I don’t know if this has happened in other countries, but here in Australia They’ve censored “teenage dirtbag” in a really weird way. The second verse starts off:
Her boyfriend’s a dick
he brings a gun to school.
and he’d simply kick
My arse if he knew the truth.
This is how it is played on local radio:
Her boyfriend’s a dick
he brings a *** to school.
and he’d simply kick
My arse if he knew the truth.
This is true for the single release version too.
I could understand if “dick” or “arse” had been cut, even though it’d piss me off. And I have seen a video clip on TV where all three words are cut. “Gun” has never been a swearword in my vocabulary, and it’s true that we’re not a gun-loving nation but this is insane.
Any comments on this, or examples of other weird censoring?
I just like it when they play 3eB’s “Semi-Charmed Life”.
[fudd]Let me give you a sample.[/fudd] “Doin’ crystbrachlefeth will lift you up…”
The actual lyric:
“Doin’ crystal meth will lift you up…”
Also they leave out that whole cool middle section of this song because it’s talking about panties and mattress flipping. All I have to say is, wtf? This is really the only song that the censorship irks me on.
It depends completely on the reference. Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” never gets cut, but Buckcherry’s “All Lit Up Again” (sample lyric: “I love the cocaine/ I love the cocaine”) is almost never braodcast intact. Why? Beats me.
Strangest one that I’ve seen is Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl.” The song originally goes:
“Makin’ love in the green grass
Behind the stadium with you,
My brown eyed girl.”
When I was growing up, one of the local radio stations simply cut one of the lines from earlier in the song and repeated it so that the song then said:
“Laughin’ and a runnin’, hey hey
Behind the stadium with you,
My brown eyed girl.”
This same station would play Clapton’s “Cocaine” all the time, but they chose to edit this?!? WTF?
But I recall finding an old book with medieaval songs in it (printed in the 1950s) and almost every page had tipex over it. Intentional. Done by the library my granny took it from (and never brought back)
During the first OJ Simpson trial it came to be know that Police Det. Furlong used the word nigger. On the evening news Tom Brokaw actually said ‘on several occasions Det. Furlong used the N-word.’ The ‘N-word’? I thought it a bit silly for a newscaster to use such a phrase. Especially after they played a tape of Furlong saying it.
On a recent episode of Win Ben Stein’s Money, they bleeped Ben saying “testicles”. Which is laughable, given the really vile double-entendres they run all the time, as their category titles.
I can’t vouch for the accuracy of this info, but I had heard that the altered version of the song was actually requested by Van Morrison. I don’t know if he was overcome with some religious zealotry or what, but for some reason, he decided that the “making love in the green grass” line was inappropriate.
I actually have 2 Van Morrison CD’s, each with a different version of Brown Eyed Girl as noted above. It’s not just the radio stations that have the re-done version.
Dang…I thought I hit cancel in time to stop the post above. I looked a little further and found the following cite from the Van Morrison website:
Art Siegel comments on the two versions of the lyrics (one with, and one without the line “makin’ love in the green grass”):
There is a comment in the book about some radio stations having censored the song, with no further explanation. The removal of the "makin' love" line was an overdub by an engineer for censorship/airplay purposes that was done in 1967. I don't think either the original LP or single versions were censored, however, though I've seen a note that "some copies of the Blowin' Your Mind LP have the censored version. The 1973 LP T. B. Sheets, reissued from the Bang session material, contained the censored version without explanation, however.
I guess that explains why I have two CD’s with the different versions on them.
Censorship in the U.S. is queer. Violence is more acceptable than nudity or cussing. Shouldn’t we be more sensitive to familiarizing our children to violence than with the human body or certain spoken words?
As for the OP, Jet Airliner by the Steve Miller Band was censored queerly, first for radio, than on the band’s greatest hits album, where Miller sings:
I don’t want to get caught up in any of that
Funky kicks goin’ down in the city.
They substituted kicks for shit. Kicks? What, you’re scared of Bruce Lee or Chuck Norris? You’ve got a problem with shoes? The Rockettes really weird you out?
They do this in the states too. Here in Seattle it’s censored the same way… in fact any mention of guns is removed… so suddenly we don;t know what to shoot each other with… we’ve tried rubber bands… and just TRY to hold up a bank with a wter psitol… now i could only remember what it was I was supposed to put these bullets in.
“We’ll be makin’ love,
under the boardwalk.
Boardwalk”
got changed to
“We’ll be havin’ some fun
under the boardwalk
Boardwalk”
Now makin’ love is havin’ some fun, but havin’ some fun ain’t necessarily makin’ love. In the censored version they could be playing go fish, for the gods’ sakes.
The weirdest one though, IMO, is the original MTV video for Tom Petty’s “You don’t know how it feels to be me”
While none of the radio stations I heard it on did anything, MTV actually make it:
“Let’s get to the point
Let’s roll another (sounded like) schnmarnk”
The League of Gentlemen was being played on BBCAmerica. In one episode, the store-owner’s wife (played by a male actor in drag) was nursing a pig with her breast. No mosaic. Later in the same episode, the covers of some porn magazines. Mosaic.
On The View, Merideth Viera once exposed a pair of fake breasts. No mosaic, but she was careful when removing the fake breasts to not reveal her real ones.
Another episode of The View. Gigantic drawing of a vagina. But when one of the girls was on another talk show talking about it, she said she had some trouble with the producers over the word “vagina”.
What’s the logic here? Plastic breasts, even when indistinguishable from real ones (exc. implants), are okay while any other depiction of bare breasts is verboten? And a drawing of a vagina is okay, but watch your mouth?
I’m not even getting into male asses vs. female asses.
(and people think Japan has some weird censorship policies…)
