In December 2008, on the heels of President Obama’s first victory, Ken McLellan, longtime frontman of neo-Nazi punks Brutal Attack, said attitudes were changing toward white power bands. “Being sold in mainstream places shows that white power isn’t so taboo anymore,” McLellan told SPIN. His pro–“Final Solution” lyrics had been a tough sell with physical retailers, but Brutal Attack’s late-’80s album Tales of Glory was easy enough to find from digital merchants like iTunes and Amazon.
Thankfully, white supremacist music hasn’t been as widely available on iTunes since late 2014, when Apple started removing bands that the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) had flagged as racist. But much of the music from SPLC’s list of 54 racist bands has remained on Amazon. It’s also been conveniently available on streaming services, where white power groups could peddle their hate for only a free, legal click. After last weekend’s horrifying rally by white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., Digital Music News reported that they’d found 37 racist bands on Spotify alone. Ken McLellan couldn’t be reached for comment, but he’s more likely to be smiling than decent people are right now.
Spotify has since begun taking down music from the bands in question. But not even including any white power bands that may have sprung up after the SPLC’s three-year-old list, as of this week there was still plenty of music available from these groups on Google Play and YouTube, on Amazon digitally and physically, on Tidal, on Deezer, and to a lesser extent on Pandora, SoundCloud, even Apple Music and iTunes. All of the streaming services that have responded tell Pitchfork they’re against hate speech and at the very least will remove content when notified by users. This is a fraught issue, but it’s about damn time.
A statement from Spotify, as the streaming service with the most paying users, speaks volumes here. “Illegal content or material that favors hatred or incites violence against race, religion, sexuality, or the like is not tolerated by us,” a company spokesperson tells Pitchfork. “Spotify takes immediate action to remove any such material as soon as it has been brought to our attention. We are glad to have been alerted to this content—and have already removed many of the bands identified today, whilst urgently reviewing the remainder.”
It’s a good start. In 2014, Spotify said that it relies on a German government list of objectionable content. Works in that index would be “proactively removed from our service,” Spotify said at the time. Bands from the SPLC list that could be streamed on Spotify as recently as Wednesday were no longer available as of this writing. These groups never had a ton of followers, but it’s still sickening to think of them cutting into the revenue share of artists whose M.O. isn’t promoting racism—and Spotify taking its cut.
Apple, which ranks second among paid streaming subscribers, has typically been more aggressive when it comes to refusing to serve as business intermediaries for white power bands. As of yesterday, the only SPLC-listed band with music on Apple Music/iTunes was Baker’s Dozen, with their album European Invasion. Apple reps haven’t responded to Pitchfork’s requests for comment, but as of today, Baker’s Dozen’s album is no longer listed.
Spotify and Apple weren’t alone in swiftly rejecting racist music, in light of this week’s events. As of yesterday, there was music from several bands deemed racist by the SPLC still streaming on Pandora; today it is not. “We take action to remove content of this nature from Pandora,” a spokesperson tells Pitchfork. “We removed much of this content in 2014 and are in the process of removing additional material that’s been flagged now.”
Deezer, another streaming service, has likewise been withdrawing its inventory of white power bands. (The company also said its editorial team will release a playlist in support of “the brutal incident” in Charlottesville.) “Deezer does not condone any type of discrimination or form of hate against individuals or groups because of their race, religion, gender, or sexuality,” a spokesperson tells Pitchfork. After being alerted by Pitchfork, Tidal as well has removed a range of white supremacist music from its catalog, though the Jay-Z-owned company hasn’t officially commented.
A bigger concern are Google’s streaming platforms. “YouTube and Google Play have clear policies that prohibit content like hate speech and incitement to commit violent acts, and we remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users,” a YouTube spokesperson tells Pitchfork. At least a dozen bands from SPLC’s list were available for digital purchase or streaming on Google Play yesterday, and they still seem to be there as of this writing. YouTube, the biggest site for streaming music online, appears to offer all the white-supremacist music that a Ku Klux Klan member could ever want, including notoriously racist bands like Skrewdriver. Unlike Spotify or Apple Music, YouTube is, of course, a user-based platform, with 400 hours of content uploaded per minute. While that’s certainly a staggering amount of content to manage, it’s also downright disgusting that YouTube not only helps circulate but potentially profits off a lynching song like Ian Stuart and the Klansmen’s “Fetch the Rope,” now streaming.
And so does Amazon. Brutal Attack’s Tales of Glory, among other racist music, is available to buy through the retail behemoth, via download or CD. Other albums, from Brutal Attack and numerous like-minded acts, are available on Amazon’s streaming service. (Amazon representatives haven’t commented to Pitchfork.) Maybe President Trump will stop picking on Amazon boss Jeff Bezos now?
How to handle hateful speech isn’t always clear-cut, as the American Civil Liberties Union famously showed when it defended the KKK’s right to march in Skokie, Ill. nearly 40 years ago. This isn’t a First Amendment issue, though—Spotify and Apple are businesses, they can do what they please. But by favoring the removal of racist content from streaming services, we non-racists leave ourselves open to arguments, like we’re hearing from Trump-heiling right-winger Laura Ingraham, that opponents of Nazis wants to “intimidate free speech.” Banned books obtain a certain cachet. Today’s traditionalists like to portray themselves as bold rebels.
And yet when it comes to speech celebrating the values of Nazi Germany, demanding that streaming services don’t circulate or profit from it feels like the bare minimum that reasonable human beings can do. CNN isn’t perfect, but its host Jake Tapper put it well when he said, after Trump’s press conference this week blaming “both sides” for the Charlottesville violence, “To anybody out there [thinking], ‘I thought that the Klan and neo-Nazis and white supremacists, I thought there was no debate about this among civilized people?’ There isn’t a debate about it.”
Five years ago, Wade Michael Page fatally shot six people and wounded four others in a massacre at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. According to the SPLC, Page was the frontman for a white power band called End Apathy. There have been times, especially in the punk era, when flirting with Nazi imagery was popular among bands that otherwise made decent music. Thankfully, we don’t live in those times. True, it would be bad if streaming services extended their role as gatekeepers to filter out material that shouldn’t be objectionable. Art is meant to provoke, and there are issues on which civilized people will agree to disagree. But the issue at hand is white supremacy. Neo-Nazism. Among civilized people, there isn’t a debate.
