Anticensorship Mom
“Tom says I’m famous in England,” Mary Morello is saying. “But I don’t know because I never see the papers. I have a lot of Japanese members, too. There’ve been articles about me there, too. I have them here but it’s useless ’cause I don’t read Japanese.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A conversation with Morello, the Libertyville woman who runs the anti-anti-rock outfit Parents for Rock and Rap, is a dizzying whirl around the world, with conversational stop-offs in Europe and Asia, in Kenya and New York, in the studio with Ice-T and on the road with Lollapalooza; she makes passing references to everything from Carol Moseley-Braun to that Fishbone concert last week at the Vic. Her involvement in anticensorship activities began in earnest in 1992, when she opposed Lake Forest’s attempts to legally prohibit local record stores from selling gangsta rap. After that she started publishing a newsletter spotlighting censorship-oriented no-goodnikness across the country. Her entree into the rock world was further solidified by the growing success of her son, the aforementioned Tom. He’s the guitarist in the explicitly political industrialish band Rage Against the Machine, a main-stage attraction at Lollapalooza last year.
When she was visiting her son in LA in 1992, she had the chance to meet Ice-T as he was working on what would become Body Count’s notorious Cop Killer LP. “If people would listen to what he’s saying it would help you understand what’s going on in South Central,” she says. “It would help you understand a lot of things.” She readily concedes that a lot of rap’s subjects aren’t nice, but insists that attacking the music won’t help. “I’ve tried to think up a solution to it,” she says. “And the only thing I can think of is to give everyone in the inner city a good education. A country that has billionaires shouldn’t have street people. People from the city shouldn’t have to come out to Libertyville to be rehabbed.”
