Music Censorship in the 1970s

Abstract

Starting with a body of documents consisting of censored song lyrics, letters exchanged between government censorship organs and censorship legislation, the aim of this research is to examine how the tensions and contradictions intrinsic to censorship activity of the 1970s and to the military dictatorship are present in the discourse of the censors and, at the same time, to analyze how, in these documents, the relation between the censorship and the culturally influential social groups of the period and the National Security Doctrine of the authoritarian state is displayed. We start from the hypothesis that the censorship, in depriving society of the natural flow of information, was intended to lead to a society that shared the traditional Christian moral values, supposedly protected by the authoritarian State. This basic set of moral codes, that formed part of the imaginary ideas of the censor and was made official by the regime, was no longer sustained by the ideas current in Brazilian society in the 1970s, more and more influenced by the new values emerging with the behaviour revolution. Thus, an understanding of the loss of this cultural ballast of censorship helps us to realize how the tensions developed between the utopian ideas claimed by the regime in power, that would guarantee its legitimacy, and the collective ideas of the opposition groups.