Music News

Sri Lanka Ministry of Culture and the Arts says it plans to bring a new bill soon to censor Teledramas and songs on TV deemed unsuitable for all audience.

With the implementation of the proposed act, the Teledrama producers will have to obtain the approval for the production from the Public Performances Control Board before telecasting it through TV channels.

The song writers will have to submit their lyrics to the Public Performances Control Board and the songs will be inspected by the board even after music is composed, the Ministry says.

Currently the Public Performance Control Board pre-censor only movies and stage drama.

A private member's bill, introduced by Liberal Democrat Don Foster, will lift some of the state control and restrictions imposed on gigs by the 2003 Licensing Act.

The changes will mean that a licence will no longer be required for unamplified live music taking place between 08:00 and 23:00, and for amplified live music taking place between the same times before audiences of no more than 200.

The bill passed unopposed and will have to go back to the House Of Lords on the 10th of February before becoming law.

The MP from Bath was steering the bill through the House Of Commons on behalf of his Lib Dem colleague, Lord Clement Jones. The success is a relatively rare example of a House of Lords private member's bill making it into law.

Foster explained:

It was said the Licensing Act 2003 was going to lead to an explosion of live music but, in the event, in small venues it was drastically cut.

We saw village halls, school halls, pubs and clubs reducing the the amount of live music, not increasing it.

Hopefully the bill, when it comes into law, will reverse that.

Separate to the private member's bill, the government is conducting its own review of the Licensing Act.

There is always someone campaigning against the allegedly evil lyrics on hip-hop records. Back in the late 1980s, it was Tipper Gore, wife of Al, and her posse of perfectly manicured, perfectly white Washington wives who spent sleepless nights panicking that hip-hop artists' allusions to sex and violence would warp young people's minds. (This was before the Gores realised that global warming was a bigger threat to mankind than gangsta rap.) Today, the anti-hip-hop baton has been passed from the prim and well-off arm-candy of politicians to feminists and black activists, who fancy that their campaign to excise words like bitch and ho from hip-hop is radical and edgy, when in fact it is only a spin-off of the squeamish censoriousness of Tipper and her girlfriends.

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