“And Everybody Listens” is representative of the particular cultural moment from which it emerged. As a believer in free speech, Brown was disturbed by censorship. Concerned with general social pressures for homogeny and direct institutional intervention against free expression, he frequently addressed the topic in his work. This piece was produced in response to Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini declaring a fatwā (ruling in Sharia law) in 1989 for the death of author Salman Rushdie, a British Indian Muslim whose book The Satanic Verses (1988) was a point of international controversy.

The Indian-born, British-American Rushdie was raised in a liberal Indian-Muslim family, and his novels frequently reflected on the cultural circumstances which formed his life. The Satanic Verses was a magical realist story following two Indian Muslim expatriates living in England who are saved from certain death by a supernatural force, and then struggle to piece their lives back together in the aftermath. Woven throughout are a series of dream sequences, the title of the book pertaining to one in particular which invokes the history of the titular verses—words of "satanic suggestion" which the Islamic prophet Muhammad is alleged to have mistaken for divine revelation.

The verses (āyah) praise the three pagan Meccan goddesses: al-Lāt, al-'Uzzá, and Manāt and can be read in early prophetic biographies of Muhammad by al-Wāqidī, Ibn Sa'd and the tafsir of al-Tabarī. It is said that Muhammad later revoked the verses, saying the devil tempted him to utter these lines to appease the Meccans. Scholarship surrounding the verses takes diverse stances; one of the most complicated issues being that even calling them “Satanic verses” is a Western invention incompatible with most Islamic perspectives on the story.

While the book was received positively by most critics, its narrative take on the titular subject matter led to explosive backlash in some conservative communities. Some protests turned violent, including at least three bombings in the United States and six in the United Kingdom. The book was banned in numerous nations, including India, Bangladesh, Sudan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Thailand, Tanzania, Indonesia, and Singapore. The last nation to ban the book was Venezuela, in June 1989. The fatwa issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini resulted in the breakdown of diplomatic relations between the UK and Iran, and Rushdie was put under state protection. It also led some fervent followers of Khomeini’s doctrine to take action. Hitoshi Igarashi, Rushdie’s Japanese translator, was assassinated in 1991, and William Nygaard, publisher of the Norwegian edition, survived an assassination attempt in 1993, being shot three times. Aziz Nesin, the book’s Turkish translator, also survived an assassination attempt via arson in 1993. The fire intended to kill him claimed the lives of 37 other people.

While the fervor surrounding the controversy has largely died down, it has not completely dissipated. In the summer of 2022, Rushdie was stabbed multiple times in New York before giving a public lecture; he survived the assassination attempt, but subsequently lost sight in one eye and the use of one of his hands.

Brown’s depiction of these events within the context of a sideshow banner is typical of his interest in topics he saw as being outside the spotlight, or beyond polite conversation: lurid scandals, ugly controversies, lowbrow entertainment, and the opaque art world.