If music be the food of controversy…

I have to admit I didn’t like the Tears for Fears single ‘Shout’ when it was first released in 1984. But then, I didn’t like a lot of what was shown on MTV back in those days… even if I actually watched those videos on either Deejay Television (hosted by Jovanotti) or Red Ronnie. 

In any case, it didn’t really matter. I was going through an acute heavy metal phase at the time, which (with hindsight) also meant that I had condemned myself to living in a permanent musical past. Oh, sure, there may have been excellent metal bands in the 1980s… but my exposure to ‘new music’ was limited only to what was thrown in my direction from TV and radio; and very little of either fell into the category of what I wanted to hear.

Radio, as I recall, was mostly a combination of country & western, and ‘Hotel California’ played around 400 times a day. In fact, I think it still is. But by and large, it was TV that provided the soundtrack to that decade; and looking back, it seemed to be an endlessly repeated loop of Madonna’s ‘Like A Virgin’, interspersed here and there with mostly New Romantics (and even then, mostly Duran Duran and Nik Kershaw) and the occasional Phil Collins… or, if you were particularly unlucky, Bryan Adams.

I still remember wishing that once – just once – Madonna would actually crack her head on the Bridge of Sighs as her gondola steered beneath… ideally, as she sang the line ‘touched for the very first time’. That’s how much the song annoyed me back then; and the same general sentiment was by and large extended to the rest of the official 1980s soundtrack, too.

But music is a funny thing. On one level, it remains unchanged forever. Record a song, play it back, and what emerges represents the exact same auditory experience, unchanged in any detail, every single time. Yet the impression it leaves might well be different. 

OK, I don’t think I’ll ever revise my original opinion of ‘Like A Virgin’ – other than that the video which annoyed me so much seems infinitely more iconic today – but in retrospect I can now easily concede that some of Madonna’s other stuff (though I may have hated it at the time) was actually quite ingenious. 

Same goes for ‘Shout’ by Tears for Fears. My initial reaction was that it was just a drone, nothing more: a steady, incremental beat heading towards a woefully predictable climax… all too wooden for my liking. But now that I hear it again – and I mean the original 1984 song, not the cover made for the ‘SHout’ campaign against spring hunting – the effect is different. 

It’s still a drone, of course. But there is more power to that beat than I had originally appreciated. Even some of the things that had irritated me the most about it – the overweening sincerity of the lyrics, for instance – seem to strike a slightly different chord today. Perhaps, after all, it is not such an irritating thing to be both urgent and sincere… even if you are just repeating the same old mantra over and over again.

That, I stress, is before you lift it out of its original context and place it as a campaign song for the referendum. Though I’d never really thought about it that way, the original was clearly a protest song in its own right. Co-author Roland Orbazal said as much: “It came out in 1984 when a lot of people were still worried about the aftermath of the Cold War and it was basically an encouragement to protest…”

‘Against what’, however, is by no means clear from the lyrics. It could be war – ‘in violent times you shouldn’t have to sell your soul’ – but it could equally be intended to apply to any conceivable issue. It doesn’t really matter which.

And this, I find, is what made the choice of ‘Shout’ so interesting as a campaign song for the spring hunting referendum. Leaving aside how uncannily the new lyrics actually work with the original motif... the bizarre thing is that suddenly, it does matter more. Now that the issue has actually been specified, the song seems to matter enough to be given attention by the state regulator.

Certainly it was not music to the ears of the Broadcasting Authority, which has just issued instructions to local radio stations to give ‘equal airtime’ to the hunting lobby each time the song (campaign version) is played. 

In a sense, I suppose it is a fitting tribute to the enormous power of music. There is, let’s face it, nothing in the song’s revised lyrics that hasn’t already been an integral part of the ‘No’ campaign for weeks. Yet put it to music, and suddenly the hills are alive with the sound of alarm bells ringing at the Broadcasting Authority… 

And this is the second thing that strikes a curious note in this whole affair. It had to take a song, of all things, to remind the Broadcasting Authority that it has Constitutional obligations to fulfil.

This is how the BA justified its decision: “Although we allow for freedom of expression, we also have a duty to keep an unbiased view in political and somewhat controversial matters.” The actual legal obligation, laid down in the Broadcasting Act (Chapter 350), is to ensure “that due impartiality is preserved in respect of matters of political or industrial controversy or relating to current public policy.”

Ah yes, of course. Terribly important that “unbiased views in political and somewhat controversial matters” are maintained at all times on TV, radio and other broadcasting media. We can’t have a free-for-all, you know. Otherwise, where will it all end? We might find ourselves in a situation whereby entire radio and TV stations exist only to project one side of an argument at the expense of the other… to endlessly transmit and glorify only the utterly biased view of its own political operators, while suppressing or distorting the equally biased views of its political opponents…

And we can’t exactly have that, now can we? Oh… wait… 

Boom! There, in a flash, some 80% of Malta’s entire broadcasting media landscape gets suddenly axed by a single BA decision… or would get suddenly axed, if that decision were ever to be taken equally and fairly across the board.

This raises the smallest of questions. Why does the BA only ever remember its Constitutional duty on the occasion of some random, once-in-a-lifetime event… and yet spend decades upon decades studiously avoiding the same duty when violations of the impartiality law are committed on a daily basis, all the time?

Sadly, there is an answer to this question. It goes back to a single decision taken in years gone by a former BA chairman to consciously treat politically-owned stations using a different yardstick. The argument at the time was that the two diametrically opposed messages somehow ‘cancelled each other out’. In other words, as long as both stations remain committed to a policy of utterly biased and unfair reportage… there’s no real harm done.

Wonderful logic there, I know. Cost-effective, too. You get two utterly unreliable channels for the price of one. In practice, however, what this also means is that the BA only ever snaps into action when dealing with media that are NOT politically owned… thus effectively institutionalising discrimination.

Yet when you look at the law the BA itself quotes above… there is nothing about any ‘exemption’ for political parties whatsoever. The Constitutional definitions are quite clear: the BA exists to regulate the broadcasting playing-field as a whole, regardless of the individual players. That includes NET and One TV and corresponding radio stations.

In fact, this policy has no status at law of any kind. It is just the widely criticised opinion of one of its own board’s former chairmen, and as such can be overturned at any moment simply by another decision taken by a different board. It actually represents a dereliction of the duty to uphold a law that still, theoretically, compels the Broadcasting Authority to intervene in all cases... not just the ones it picks and chooses itself. 

This same policy does, however, work out considerably to the advantage of the two parties. Not only do they get to enjoy privileged access to the airwaves – unfettered, unregulated and uncontrolled by the media watchdog – but they also retain a degree of control even over stations owned by others.

But of course if anyone else out there so much as dreams of partaking in this blissful state of legal immunity… crash, bang, tinkle! The entire machinery of the State regulator suddenly gets into gear, and acts swiftly to iron out the imbalance.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing in all this is that the Broadcasting Authority would itself quote the same article of law it so wilfully ignores 364 days a year… on the one day it suddenly decides to do its job. Why only now? Could it be, perhaps, that a referendum campaign which has all along been supposed to be ‘apolitical’, is now posing problems to the two parties that the BA exists to serve? Both those parties are tacitly urging a Yes vote… yet here we have a bunch of Maltese artists with the temerity to sing ‘No’. Houston, we have a problem. What to do, what to do…

In any case: for better or worse, that’s the BA’s decision in a nutshell. All that remains to be seen is how it will impact the people most adversely affected… i.e, those poor radio DJs, whose plight no one ever pauses to consider. 

Consider the dilemma they must be facing. They now have to allocate an additional, oh, four minutes to the ‘Yes’ campaign each time they play this one song... which also means messing up all those DJs’ laboriously pre-prepared playlists, some of which might have been entire minutes in the making. And all because the BA just wakes up one day and remembers it has actually a job to do. How unfair is that?

And besides: what are those four minutes to be filled with, exactly? At the time of writing this, the ‘Yes’ campaign has yet to launch a song of its own. So what are DJs expected to play? Four minutes of gunfire? The entire soundtrack of Reservoir Dogs?

Wait, I’ve got it! ‘Happiness Is a Warm Gun’ by The Beatles. Think about it: the ‘bang bang, shoot, shoot’ backing vocals would work particularly well… especially if sung by bikini-clad models in cowboy hats, with repeater rifles slung over their arms.

Besides: if we are to be permanently deprived of political impartiality on the radio because of the BA’s absurd (and legally unsound) policies… at least, we’d be guaranteed some good music instead. So there: the balance of the airwaves has been restored…