Censorship and the Redression of Societal Imbalances

Art, culture, and policy: three factors that govern our lives day in, day out. Although the relationship between them may not always be apparent, they both reflect and progress one another. If one were to change, the others would have to adapt. I’m Nick Thomsen, owner of Atlantic Records, long time social commentator, and avid fan of music. As can be inferred from the works of Irish poet Seamus Heaney, art has the power to redress social imbalances. However, politically based censorship is a roadblock faced by any artist that wishes to do so. Whether it be race, religion, ideology, financial class, gender, age, and just about any other demographic or otherwise exclusive label, if the barrier of unnecessary censorship is broken there is no limit to what art can achieve.
Censorship has been around ever since organisms were able to communicate, stemming from the instinct of living creatures to avoid what is seemingly dangerous, unusual, or offensive in any manner. Modern censorship is a little more refined than that, with a range of categories, and laws that vary from region to region. We’ve built cultures around the value of self-censorship and the needless censorship of everything around us for our comfort. The category that is most detrimental to the redression of social imbalances is political censorship, in which a governing body prevents the free expression of information or ideas that may not support their image, objectives, or power. This often means the prohibition of public broadcast, being stocked in retailers, and in extreme cases, the very possession of the art piece. While this seems like something that would only exist in primitive dictatorships, it is very much present in modern democratic nations such as the U.S., England, and Australia. Two artistic movements that have been able to work around political censorship are punk in 1970s England, and hardcore hip-hop in the U.S. in the late 80s and early 90s.
The goal of the artists in both of these