December 30, 2004
2004: The Year Of The Boob
Janet Jackson's 'wardrobe malfunction' was all the ammo American puritans needed to launch another ice age ... and the chill was felt all across the entertainment biz
Source www.canoe.ca By JIM SLOTEK
Call it history foretold. On Jan. 28, mtv.com plugged its upcoming Super Bowl halftime show with the headline, "Janet Jackson's Super Bowl Show Promises 'Shocking Moments.' " But history is not just a series of events, it's a series of conditions, simmering resentments and blood feuds, etc., waiting to be unleashed. The "events" are merely catalysts.
Think of it in terms of that "chaos theory" butterfly whose tiny wings beating in China lead to a hurricane in the Caribbean.
And come to think of it, didn't that "nipple shield" that Jackson was wearing that fateful Super Bowl Sunday look kind of like a butterfly? Or was it a spider?
But while blame for last season's Florida hurricanes is kind of a stretch, Jackson's breast clearly affected the choice of the Leader of the Free World and helped split the U.S. into its now famous Blue and Red halves ("the United States Of Canada and Jesusland," according to a widely circulated Internet map).
To watch the fallout of Janetgate -- in which Justin Timberlake ripped off a piece of Jackson's top during the song Rock Your Body and exposed her breast to a hundred million football fans -- was to see American culture in all its contradictions.
Or as comedian Lewis Black said, summing up the results of the Nov. 2 election, "Americans remain free to pursue their dreams, so long as that dream doesn't make Midwesterners feel 'icky.' "
The U.S., a country paradoxically founded by freedom-seeking Puritans, is the world's biggest consumer of "adult entertainment," to the tune of $10 billion a year.
At the same time, it plays host to the most prurient strain of Fundamentalist Christianity in the world, a hellfire-obsessed "sex for procreation only" message of self-control and self-denial that has found an unprecedented voice in the current U.S. administration. Look no further than then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who had the exposed breast of the famous statue of Blind Justice covered with a sheet for photo ops.
Janet's boob pretty much put in overdrive the career of one previously little-heard-from Republican -- Michael Powell, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (and the son of Colin Powell). It was a confluence of events and personality that could inspire Tom Wolfe to write another Bonfire of the Vanities. On the day in question, Powell says, he watched the Super Bowl with his family and was taken aback by a "classless, crass and deplorable stunt."
Almost forgotten in the furor over Jackson and Timberlake was the fact that there were other artists on the bill, including Kid Rock (who wore an American flag poncho) and the crotch-grabbing Nelly. Powell didn't overlook them though. "The whole performance was onstage copulation," said the FCC boss, who launched an obscenity investigation of the entire halftime show.
In September, the results of that investigation came down. Federal regulators fined CBS a record $550,000 for those few seconds of boob -- the maximum of $27,500 against each of the network's 20 owned-and-operated stations. It opted not to fine any of more than 200 affiliates which are not owned by CBS's parent company Viacom (which also owns MTV).
But clearly, Powell and Co. would have fined CBS more if they could. A few weeks after the Super Bowl, contrite execs from Viacom and the NFL were hauled in front of a House subcommittee on telecommunications and the Internet, which was considering a request by the FCC to multiply its fining abilities tenfold. That measure passed Congress the following month and sailed through the Senate (in a 99-1 vote) in June as the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act. It gave the FCC power to fine a company $275,000 per station to a maximum of $3 million "per single act or failure to act."
Empowered, the FCC became busy little smut guardians indeed. In April, broadcast giant Clear Channel reportedly paid a $2 million settlement for indecency rulings against Howard Stern (whom the company had dropped from six of its stations in February), Washington morning host Elliott Segal and Florida deejay Bubba the Love Sponge.
And in March, at Powell's behest, the commission overturned an earlier ruling that NBC hadn't aired an indecency when U2's Bono accepted his trophy at the American Music Awards with the expletive, "F--ing brilliant!"
All this and the FCC still kept up with the small stuff, like a $7,000 fine against Infinity for the broadcast of a hip-hop concert on WLLD-FM in Holmes Beach, Fla.
But the real impact came in the area of "self-policing," as obscenity-chill settled in almost immediately post-Super Bowl. Timberlake's 'N Sync pal, J.C. Chasez, was dropped as a halftime act at the Pro Bowl the following week (they replaced him with a Hawaiian theme featuring hula dancers and conch blowers). Janet Jackson either bowed out or was axed from the Grammy Awards, which imposed a five-second "enhanced" tape delay on the program for the first time. The Oscars quickly followed suit, announcing their own tape delay.
On NBC, the network quickly excised a shot of an 82-year-old woman's breast from an examination scene on ER.
And last month, 66 ABC affiliates refused to air Saving Private Ryan on Veterans Day. Seems a group called The American Family Association objected to the graphic violence and 21 uses of the F-word. One complaint (and sometimes no complaint at all) is all it can take for an American broadcaster to find itself looking at millions of dollars in fines.
In Canada, the it-can't-happen-here reaction to Janetgate was epitomized by Alanis Morissette, who came out to emcee the Juno Awards "naked," wearing a body suit with painted-on nipples and pubic hair. Her opening words: "I am overjoyed to be back in my homeland, the true North, strong and censor-free."
True enough, as a country we don't seem to be fazed much by nudity or cusswords. But broadcast-chill was in the headlines here, too. Don Cherry went one "Chicken Swede" too far when he opined that most NHL players who wear visors "are Europeans or French guys." The comment prompted an inquiry by Canada's official languages commissioner and led to the imposition of a seven-second delay on Cherry's Coach's Corner segment of Hockey Night in Canada. "(CBC) categorically rejects and denounces the personal opinions Mr. Cherry expressed," network exec VP Harold Redekopp said in announcing the decision.
An overreaction? Maybe. On the other hand, the CRTC served notice in the summer it wouldn't be bluffed when it rescinded the licence of CHOI-FM, Toronto's most popular radio station. The main offender: Morning man Jean-Francois Fillion, about whom the commission says it received 47 complaints between 1998 and 2001, mostly in the area of racist commentary.
Fillion would get a sympathetic ear from Howard Stern, who went from pro- to anti-George Bush the week Clear Channel dropped him from six markets. With his main syndicator, Infinity Broadcasting, also facing more than $1 million worth of indecency fines in his name, Stern decided to bolt the public airwaves altogether. In October, he signed a $500-million deal, effective 2006, with Sirius Satellite Radio -- the radio equivalent of pay-cable. Typically humble, he hailed the deal as "the death of FM radio and the death of the FCC."
If Stern does turn out to be the X factor in satellite radio's success, it could rewrite the rules in the broadcast world.
Score another one for Janet's nipple.