I was listening to the local Top 40 station and they were playing a song where the word “nigga” was blanked out. (It was obviously the next word.)
Is “nigga” generally a bleeped out word on commercial radio, or does it depend on the station? Are there any (other) words that are not generally considered “obscene” that get bleeped? I am woefully ignorant of most current music and trends.
This was a Clear Channel station, if that makes a difference.
From my experience, yet. If a station bleeps (I don’t think all of them do), the n-word is definitely one that they’ll bleep, in addition to shit, fuck, and sometimes ass and damn.
Kind of related: I have Dr. Dre’s CD 2001 and it’s censored (Unfortunately. I don’t know why I don’t throw that thing away and buy myself a real one). They bleep pretty liberally on this CD: when Eminem says “choke you to death” they bleep out both “choke” and “death.” Yet on one song, Dr. Dre calls Em his “nigga,” and they don’t bleep it out. I think it’s kind of funny. Must not have been expecting Dre to call a white boy that.
Well, it can vary from station to station, but the FCC does have general guidlines, and certain words, regardless of the staion, will almost always be bleeped, such as:
Fuck
Shit
Cunt
But some stations may bleep asshole, others may not, likewise with the n-word, and possibly others.
However, there is such a thing known as ‘safe harbor hours.’ Between 10 PM and 6 AM a radio station can play indecent (but not obscene) material.
Some stations always played the original version of Steve Miller’s “Jet Airliner” with the words “funky shit going down in the city”. Others played the sanitized version. I don’t think there’s and consistant rule. The same situation with The Who’s “Who Are You?” with the line “Who the fuck are you?”
There are inconsistencies within radio stations. The Clear Channel station here in NYC (Z100) will bleep out titty. However, if you say it in Spanish (tetitas-- or little titties), it’s ok.
On BBC radio over here, often expletives reversed - which makes shit sound amusingly like fish. Other commercial stations either do that or more commonly bleep it out.
On the student radio station I present for cue cheap plug, silencing is done on any swearing upwards of crap. Nigga (and similar terms) are also cut out, which pretty much means about half the rap songs on the playlist end up sounding like instrumentals. After the watershed (9 p.m.) that’s usually fine, but as we’re poor and can’t afford many fines discretion is usually used until pretty late at night.
I do not know the actual rules, but I believe it is up to the radio stations own policies. The exception being the Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words you can’t say on tv (radio). MTV bleeps out anything to do with guns, drugs, violence, sex. When Mtv actually plays a video it is very distilled and unlistenable (better word for that?). Then the same words used in a cop drama on another station are uncensored. It seems, “it depends” is the answer to the OP.
As a funny aside: on Comedy Central’s “Comedians of Comedy” some exec was explaining what words the comics could not use in their broadcast. The example was dick. It could be used in the sense of calling someone a dick, but not when referring to a penis. Patton Oswalt had a funny bit based on this – saying what if is penis was disrespectful to women, and he said his dick was a dick. Comedy Central bleeped the first one and let the second one go. HA!
That reminds me of a bit on Whose Line is it Anyway? where Ryan Stiles says, “Look, I can make my hands turn blurry!” He then proceeds to give the middle finger to the audience. Sure enough, they blurred it out!
Sometimes the choice of what to censor is very strange. I believe a South Park line was changed from “fingerbang” to “******bang” once. It always reminds me of the images from Monty Python of naked women with their knees or elbows blacked out.
I think that any bleeping of music is totally individual-station decided. I know of many songs from classic mainstream rock groups - The Who, the Stones, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan, Steely Dan - that contain four-letter words, yet are played unbleeped on the radio.
Maybe they’ve decided that if these songs haven’t corrupted us after four decades, we’re too old to be affected by them now. 
Until recently, when I heard Alice in Chains’ “Man in the Box” on the radio they’d play the whole thing uncensored (e.g. “shove my nose in shit”), but in the last month or so they’ve played a radio-edit version where “shit” is just silenced. Oddly enough, another station, however, still plays “Who Are You?” and Pink Floyd’s “Money” uncensored.