Remember When A Right-Wing Politician Tried To Get Regurgitator Banned From Kmart?
The year was 1996, and 'Tu-Plang' by Regurgitator was causing waves.
It’s easy to imagine that our age of moral puritanism is a recent invention, what with the endless outrage over something as relatively straightforward as Cardi B’s ‘WAP’ music video. But cultural critics from the right have been wagging their fingers at pop music for as long as pop music has been around, as the argy-bargy over the release of the first Regurgitator album, Tu-Plang proves.
The story, which was brought to Music Junkee’s attention by a post in the Sound As Ever Facebook group, begins in 1996. Regurgitator had just finished the work on their major label debut, which had been shipped to stores around Australia, including Kmart. A strange, lopsided release, the album dipped its toe occasionally into the world of the crude — ‘I Sucked a Lot of Cock to Get Where I Am’ isn’t a play on words, after all.
Not that such risque language was excessive; the band always used their diverse collection of swears for the power of good, making a mockery of social norms and breaking new ground for Australian pop.
Try telling that, however, to conservative politician Fiona Simpson, who rallied her forces together to get the record banned from sale at Kmart stores in Queensland.
In an article written by Glenis Green, published at the time of the controversy, it was revealed that Simpson had first come to hear of the band after a member of her constituency called attention to its “totally offensive and unacceptable lyrics”.
Never mind that the album was sold with a sticker that warned potential buyers of the content — Simpson was shocked and horrified by mentions of human appendages and took to the media to say so.
“It’s not just a bit smutty,” the politician said at the time. “This stuff is vicious, extremely sexually explicit and very nasty.”
Sounds like a ringing endorsement of Regurgitator to me. But the noise was enough to scare off at least one Maroochydore-located Kmart store, with the owner telling the press, “It’s not the sort of thing we want. We are a family store”.
So there you have it — some retro “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” content for you.