If music were not a powerful resource in social and political struggles it would not be so widely censored, controlled, and surrounded with restrictions. All around the world music creates loyalties and galvanizes opposition so well that music itself sometimes becomes an object of struggle, rather than an expression of broader issues. Americans with long memories will recall the politically motivated artist blacklisting in the 1950s, the moral furor over the Rolling Stones in the 1960s, and many other so-called "crises" that prefigured today's uneasiness about rap and heavy metal.
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