A record label's primary goal is to make money selling music.
Often that will mean encouraging bands to make decisions based more on marketability than on artistic merit.
However, if they're going to make money off of an album which is subversive, or even loudly opposed to the label itsself. They'll release it.
It's not like EMI stopped printing copies of "Never Mind the Bollocks" when they acquired the rights just because it had a song that explicitly called them out.
I didn't realize "Bollocks" can be wrought on EMI, I always thought it was a Virgin album.
It is a great play on titles though.The EMI actually stands for "every mistake imaginable" and is pointed right at the record company but in such a way that, because of the double entendre, they couldn't be sued !
I keep hearing people say major labels suppress artists interests and tell them what type of content their music should be about and stuff.
If that was true, then why didn't major labels suppress/control music from say Rage Against the Machine, System of a Down, 2pac, Eminem,
Well it's partly true in some cases and not in others. Independent labels were always less likely to dictate to artists, which is partly why
they were independent. But there are exceptions; United Artists didn't censor or prevent some of the Stranglers songs like "Bitching", "Dagenham Dave", "Bring on the nubiles", "Burning up time", "I feel like a wog" and "School Mam" on the "No more heroes" Lp for instance, even though the lyrics of those songs could've caused riots ! There's lots of examples running both ways. Warner Brothers refused to issue Black Sabbath's "Volume 4" LP with the title "Snowblind" and the year before, they'd refused to let the Grateful Dead name their second live album "Skullfuck" (so it was just called "The grateful dead", even though they'd used the album title before). On the other hand on John Lennon's first solo album proper, EMI didn't refuse to release "Working class hero" though he calls people 'fucking peasants' in it. But when he and Yoko Ono appeared nude on the cover of "2 virgins", EMI refused to distribute it .
So it's actually not cut and dried either way. Labels like Island didn't stop all those reggae bands prosletyzing about smoking ganja, even though it was illegal in most countries through the 70s and 80s, neither did they nix their highly politically charged songs.
Sometimes though, "the labels" have used their muscle for good, pushing many artists/bands into actually crafting songs that
were accessible and would sell. I'd argue that it made many people better writers, better recording artists and gave many access to punters they may not have reached otherwise.
So to me this runs both ways. Alot of it is pot luck, being in the right place at the right time. Sometimes, the times dictate whether something is going to be more tolerable to a record label, just look at rap from the early 90s to say, about 5 years ago. Much of the lyrical content would have been unlikely to have gotten released in the 70s and 80s.
