“Canada attempts to place US rappers in the same category as terrorists – literally,” says American rapper Jerome Almon, CEO of Murdercap Records. “If Canada is not stopped, every musician seeking to enter a country other than their own will face this problem,” he warns. By Freemuse “Everything stops when …

50 Cent is set to be banned from Canada – because he attracts too many guns, reports Headline News staff reporter Christina Ficara on November 30, 2005. The “Get Rich Or Die Tryin” rapper has been shot nine times and the country’s Junior Foreign Minister Dan McTeague is worried his music …

A music video for the song ‘Baby Girl’ has not been added in rotation on Canada’s national music station At issue are t-shirts worn in the hip-hop video that state, “Stop Snitchin'” overtop a red shape resembling a stop sign. Canada’s national music station Much Music is said to refuse …

Story from Weekly Update on the Americas / LACYORK, York University , Canada Haitian police detained three members of the popular band RAM late on the night of Nov. 4 as they were on stage performing a song called “Justice!” at the Oloffson Hotel in Port-au-Prince, witnesses say. District police …

Conference on 1+2 October 2004, Montreal, Canada This October, the Rights & Democracy Network is sponsoring the second annual Mixing Pop & Politics conference, which takes place alongside this year’s Pop Montreal music festival. Founded last year in response to the glaring lack of musical protest against the U.S. invasion of Iraq, …

1964. USA. Johnny Cash Johnny Cash was concerned with the plight of Native Americans, and produced a series of records about their condition. The song ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes’ became a top ten country hit. It tells the story of Ira Hayes – a Pima Indian who was one of …

1985. USA. The most prominent group in the history of music censorship in the US, the Parents Music Resource Group, PMRG, is formed in Washington DC by Tipper Gore, wife of then-senator Al Gore, and Susan Baker. The PRMG’s primary focus is to convince record companies to monitor and rate …

1950s. USA. Paul Robeson In the 1950s, musicians as well as the denizens of Hollywood felt the force of the McCarthyite witchhunts and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. No-one more so than Paul Robeson. According to Julian Petley’s article in Index of Censorship in 1998, Paul Robeson is “undoubtedly …

1939. USA. Billie Holiday Billie Holiday crooned against the lynching of black men in the song ‘Strange Fruit’. The “strange fruit” of the title are lynched blacks, hanging from trees across the American south. This powerful political song was banned on the American radios. The song was written by the …