American popstars Lady Gaga and Ariana Grande are among the artists whose lyrics have landed on a list of “illustrations of offensive lyrics” in a ministerial handout recently issued in the Singapore Parliament.
Monday’s statement came nearly a month after Swedish black metal group Watain’s concert was banned in Singapore on concerns about its history of “denigrating religions and promoting violence.”
Singapore keeps a strict rein on public speech and the media, especially when it comes to matters concerning race and religion.
A photo of the ministerial statement on “restricting hate speech” was posted on Facebook by opposition MP Chen Show Mao late on Monday with the caption “lesson of the day”. The post had been shared over 1,000 times and received hundreds of comments by the next day.
The list cited Lady’s Gaga’s ‘Judas’ and Ariana Grande’s ‘God is a woman’, alongside songs ‘Heresy’ by Nine Inch Nails and ‘Take me to the Church’ by Hozier, as “illustrations of offensive lyrics”.
K. Shanmugam, Singapore’s home affairs minister, said in a Facebook post on Tuesday that he gave the list as a demonstration of things people may find offensive.
‘Doesn’t mean that it can all get banned, just because some people find it offensive,’ Shanmugam, who is also the law minister, posted.
In his speech on Monday, the minister had said the government’s approach had to be accompanied by common sense.
He added, either banning everything that is deemed insulting or offensive by anyone, or allowing everything that is insulting or offensive, was not doable.
The statement came on a day Singapore submitted wide-ranging fake news legislation in parliament, stir up fear among internet firms and human rights groups that it may give the government too much power and restrict freedom of speech.
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