Censoring the Street

In this email I’m going to talk about some of the most ludicrous freedom of speech violations in the busking world.

This is inspired by recent news that the military junta controlling Burkina Faso has just decreed that all street performances there must delivered in the nation’s official language: French.

Sorry, I meant Quebec City.

That’s right: lawmakers in provincial, small-town, little-visited Quebec City passed a rule in May to make buskers sing in French, so that locals don’t have to hear foreign languages as they pass through town.

Obviously I’m joking again. Quebec City isn’t some remote, backwards municipality but a thriving metropolis of almost 900,000 people, one that’s visited by over 4 million tourists a year. That figure includes 1.2 million people from outside Canada (more than the population than the city itself) that now have to connect with French-only lyrics before tipping.

Jocelyn Gilbert, president of the “local neighbourhood committee” that inspired the law, is interviewed at the end of the video above. He explained that the committee only wanted buskers to be, “more conscious of the fact that it would be appropriate to have a larger French content in their performance”.

You can tell he’s ashamed of that lie by the mealymouthed way he delivers it. The law doesn’t say French content should be “larger”. Nor is this an exercise in educating artists to be “conscious” of what’s “appropriate”. Buskers have been banned from singing in anything but French.

You might be as surprised as I was to hear of such a law, but this ruling is part of a larger concern: Francophone Québécois are worried that French—a treasured vestige of European colonialism—will be replaced by English unless there’s strong government intervention to protect it.

The people of Québec are against this rule change: almost all of the comments written below numerous articles covering it are incredulous and/or angry. Indeed, public outrage has prompted the Quebec City Mayor to claim in June that he was “surprised” by the backlash. He also tried to twist the story, saying, “We are not subject to an Anglophone diktat.” Not that diktat, no, but he’d just created another one.

Quebec City’s language barrier is absurd, but it’s far less problematic than the following rules that failed to pass when a landlord proposed them about 400 miles (600km) south of there.

The $10 billion Ashkenazy Acquisition Corporation (AAC) bought the right to manage land containing one of America’s most popular busking pitches. In May 2015 they threatened to charge its street performers an annual fee of $500 to $2,500. This would have made it the world’s most expensive place to busk.

Even more insane, though, is that AAC also wanted to prevent buskers from mentioning specific denominations during their hat lines (so no “tip me $20 and I’ll go home with you tonight” joke). In fact, they wanted to limit all of the street entertainers to just a single approved request for donations, to be written by the comic geniuses working for the private equity firm:

The irony? The pitch in question was at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, a building famous for its pivotal role in the history of American protest. Faneuil Hall was where colonists gathered to discuss grievances against foreign rule. It’s where organisers planned the Boston Tea Party, which started the American Revolution. It symbolises the principles enshrined in the First Amendment, which is why people have two nicknames for Faneuil Hall: “the Cradle of Liberty” and “the home of free speech”.

And yet here was an out-of-state corporation trying to dictate what buskers could and couldn’t say on the building’s doorstep.

You can read the open letter to AAC at the time, or a much better-written article by Simon Waxman, former editor of the Boston Review.

Absolutely nuts.

In 2010, Las Vegas created “Free Expression Zones” on Fremont Street (still named, because America, after John C. Frémont, who led several massacres of Native Americans during the California genocide). Listen to how “Conan the Ballsbarian” (after whom the street should be named) and his peers say these zones have impacted their livelihoods:

Calling them ‘free expression zones’ is an Orwellian-level of misdirection. The entirety of America is a free expression zone. By creating these areas, Las Vegas was actually removing freedom of expression from everywhere else on the street.

This legislation was passed at the behest of the “Fremont Street Experience”, the private company that manages the street (which was also sued in the ACLU in 2022 for other busking restrictions).

In Leicester Square, buskers were kicked out after complaints by nearby businesses. Those businesses had previously commissioned the Metropolitan Police to patrol busking pitches, turning a governmental agency—the police—into their own private militia.

If you remember my discussion about the restrictions at Ireland’s Cliffs of Moher from last year, entertainers there are limited by the private company that manages the tourism area to only playing traditional Irish music—a flagrant abuse of Article 40.6.1 of their constitution, which doesn’t apply on privately-run land.

As for the Boston story above, the new regulations were a result of handing over management of the land around Faneuil Hall to an out-of-state corporation.

Which leads me to the main point of this article. Private pressure is often the source of anti-busking legislation, and buskers are often on the leading edge of the battle over everyone’s freedoms in public spaces.

The privatisation of public land is something that affects us all. Whenever governments begin working at the behest of local businesses, or whenever businesses are given the right to directly impose their will in public spaces (an increasing problem in the UK, for example), the result is less freedom, more security guards, more surveillance, and more rules and regulations banning free expression, the right of assembly and a raft of other democratic activities.