Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
UnJustin
Posted on February 8, 2004 in Celebrity Censorship Scoundrels
UPDATE: The United States is preventing 77 year old Ibrahim Ferrer from attending the Grammy Award because he is a Cuban and a possible terrorist. Can we ditch Miami? Thanks to Bird on the Moon.
Janet Jackson confirmed that she will not be attending the Grammys. Her manager Steven Huvane told press release mill Teen Music “I can confirm she is not attending. I won’t give any more details.” The rest of us know the whole story and Tom O’Neil said it well: “Janet Jackson [is being punished] for performing that same role on someone else’s stage.”
I thought it was a cheap stunt and I still think it was a cheap stunt. Last Sunday I expressed my feeling that CBS had been involved in the deal. Now I am willing to exculpate them. I wish, however, that my earlier theory had been the correct one:
CBS is instituting a five-minute delay to allow enough time to edit out any potentially offensive moments during the show at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
I suspect that “offensive” extends to statements against the Bush Administration. But one thing it does not include is Justin Timberlake, Jackson’s co-star who was singing “I am going to have you naked by the end of this song” when his hand undid Jackson’s costume and showed her gold-starred mammae to the world. Justin Timberlake who took part in this display of mock violence against women and who not so long ago let his lips drool with the details of his relationship with Britney Spears. Justin of the big mouth, whose fellow NSync band member J.C. Chasez now whines:
“You’re terrified that if I do this song, are they going to play it on the radio?…I think music and entertainment are in a great place right now. One bad apple is spoiling the bunch.”
(Will someone please tell J.C. that there are no pictures on radio?)
My point is this: here in Puritan America, it is pornography to show a human breast. The woman should be punished, the reasoning follows, the man excused because “she led him into it”. The same man can betray confidences of his sexual relations with a woman and still rise higher and higher.
I don’t like Justin Timberlake or CBS one bit. I won’t call for his being kicked out of the Grammys, but I hope fans will boycott his CDs. When he comes on tonight, my advice is just change the channels for the duration of his appearance. No five minute pre-empt by CBS can keep you from doing that.
Heck, don’t even watch the Grammy’s. CBS is a bigger scoundrel than Justin. Send the message to their advertisers that you aren’t seeing their commercials.
Just a facetious thought: Recently MoveOn made a protest of the Super Bowl by asking viewers to switch over to CNN during the half time festivities. Now I am making a similar request. If this gets popular, will broadcasters seek to ban channel surfing?
