Music censorship?

Sac Arrow

Sac Arrow

Touchdown! Greaser!
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Charlotte, NC
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Snorting his way across the USA
So I had to make a road trip yesterday inland. Which means I can't receive most of my Bay Area radio stations, therefore I had to tune in local ones. After some jumping around the presets in the avoidance of commercials, I finally settled on a nearby station, 98 Rock.

The town (actually it's a City I guess) of Vacaville has no name recognition beyond the boundaries of the Northern California border and the Tehachapi mountains to the South, except for a cool little airport and a local musical group of the rock genre, Papa Roach.

Ahh! One of my favorite Papa Roach songs came on! "Forever"! Coolio!

...Sitting by a fire on a lonely night
Hanging over from another good time
With another girl... little dirty girl
You should listen to this story of a life
You're my heroine-in this moment I'm lonely fulfilling my darkest dreams
All these drugs all these women
I'm never forgiven... this broken heart of mine....

Well, except, this station's version of the song didn't go that way. It went like this...

...Sitting by a fire on a lonely night
Hanging over from another good time
With another girl... little dirty girl
You should listen to this story of a life
You're my BLEEP-in this moment I'm lonely fulfilling my darkest dreams
All these BLEEP all these women
I'm never forgiven... this broken heart of mine...

Huh? WTF? I thought about it for a minute, and it actually made me a little mad. I'm not a fan of censorship to begin with but I get the whole point of editing certain words so FCC rules aren't violated, yada yada. But the level of idiocy behind this particular edit is, to me, beyond comprehension.

Okay, so, you are trying to denigrate drug usage. That is your message. Whatever. First of all, if you critically listen to the lyrics in their entirety, you will find the song does not at all promote drug usage. Secondly, you freaking MORONS, "heroine" used in the context of the lyrics isn't even a drug! It's a female hero!

If you don't like the song, just don't play it. Don't butcher it. It's kind of like putting ketchup on a hotdog, to those that are offended by the idea of putting ketchup on a hotdog.
 
Ahhh, the lovely nonthinking, zero tolerance crowd, strikes again.
 
Old Geek said:
Like trying to watch "Blazing Saddles" on TV....
Click to expand...

Every once in a while, you find a censor who doesn't know what Lily von Shtupp means. I always found it funny that the N-word gets bleeped out, but that one only sometimes gets it.
 
MTV used to censor the word "suicide" from the other Papa Roach song that people had actually heard of before. Also, a lot of stations censored the words "gun" "shoot" and "murder" as well.

Its mind numbing.

Of course, as made famous by Dave Chappelle's stand up - my favorite censorship is replacing the words "mother ****er" with "skeet skeet skeet skeet" which is like 1,000,000 times worse.
 
1) Corporate Radio
2) FCC "encouragement"
3) local "community standards"
4) the old Broadcast "Code" (many stations will still refuse ads for hard booze)

Back in the '60's and '70's - and awful lot of songs were censored or never received airplay. I can think of several, including "*** **** the pusher man" by Steppenwolf.
 
wsuffa said:
Back in the '60's and '70's - and awful lot of songs were censored or never received airplay. I can think of several, including "*** **** the pusher man" by Steppenwolf.
Click to expand...

American Bandstand actually played the song uncensored, prefaced with a statement that the censors felt that the anti-drug message justified the profanity.
 
wsuffa said:
1) Corporate Radio
2) FCC "encouragement"
3) local "community standards"
4) the old Broadcast "Code" (many stations will still refuse ads for hard booze)
Click to expand...

1) Corporate radio pushes as far as the FCC allows.
2) The FCC is trying to depart the obscenity/indecency arena completely, and has only stayed in this long because of the patronage politics involved in appointments to the commission.
4) The "old broadcast code" was banished by the Supreme Court decades ago as being in conflict with the duty of broadcasters to serve local standards and needs. That's an odd distinction, since the local broadcasters chose whether to endorse the code. It's now a decision more likely to be influenced by picketers from MADD.

Number 3 is the only one that really makes a difference anymore. Those edits are the choice of a small company that runs the station and has to respond to the tastes of its community. Those edits are way short of anything that would get the FCC's attention.

The only head-scratcher is, as you note, why play it at all? If you're that against recreational drug use, why would you even play anything from that band?

I wonder if they ever play "Life in the Fast Lane" by the Eagles, which has both drug references and the issue of Steppenwolf's "The Pusher."

I spent 30 years as a broadcaster. The most ridiculous editing I ever shook my head at came from a syndicated format provider based in Chicago, Peters Productions. They sent their stations a version of Kodachrome by Paul Simon that had the word "crap" edited out, yet distributed the original version of Rickie Lee Jones's "Chuck E's in Love" with the lyric, "Christ, I think he's even combed his hair."
 
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Old Geek said:
Like trying to watch "Blazing Saddles" on TV....
Click to expand...
PBS ran the Mel Brooks interview on Monday night...with the excerpts from Blazing Sadddles (I have the poster framed in my living room) and NOTHING was bleeped out! In fact there was a reasonably serious discussion about the dinner scene around the campfire and how Brooks' films opened the door to a genre of film comedy.
 
Private business, they are free to do as they wish. If the customers don't like it, they'll go out of business.

As an aside, I saw the TV edit version of Pulp Fiction. I think the movies was like 45 minutes long..... :D
 
I have a simple rule. NEVER watch movies on commercial television.

Saddest instance of profanity "fixing"? NBC aired Spike Lee's "Do the Right Thing" and they replaced every "MotherF...er" with Mickey Fickey.

Funniest instance was USA Network's airing of Howard Stern's "Private Parts" where, quite cleverly, every curse word was beeped, but suspiciously, about a second too late. It was hilarious to watch.
 
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