way."

Phillip Taylor, a writer based in Newport News, Va., is a free-lance correspondent for freedomforum.org.

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