Censorship Is Much More Offensive It’s Censoring Corporations Are Holding Pop Culture Hostage.

It’s lucky Wal-Mart wasn’t around in 1957. Frank Sinatra’s “All the Way” wouldn’t have gone anywhere.

The song - which has sexual overtones - raised eyebrows back in its day, but parents were the ones who decided whether their children would listen to it.

Nowadays, Wal-Mart would just ban the song or force Frank to change it to “Part of the Way” or “All the Way … After We’re Legally Wed.”

Wal-Mart is the largest seller of pop music in the country, and it is using its muscle to dictate what artists can say and what listeners can hear. Using its own nebulous criteria, it refuses to stock albums with lyrics or cover art it finds objectionable. That could be anything from a marijuana leaf to drawings of Jesus and the devil.

So, who suffers? Consumers, obviously, but society as well.

By sanitizing entertainment - whether it’s music through Wal-Mart or videotapes through Blockbuster - corporate culture is holding popular culture hostage. It is dictating what is and isn’t acceptable, regardless of the message an artist is trying to get across.

Wal-Mart would like people to think it is acting out of an altruistic sense of duty to “protect” its shoppers from sex, obscenity and violence, but in September, it banned Grammy winner Sheryl Crow’s new album because lyrics in a song mention Wal-Mart as a place where kids buy guns.

That’s censorship at its root, and Crow stands to lose 400,000 album sales because of the ban. Other artists and record companies will be chilled by the suppression, so what songs will we not hear? What statement will go unsaid?

Common sense says any business should have the right to sell what it wants, but when a mega-conglomerate such as Wal-Mart is in control, the issue moves beyond local decision-making. Wal-Mart is not letting the market decide what’s acceptable. Instead, a faceless corporation is doing the deciding for us. Remember, this is the same company that pulled from its shelves T-shirts featuring a cartoon character who proclaimed, “Someday a woman will be president.” The chain found the shirt offensive.

Consumers should find Wal-Mart offensive - and should show their distaste by doing their shopping at independent music stores where the music is what its makers intend it to be. It might cost a little more, but don’t we always pay a price for freedom?

, DataTimes MEMO: See opposing view under the headline: Retailer being good corporate citizen

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