On 11 January 2025 Mestizia CRK released three EPs/albums with a similar artwork, differentiated only by colour depending on the genre: black and white for the hard techno EP, natural colours for the piano sonata, a red filter for a metal ballad.
The image shows a shirtless child, eyes censored by very «plain» X marks to represent the death of the soul; with one arm he raises a beer mug, and on the table there's a pizza and a pack of cigarettes. The album, despite its variants, is called «Child Man's Teeth»: an «adult» child, or a man who still has his milk teeth.
The theme is the «adultified child» and its psychiatric consequences — depression, personality disorders and more. Among them, the deprivation of pure pleasure, which pushes the subject to seek a fake one through alcohol and substances that alter thought. The original artwork features Mestizia CRK himself as a child: no privacy violation. And yet it's no longer available on Spotify.
The Piano Sonata version was also flagged and censored as inappropriate: the presence of alcohol and tobacco together with a shirtless child was read as sexualisation and promotion of illegal acts toward minors.
This case shows how censorship, believing it protects, limits artistic freedom and prevents an important subject from being addressed. Nirvana's famous «Nevermind» has on its cover a fully naked baby, genitals in view, chasing a banknote underwater: yet that cover is still online.
Why? Money. The answer we got to our complaint was: «Some artists have many listeners and a lot of money, so they get special treatment, simply because they generate a lot for the platform hosting them». So the morality of the policies can be bought.
Art often tries to provoke and inspire reflection, without being bridled by rules that ignore context. It's not the fault of our distribution, bound to respect the platforms' rules, which in turn chase a hypersensitivity that sees malice everywhere.
Chaos Rules rejects bigoted moralism as much as conservatism or hyper-liberalism: we accept reality as it is, sometimes beautiful, sometimes ugly, sometimes rightly horrible, because the world isn't perfect. We do not believe in any way that our cover promotes the sexualisation of minors or the use of substances. We can't make the rules for others: we trust in your support to act, in the future, within international legal limits alone — not rules invented by internal policies.