I figured this was closer to a General Question than a Cafe Society question, but the mods are more than free to touch that dial and spin it over to the classic and hit sounds of Cafe Society FM if they deem it appropriate.
Anyway, I listen to the radio a lot (I spend a lot of time driving). Since there’s only so much news I can listen to, and I avoid talkback because it’s the radio equivalent of YouTube comments, I like to listen to various music stations too, and naturally sometimes they play songs which I know contain swear words.
Some of the stations have made a choice to play the “uncensored” version of songs with fairly mild swear-words by Australian standards; I’ve heard the word “shit” in lyrics on commercial radio quite often - while other radio stations play a “clean” edit with the naughty words blanked out or otherwise masked by the music. I also believe most of these edited versions come from the record labels, usually in the US, because the commercial radio stations don’t have the time to be messing around deciding which swear-words they’re OK with in a song and censoring the rest themselves.
Now, I completely understand why commercial FM radio stations can’t/won’t broadcast words like “Motherfucker”, “Nigga” and/or even “Shit” - but what I can’t work out though is why these “clean” edits often omit (mostly) harmless words like “Ass” or “Balls” yet leave “Bitch” in.
I understand there’s different community standards - I don’t think most adults in Australia would object to a song with the word “shit” in it being played uncensored outside the school drop-off/pick-up slot, for example - but are there really significant numbers of people in the US who would get an attack of the vapours over a radio station broadcasting a chart song which included uncensored lyrics like “The haters can kiss my ass”?
As an example, if you take the Macklemore song Thrift Shop, in the “clean” edit, the line where the artist is singing “I got a big cock” is censored, but a later reference to a used set of bedsheets smelling of “piss” is left in. (It goes without saying the refrain “This is fucking awesome” is censored out; I understand why that is.)
The “censored” edit of Lilly Allen’s Hard Out Here is almost unlistenable because so much of it is blanked out - yet, when you listen to the “uncensored” version most of the blanked words are things like “balls” and “tits” which, whilst not the most decorous of terms, are hardly something one would think the average person would find objectionable, particularly in light of how the song’s refrain is about how things are “hard out here for a bitch” and is uncensored.
Basically, I don’t get why “Bitch” is OK but “Ass” isn’t - or why “Cock” is objectionable but “Piss” is acceptable. Why is that? Who comes up with these things? Do people think it’s stupid too or are there significant numbers of people in the US genuinely glad their eardrums haven’t been exposed to the word “Ass” in a Top 40 song on the radio?