My world civ professor in college mentioned that this song was banned due to being pornographic. Is this like when To Kill a Mockingbird is banned where it's only in select areas?
What were the specific arguments for labelling it as pornographic? Was there any backlash to this response?
According to an article in the January 19th, 1959 edition of Billboard Magazine, 'Rumble' was released during a period of decreasing censorship of the American airwaves (1958); the article suggests that the line 'I get no kick from cocaine' in Cole Porter's 'I Get A Kick Out Of You' had habitually been changed to 'some like perfume from Spain' in previous years, but that audiences were less and less likely to complain if it was left in. However, that was in jazz and showtunes; rock'n'roll was a different story. Some argued that rock'n'roll was all about the beat and that the lyrics weren't being paid attention to, and didn't need to be censored so carefully. Some argued that rock'n'roll was awful and encouraged teenage delinquents in their delinquency; Frank Sinatra said of it that:
It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. It smells phony and false. It is sung, played and written for the most part by cretinous goons and by means of its almost imbecilic reiterations and sly, lewd—in plain fact dirty—lyrics, and as I said before, it manages to be the martial music of every sideburned delinquent on the face of the earth...
Towards the end of the article, it elaborates on 'Rumble' being banned. It wasn't banned as 'pornographic'; it was banned because of a worry that it might incite violence. According to Billboard:
Even instrumentals somestimes [sic] run into trouble. Lin [sic] Wray's 'Rumble', for instance, which had difficulty in winning spins on New York stations because of its teen gang connotation. Manhattan was in the middle of a teen-age crime wave at the time. When Link appeared on Dick Clark's show to plug the record, the network at first refused to let him go on. A compromise was finally reached, whereby Clark merely said, 'And here's Link Wray'; then played the record with out mentioning its title.
After all, the musical West Side Story, with a prominent fight scene referred to as a 'rumble', had premiered in 1957, and there's a violence in the ugliness of the guitar sound of 'Rumble'; it's not a big stretch to assume that people would interpret it to be an auditory soundtrack to violence, especially in an age with a moral panic (as the Billboard article implies) about teenage delinquents using rock'n'roll as 'martial music' (to use Sinatra's term).