I was gonna say… you have to be making some totally reaching interpretations of the song to find anything objectionable in it.
[sub](The lyrics for FFTFT are not linked to at the top of the page, but they are printed after the lyrics for Go Home.)[/sub]
http://www.summer.com.br/~pfilho/html/lyrics/n/night_chicago_died.txt
Why is this song on the list? We should be so lucky to win this battle against those that would war against the forces of the law.
For the last time, nobody is warring against the forces of the law. The company in question has issued NO LIST OF BANNED SONGS.
I am sorry to keep repeating this, but apparently some people are not reading the entire thread.
OK, I’ll accept that there is no order from ClearChannel censoring songs. But the document must have originated somewhere, I suspect that some local station created the list without any directive from above.
He sure as hell does!!!
I have the live version with him yelling “Fuck the Revolution” too - it’s one of the best live versions I’ve ever heard.
Weren’t we all singing “Sunday Bloody Sunday” in here the other day?
Which is what bothers me the most about that short list of songs. Any one of those could actually offer comfort or solace at a time like this.
Dammit!
I should read the entire thread next time.
But for what it’s worth, Bono STILL rocks!
Read the link. Clear Channel Communications released a list of songs they suggested stations think twice before playing. It was an internal memo giving suggestions, not a policy. It is completely up to local stations which songs they play.
Somebody needs to tell whoever made this list that “Suicide Solution” is by Ozzy Osbourne, not Black Sabbath.
The Alanis song talks about a man dying in a plane crash. The Barenaked Ladies song has the word “Falling” in the title. There are other songs on the list that indicate “Falling” was a listable offense.
There’s nothing that even hints at this in the official ClearChannel press release from their website. They flatly deny any censorship took place.
However, in light of the new statement attributed to ClearChannel on Snopes, I withdraw my remark. Yes, ClearChannel IS censoring its affiliates playlists. Any time your corporate HQ “suggests” something like this, the affiliates will interpret it as an official policy.
My mistake. It wasn’t a list circulated from the top down. It was grassroots.
Defend this statement, please.
And what do you think terrorism is?
I believe that qualifies as “spin”. And you appear to have been spun quite nicely.
The “official” story is that the list is a list of “suggested bans”. It seems quite clear that ClearChannel intends, or at least intended, to place a don’t-play notation on at least some songs, including some, if not all, of the songs mentioned in the OP, and it is quite reasonable for us to discuss whether such an action is warranted, either on a case by case basis or as a whole, notwithstanding whether they actually go through with it or not.
“Spun”? At the time I posted earlier, I hadn’t seen the Snopes link that says that the list did actually originate from a ClearChannel employee. All I had seen was the statement given by ClearChannel, which makes NO MENTION of ANY LIST, which is exactly what I said. I would have to call this “lied to”, not “spun”. I apologize for misleading anyone, but that was not my intention; as I said, when I posted earlier all I knew was what had been posted officially by ClearChannel, which made no mention of any list and said that no songs had been banned.
Again, my apologies. On re-reading the thread, I see that your post about warring against the forces of law was referring to the terrorists, not to ClearChannel. I misinterpreted the first time I read it. Sorry.
I’m going to go hide in a closet now until I can learn to post correct information. Sorry, everyone.
hehe…
they sooo missed “Life During Wartime” by Talking Heads… and I don’t think they could really play anything from Pink Floyd’s The Wall if that’s how they feel.
And Battle of Evermore by Zeppelin is about war and all that nasty stuff much more than Stairway is.
It’s especially a shame because the operator of 60% of rock radio has now betrayed its lack of knowledge of the genre.
You just defended it for me. Lower level ClearChannel employees interpreted the “suggestions” as mandatory.
I can tell you haven’t ever worked in a huge megacorporation with HQ in a different city. I used to get lots of “suggestions” from Corp HQ all the time. They were ALL mandatory. That’s how they do things.
Yes, but it was used in “Good Morning, VietNam” as background music for a montage of the vietnamese countryside being blown up.
Could be construed as a “Negative” connotation.
If yer paranoid, that is.
Chris W
The New York Times has a good article on this.
Why is this a big deal?
Are you arguing that Clear Channel should continue to play songs that upset people by reminding them of the disaster? Wouldn’t people be even more outraged if they did that?
Isn’t it simply a matter of good taste to refrain from playing songs that remind people of such terrible pain?
Granted some of the choices are silly (censorship lists always are), but is it all that unusual for people to become angry or offended for silly reasons? What’s wrong with avoiding that?
When Fox decided not to show “Independence Day” last Sunday, was that censorship? Were you protesting then?
Finally, the songs aren’t “censored.” The stations don’t want to ban them from the airwaves. They just want to stop playing them while the memory of this is still fresh. In a few months, nearly all of the songs will be back.
I did a quick search http://www.google.com/search?q=clear+channel+150+songs and there appear to be far too many seemingly legitimate links there for this to have been anything but a top-down mandatate, um, I mean ‘suggestion’.
As I read through the list of not-quite-banned songs, my first thought was “You mean there are places where Clear Channel actually played some of this stuff?”
My second thought was all the songs they missed. Since it appears that not a lot of thought went into the Clear Channel list, I’m going to take some liberties on my own list…
“Wave of Mutilation” - The Pixies
“Dead Set on Destruction” - (forgot the original artist, but I have a cover by Trip Shakespeare)
“Waitress in the Sky” - The Replacements
“Shoot’m Down” - Morphine
“The Only Flame in Town” - Elvis Costello
“Disintegration” - The Cure
“Push the Little Daisies” - Ween
“Kung Fu Fighting” - Village People
Those were the first that popped to mind…