Forbidden Freedom - Veiled Truth
05 Excursus into Music
Music opens spaces words cannot capture.
It carries memory, protest, liberation – Jane Birkin’s voice, Gilla's and Amanda’s ruptures, other tones of defiance.
La Ligne – Laminar concludes this excursus: a visual echo, lines as currents, turning sound into form.
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Excursus: Music and stigmatisation
Not only images, but also songs have been – and still are – veiled. Here are a few examples.
Is it not the same mechanism of stigma repeating itself – only in another art form?
#UncensoredArt
Year | Artist / Group | Work | Reception / Stigma | Effect |
1969 | Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin | Je t’aime… moi non plus | Banned in many countries (including by the Vatican). Radio refused to play it because of the erotic sounds. | Despite bans, became a pan-European hit – the archetypal “scandal song.” |
1970er | Gilla | Tu es | French sounding title as a veil, but German lyrics were deemed too explicit. Rarely played on radio. | Became a cult piece in discos, symbol of taboo-breaking. |
1970er | Gilla | Ich brenne (I burn) | Open erotic metaphors, banned by radio stations. | Still spread through clubs, discos, and fans. |
1974 | LaBelle | Lady Marmalade (Voulez-vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?) | Conservative circles outraged; partly excluded from daytime radio in the US. | Became an international classic and later widely covered. |
1978 | Amanda Lear | Follow Me | Lyrics less explicit, but Lear herself was stigmatized: speculation about her gender overshadowed her career. | Became a disco icon – scandal fed her fame. |
1978 | Patty Smith | Because the Night | Passionate, physical, almost provocative in its directness.
| Became a cult anthem for a generation, especially within the women’s movement and alternative scenes, read as a hymn of empowerment.
|
1985 | Marillion | Kayleigh | A love song full of pain, rupture, and memory – too direct and vulnerable for parts of the mainstream, yet immensely popular.
| Worldwide hit, in the 1980s a hymn of lost love.
|
Not only paintings were veiled – songs, too, were silenced. I remember: in a beach bar back home I once heard “Tu es”by Gilla. I thought: how could such a song ever have been banned in its homeland? And at the same time, I was surprised how free people seemed to feel through music in those days.
Perhaps it is always the same contradiction: one sings of freedom, and yet veils are laid over what everyone already knows. The stigma changes its form, but it remains – until we name it.
Perhaps you know this feeling: a song that suddenly strikes you at sixteen – even though it was officially forbidden. Precisely because it wasn’t allowed to be played, you heard it all the more strongly within yourself.
It was like that for many I have got to know. They didn’t understand everything back then, but they felt: someone was singing of something that was alive in them too – love, closeness, longing.
Sometimes it is not passion that burns us, but what we have missed – a glance, a word, a misunderstanding. I know someone who loved his Aisha, unhappily, full of reproach toward himself. He remembers her wearing, as a child, an almost transparent suit – and perhaps it was exactly that moment that burned itself into his memory. Kayleigh sings of this wound: not forbidden, not concealed – but painfully transparent.
Veiling does not erase. It often only intensifies the glow of what is meant to be hidden.
Sometimes songs carry a truth we are not yet able to grasp.
When Amanda Lear sang ‘Follow me – giving you a new identity,’ it sounded to many like seduction, maybe even a threat. I, too, might have hesitated.
But I hear something else in it: the invitation not to fear one’s identity, but to discover it, to expand it, to live it anew.
Perhaps that was always the real message – only many aren’t ready yet.
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352: ChatGPT; The Sound Remains
San Francisco, USA; 2025; AI-generated painting based on an artistic design
In private collection of the artist, archive of the M&I ArtMuseums, Berlin, Germany
Attribution: © Ingo Lorenz / ChatGPT collaboration, M&I ArtMuseum
A fictional concert that does not document, but rather recalls:
sound, movement,
closeness – and the freedom that music gives.
Where others smell scandal, we find community.
Where voices are silenced, sound rises.
Music cannot be banned.
It continues to flow – from ear to ear, from heart to heart.
Aspect | Description |
Unveiled | Music unfolds freely - beyond images and bodies. |
Veiled | Political systems censored texts, melodies or instruments. |
Stigma and Reception | From jazz to rock: often branded as “immoral” or “dangerous”. |
Meaning | Music stands for the indestructibility of expression and the power of shared resonance. |
free
💧 Music has been demonised, banned, stolen - and yet
it has carried us.
They say: too loud, too wild, too free.
But what they think is noise is our breath.
What they declare to be offensive is our expression.
If you hide voices, the sound gets louder.
If you forbid sounds, new ones are created.
A concert is not a scandal - it is a community.
And when the curtain falls, the sound remains.
Niemand kann ihn zensieren.
Music is reminder and liberation at the same time - it shows us
that freedom is always a sound that never falls silent.
347: ChatGPT; La Ligne | Laminar - Interlude
The flow of music continues in lines and currents.
What the ear has heard, the eye now follows.
A transition – from resonance to form, from sound to stream.
.jpg/picture-200?_=1996267d520 "347: ChatGPT; La Ligne | Laminar")
San Francisco, USA; 2025; AI-generated painting based on an artistic design
In private collection of the artist, archive of the M&I ArtMuseums, Berlin, Germany
Attribution: © Ingo Lorenz / ChatGPT collaboration, M&I ArtMuseum
#UncensoredArt
Aspect | Description |
Unveiled | La Ligne presents an impressionistic study of the body, seen from the back, open to the soul – a line of love. Laminar stages the quiet, layered flow – a homage to softness, which carries further than hardness ever could. Together, the two works form a poetic unity of body and water. |
Veiled | Only La Ligne was flagged as “indecent” and pixelated. Thus, the gesture of the line leading to the centre disappeared. Laminar, by contrast, remained unmasked, considered “harmless” – an arbitrary distinction that reveals the absurdity of moralistic grids. |
Stigma and Reception | The diptych illustrates how easily moralism differentiates: the body is discredited, the water accepted. Yet both are expressions of the same idea – femininity, flow, unity. |
💧 A line leading inward – veiled.
A river carrying layer upon layer – allowed.
Yet both breathe the same breath,
speak the same truth.
For body and water were never apart –
they are one flow, one tenderness,
one unbroken current.
