So I downloaded this song from iTunes and it came with one of those obnoxious explicit labels.
Can my fair dopers please explain this to me?
Lyrics:
*All I can say is that my life is pretty plain
I like watchin’ the puddles gather rain
And all I can do is just pour some tea for two
and speak my point of view
But it’s not sane, It’s not sane…
*
I’m stumped!!!
Thw whole album might have been labled, or it might have to do with some belief that the band was advocating drug use.
The decisons as to what gets labeled are not very rational. Frank Zappa once got an explicit language sticker for an album that was completely instrumental, not a sung or spoken word on the album.
The word “insane” in the lyrics might cause people to go insane. We can’t let that happen, now can we? We must be ultra-careful with these things, you know.
(It’s probably the “cheeks” reference.)
PMRC- Gotta love Tipper Gore.
Jazz from Hell is the album. PMRC’s way of stuffing it up his ass after the Congressional hearings where he made fools of the commitee.
In fairness, one of the songs was titled “G-Spot Tornado”. (Great song in studio, mind-blowing played live.) That’s weak to be sure, but defendable grounds for an explicit content warning.
Explicit content? The content is music. Period.
Uh, no. If the cover art included boobies that would also merit an explicit content rating. Just an example to show the flaw in your simplistic logic.
And G-spot tornado isn’t a song, its a piece of music. Songs are the kind of crap you here on the radio, American Idol and at a restaurant on your birthday. Puke.
Sounds like you are familiar with this particular piece anyway. Was that a giant whoosh?
Anyway the cover of Jazz from hell has no boobies. Its an image of a jazz club. just a building, no people at all. No boobies.
You remind me of Elias from clerks 2.
Just a reminder: From the rules of Cafe Society, which are based on the registration agreement:
If someone would like to post a link to the complete lyrics as posted elsewhere, please do, but don’t quote the whole thing (or a too-substantial chunk) here.
twickster, Cafe Society moderator
Dial back the pretension around 9 notches.
I am familiar with it; I physically bought around 40 different Zappa CDs, which are currently sitting in a duffle bag at my feet. I have his complete library in mp3 form.
And no, it was not a whoosh. “G-Spot Tornado” is not a G-Rated song title, no matter how much you wish “piece of music” titles weren’t part of the artistic content of an album.
My band has an album up on iTunes, and while three songs indeed have a bit of explicit language, the entire album and each song individually got the Explicit tag. I’m not happy at all with that policy, either, but it was that or not being on iTunes.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this argument recently. I’m curious where this is coming from.
Whatever the technical arguments (and technically, a song is far more than what you describe), song is a perfectly correct colloquial English word in this context.
I have the Blind Melon CD right here, with the Bee Girl on the cover, and there was no “Parental Warning” on it back then. Or had Tipper Gore not started that yet? The song was also extensively played on the radio. I’m as confused as the OP.
I bought the album at the time, partially because I was going through a bit of a Zappa phase, but also to stick it back to the PMRC.
The PMRC hearings took place in the mid-80s and the album in question came out in 1993 so there’s no real association between the two except for the warning.
I suspect, although I’ll never be able to prove it, that Blind Melon is getting the warning because Shannon Hoon overdosed on drugs, therefore the music became suspect for drug euphemisms and references. As you said, the copy I got when the album came out had no warning on it, and while it’s been a long time since I heard it the whole way through I don’t remember anything particularly explicit.
The Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream was sold in an explicit and non-explicit version…the only difference being the non-explicit version didn’t have the tracklisting printed on the back of the jewel case, one of the songs being named “Silverfuck”. No swear words on the album.
The explicit version didn’t carry the PMRC sticker though. This was apparently a “business decision” by Virgin Records not to offend certain retailers (WalMart).
For the Mellon Collie album, a song called “Fuck You (An Ode to No One)” carried only the parenthetical title on the back of the case to avoid this “problem”.
Hilariously, in the iTunes store songs like “King Herod and the Cock”, which refers to a rooster and is an olde timey Christmas song, get spelled “C*ck”.