Life's Little Rants #6: The Wacky World of Censorship

I was listening to a radio station at work yesterday. To preface the next part of the story, they switch radio stations periodically at work to accomodate the varied listening tastes (a word sometimes used loosely in these matters) of the semi-diverse groups that are employed within. Without getting into something else altogether by discussing my feelings about different, lesser genres of music, the groups of listeners involved are basically white, black, and hillbilly. You have your couple of stations that pretty much cater to all types, and these are the stations I wish they would leave on at all times. They play a good, wide array of songs from several decades, from an equally wide array of different artists from several genres. One of those stations even plays a lot of 80's music (in my opinion, the best decade for music, hands down). One or two stations that get rotation at work rely on a pretty strict diet of , for lack of a better term, black music. You have your rap (or, I guess they're calling it "hip-hop" nowadays, even though they're still rapping...oh well), R&B and soul. The other station plays top 40 music, and since most of the top 40 these days is black music...well, there you go. Then, last and least, you have your country music. We don't hear the country station too much, which is fine by me, but we paid for it earlier this week, as several representatives of the country faction managed to scribble enough decipherable words onto a piece of paper, which managed to find its way into the suggestion box and, when read, bitched about the fact that country music isn't played often enough, in their opinion. I think it said something to the extent of "More Hank! Yee Haw!" (sorry, the ills of L'ville still boil deep within me) So, we had an entire day of country music. Next week, my suggestion for the box will either be polka, or, if one exists, a station of nothing but Gregorian chant. I digress.

So, we happened to have it on one of the black stations at some point yesterday. You know the one: "The Quiet.......Storm" (cue thunderclap and rainfall effects). They start playing a Prince song. I think "cool", as I like Prince. The song is "Housequake", which is one of those Prince songs you don't ever hear getting play on the radio. I think "cooler still". So I'm singing along with the words, to myself, at my desk, and within the first 30 seconds of the song, the reason why you don't hear this particular song on the radio becomes abundantly clear: Prince, in all his glory, yells "Bullshit!" I exclaim out loud "YES!", since I absolutely love it when any expletive makes its way onto the airwaves, intentional or not. Sure enough, within 5 to 10 seconds of the faux pas, the song fades out prematurely, and another, tamer song begins to play. I sort of chuckled to myself, shook my head, and went about my business, ignoring the replacement music. What's even funnier, in a dark kind of funny, is that radio station is probably going to receive a fine for airing that word on the radio. Why? Because as sure as God made the platypus while he was stoned, some old lady will call in with a claim of being offended at hearing the word "shit" coming out of her radio. This same lady probably hung up the phone and yelled to a group of kids outside to get off her goddamn lawn. Yes, my friends, Irony and Humor may have been surgically separated at birth, but they still share a spiritual link that no crazy situation in life can rend asunder. The South Park movie summed this up best with the line "Remember what the MPAA says: Horrific, deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don't say any naughty words!"

Thus begins the rant.

Why do I love it when an expletive finds its way into the public's ear? Because, quite simply, it's a small way of sticking it to Those Who Would Have Us Speak The Way They Want Us To And Hear And See Only What They Want Us To. Face it, expletives are a part of nearly everybody's everyday dialect. A lot of people know when it's appropriate to use them, depending on the company we share or the situation at hand, but there really is no getting away from them, no matter what we do. We will deal with someone, somewhere, every day, who will use some form of "colorful metaphor" to express themselves. Are we going to dry up and wither away at the sound of such evilness? Doubtful. Example: Fuck. I just now typed that word for the purpose of making a point. Did I hurt anyone? Did I risk a chance at world peace by using that word? It's not like I replied to a comment I may have not liked by saying "fuck you". Even if I had, would that have killed anyone? The use of it would have been to merely express a feeling or thought. Luckily, I have an extensive enough of a vocabulary that I can tell someone how I feel in a way that will still be interpreted as "fuck you", even though I didn't say the actual words.

My point is, why bleep things out or cut things off at all? Who are They trying to protect? Children, maybe? Fine, bleep something out. Don't you think that's just going to arouse a kid's curiosity as to what was bleeped out, and they're going to find out anyway, whether you like it or not? In fact, they're more likely to seek something out if they know it's taboo or forbidden in any way. Kids test limits, and they're rebellious. Just say the word, and let the kid decide what to do with it. Then, if the parents hear it from the kid, they can deal with him/her. Good enough parents will raise their kids to deal with trivial things like this in life, and teach them that if they should choose to incorporate certain "metaphors" into their vernacular, there may be consequences. I believe good parenting is guiding children, not imprisoning them in Their beliefs. Talk to your kids about what they hear and see. Always make yourself accessible to them, so if they have questions about life, they know they can come to you without fear of being punished for just being curious. Teach them to make good choices, and trust them to act on those choices.

Ok, granted, I'm not a parent myself. But I've been in this world enough to be able to see from my experiences, and from what I see a lot of people in the world going through, to know how well I was taught, how I would have liked to have been taught about things I may not have been, and how I would teach my own children. My mom swore occasionally. She understood it rubbed off on me, and subsequently I used a lot of words in the company of my friends, as we all did, to sort of see how the world reacted. We tested the waters of society's view of us based on how we talk to our fellow human beings. And you know what? I think we turned out ok. We watched R-rated movies, we listened to music with naughty words in it, some of us may have even watched a little porn...and we turned out ok. Well, most of us did, anyway.

Speaking of us, are They trying to protect us, too? Sorry, I've already been raised once, and I don't need to be raised again. I don't need to have bad words kept from me by a group of uptight prudes, like I've never heard them before, or because They've decided what's best for me, like I'm a child. I decide what's best for me, and if I want to listen to songs with "bad words" in them, that's my choice. If I want to watch a TV show or movie with bad language or nudity in it, that's my choice. This is why I hate watching movies on TV, and why I will never purchase an edited version of an album, or even a edited single from an album. The line between the world we live in and the world of Big Brother is getting really thin lately, and getting thinner all the time. It's all of funny, sad, pathetic and maddening that something as stupid as seeing Janet Jackson's boob for a half a second has set off this whole new movement of censorship in our country. It's not like we knew the boob was coming, and half a second wasn't even long enough to grasp what had just happened. Hell, I wouldn't have even realized what happened if the media and some priorities-screwed-up parents hadn't blown the whole damn thing out of proportion. I saw her boob...so what? I've seen boobs before. Anybody who's ever had sex with a woman, not to mention every woman on earth who's ever looked in a mirror, has seen boobs before. Just because it happened to be on the TV screen for a split second doesn't mean it's obscene. Jeez, They're trying to make it seem like the boob attempted to open a direct gateway to the depths of Hell.

So, a final message to Them: Stop bleeping out life. Stop pretending it doesn't exist, or that it will go away if we ignore it. Deal with it. Let us deal with it, and stop trying to protect us by telling us what we should or shouldn't hear or watch. Help work on the real problems of the world for a change, instead of trying to run everyone else's lives. If you can't do any or all of that, well then...

"Fuck You."

;-)