Editor-in-chief: David Suissa
January 31, 2022
A Tennessee school board voted unanimously to ban “Maus,” the 1992 graphic novel by Art Spiegelman about his father’s experience in the Holocaust.
To ban “Maus” for being an uncomfortable read is, in fact, to be against teaching the Holocaust, regardless of the school board member’s protests to the contrary.
The official reason for the ban was its nudity and foul language. But the story is making waves not because due to the prudishness of one conservative school district, but because there is a rising tide of racist, right-wing censorship in American schools.
Book challenges aren’t just coming from the right: “Of Mice and Men” and “To Kill a Mockingbird,” for example, have been challenged over the years for how they address race, and both were among the library association’s 10 most-challenged books in 2020.
Joni Mitchell has joined Neil Young, who has taken his music off of Spotify in protest of their hosting the controversial Joe Rogan podcast, leading to a plummet in spotify stock prices.
I suspect that Neil Young is about to prove that a swathe of established artists – namely prestige catalog artists – really don’t need Spotify to survive anymore.
Regardless of Young’s distaste for Rogan, removing him from Spotify won’t silence him. It could, in fact, make him more prolific.
Whether it’s healthy for any one company to have quite so much sway is a very moot point, but given the circumstances, it’s an extremely brave and principled artist who risks incurring Spotify’s wrath in 2022 without the kind of financial safety net that Neil Young has.