Forget this shhhh

[muckefuck]

I didn't watch the Grammys last weekend. Awards shows aren't my thing at all, and besides I've got mysterious problems with my cable. (As far as I know, it's still stuck on channel 43.) But when I found out that Cee-Lo Green's performance of "Fuck You" was a tribute to one of my all-time favourite Muppet Show skits, I just had to check it out. It was my first time hearing the bowdlerised radio edit and, man, am I ever glad I've steered clear of it. The entire joy of that song is hearing mellow Motown sounds married to outrageous lyrics. Cee-Lo himself had so much trouble remembering what he could and couldn't sing that he forgot an entire line.

I really don't have the patience for mindless taboo avoidance that I once did. Not only are all the expletives excised but the last word is hacked off the fantastic couplet "Oh shit, she's a golddigger / Just thought you should know, nigger", taking the rhyme with it. Seriously? "Nigger" is only offensive insofar as it's used by non-blacks to denigrate them; between black men, it's a signal of solidarity. But I guess like "faggot" it's been deemed "word that has no place today on the airwaves" regardless of context or intention.

And that's still not the limits of outrageousness. A day earlier, I decided I wanted to watch the video to Lily Allen's "Alfie", but YouTube only offered me a choice between (1) full lyrics with no video or (2) full video with censored lyrics. Incredibly, the radio edit lacks not only the words "twat" and "weed" but even "THC". That's right, you can't even have a drug reference in a song criticising the use of this drug.

I remember what a big deal it was when you could finally say "bitch" on broadcast television. It made me think I might finally see the day when it would catch up to cable. Watching British panel shows online, with their liberal use of not only "arse" and "shit" but "cunt" and "fuck", has only underlined for me how bizarrely bluenosed we are in this country. And I find it even more bizarre to see that, if anything, radio (and, by extension, online services like YouTube) is moving the other way, becoming more censorious than it was when I was young and Prince's "masturbating" became "mastur*BEEP*".

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

So I see we're on opposite sides of this and I think the reason is purely circumstantial - if I may argue by exteapolation for a moment, I'm guessing your fundamental point is that all censorship is absurd and that it tends to create victims and we'd be better off without it. And in principle I agree, partly because that's a conceptually easy path to take and argue, and I'm all for conceptually easy.

But circumstantially, I've just arrived in a foreign country where my kids don't know anyone and we're trying to learn the social dance, and having them joyfully shouting "fuck you" in the school playground is more or less equivalent to having them shit in people's shoes when it comes to building a social network.

What can I say, I find your frustration at Cee Lo's confusion less important right now than maintaining some standards of politeness. I realize my position is indefensible on principle, but so are all our social conventions. I still have to live with them, and not doing so does violence to my family's social opportunities. So I'm not saying your wrong, and per Voltaire I'd defend your right to say it, but I'm paying costs right now to defend something I consider completely unimportant, just like you are, and if your costs went down mine would go up.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

If protecting your children from profanity is important to you, you've got more tools at your disposal than ever before in history. It's not necessary to restrict all media for the benefit of a minority of citizens with young children any more than it's necessary to have a global ban on alcohol sales or driving automobiles.

And I don't comprehend how failing to censor radio and television automatically leads to children yelling "Fuck you!" in the schoolyard. Children have to learn that certain words are appropriate for some situations and not others just as they have to learn that some actions are. I mean, you don't literally have a problem them shitting in other people's shoes, do you? How did you manage to teach them where and when it's appropriate to shit and why can't you use the same methods to teach them where and when it's appropriate to say the word "shit"?

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

They weren't already in school, listening to the radios of the people who live next door to the school, when we toilet trained them. And the first time it happens is already too late, when you're the rare representative of a barbarian race.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

I'm not calling for censorship, I'm pointing out that there are costs associated with both positions. Fuck the minorities seems like a strange response to that.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

How exactly is my position "fuck the minorities"? What prevented you and your wife from teaching your children that "fuck" isn't a word they should use freely in public before they happened to hear it on the radio?

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Your position is that the convenience of parents (and of anyone else who would rather not hear swearing on their radio) is unimportant compared with your own and that they should therefore be made to pay costs so that you don't have to. Your argument is that the unimportance of these people is based on their forming a minority.

Now, the case here is so trivial that I refuse to compare it to more serious cases, but I'm surprised that this line of reasoning doesn't give you pause.

The cost exists because social norms about swearing are changing, largely because of the active efforts of media producers such as Cee Lo who dislike the strictures of broadcast media (really, the song would not have that frisson you enjoy so much if gangster rap was all over the radio and you heard fuck every few minutes anyway, so I hardly think Cee Lo's inadequate performance at the awards can be taken at face value). If nobody cared, as you wish they didn't, we'd be fine. If people, especially children in their own peer groups, didn't take social cues from media, we'd be fine. If I had time to monitor all media and figure out what I needed to prepare for, we'd be fine. But I've just moved from a place where swearing is off the radio to one where it's unrestricted, and I face new and unexpected costs. My daughter is 4. I didn't think I had to cover the gamut of swearing vocabulary and the niceties of how to use it yet, seems I was wrong, and the wedge is Cee Lo.

I could take an alternative tack. I could just say "my kids need to be prepared for the real world" and have them learn about safe sex and not sharing needles and all the skills of adulthood earlier than any age you would find amusing, say, 2. And that might be better in some ways. But I'd be expecting them to make adult decisions at that age or to just accept everything I said without personal referents, and that's not sound pedagogy. And it would create its own costs.

So I'm saying, if Cee Lo looks a little foolish at an award ceremony, that doesn't upset me.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

For some reason it seems to be impossible for me to delete my comment from my phone. Please disregard it. I've decided would prefer not to argue with you about it.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I can delete it if you wish, but I'd rather let it stay up because I like the points you make.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

You're too kind. Let it stay, then.

This seemed like one of those tiny little sweater snags that ends up unraveling everything, and suddenly I find myself defending other people's rights to call themselves druids, when my only point was that actually I quite like vanilla.

And I'm on holiday, and thinking about this was making me sad, when I really wanted to be enjoying looking at Mont Blanc.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

You've got a view of Mont Blanc right now? WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING WASTING YOUR TIME ON LIVEJOURNAL?

(Sorry, I mean "what the fudge". Wouldn't want to cause more upset!)

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Apologies for spelling and grammar above -am typing this on an iPhone onscreen keyboard. Actually, no. Fuck that.

[mollyc-q.livejournal.com]

I've had "laaaaaa, lalalala lalalala lalalala " running though my brain for several hours now.....

US censorship

[ursine1.livejournal.com]

The US prides itself on "freedom of speech", but it is one of the most restrictive in terms of censorship on broadcast media. All TV sets sold in the US for at least a decade have a "censorship" chip built in (commonly referred o as the "V-chip"). So there is really no excuse for "expletives" being deleted. It's interesting that in the US "hate speech" gets a pass. Just the "f-word" or "n-word" gets "bleeped" when they say "kill all the *bleep*".

Chuck

[my-tallest.livejournal.com]

I do have to agree, you gotta be able to sell it in Peoria.

I just want some consistency in explicit vs. safe versions in how the various consumers of music get the choice between the two presented to them. If I want to listen to the explicit version, give me my own channel, dammit. Or make the damn video twice. And then be consistent about how you build those channels.

I was just listening to Pandora, on the most banal of their presets, "Today's Hit Radio", just trying to get some exposure to mainstream music I'd heard vaguely about. (I try to keep in touch.) There's a "next" button, so I can limit my exposure to Justin Bieber, although at least I can say I've listened to 20 secs of his crap now, instead of just prejudging.

So Pandora gives up Enrique Iglesias' "Tonight (I'm Fucking You)" first as
the bowdlerized "Tonight (I'm Loving You)", then four song choices later, as the original. Same mainstream channel. So neither the Peorians or Vulgarians are happy. (Iglesias and his producers probably are the only ones.) I think the Puritans get what they want, if they set it to turn off explicit lyrics, in that the second one wouldn't play for them. But then, what if the only time it was coming up in the rotation, it was the explicit one and so got blocked, so Peoria never hears either?

As for me, if I've set Pandora to allow explicit lyrics, I want to hear those as my choice for that track *in place* of the bowdlerization. Naturally, because of the title change, every digital media lists it as two totally different songs. But could they mark the bowdlerizations as such, so that I could at least get the filtering out of that crap that the Puritans are enjoying with their explicit filter?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

The technological solutions are there and would work just fine if someone would use their fucking brain once in a while. I mean, the iTunes taboo filter is so crude it actually substitutes "c*m" for "cum" in the title of Latin hymns! The problem is that the Puritans always squawk louder, so they get catered to at the expense of the grown ups who can handle "bad words" without going apeshit.

Maybe we need to organise call-ins to protest craven instances of censorship in the same way that the easily-offended do to protest broadcasts most of them haven't even seen.