As I have mentioned before in these pages, I am not a fan of censorship. My feeling is that if you don’t want your kids to hear all the swears in some song, then don’t let them listen to it until they are older. And if you don’t like what is in a particular book, then don’t read it! Just don’t stop me from enjoying it, f-bombs and all. That being said, there is clearly no way to completely avoid censorship over public airwaves like the radio and network television. They know that kids might be watching, or more importantly, the FCC, and so they bleep and bloop out anything that they think might get them into trouble, oftentimes with hilarious results.
Let me tell you the problem with censoring certain words or phrases from a song or a television show. The people listening are not fooled by you. They know that Samuel L. Jackson did not just stop talking for half of his sentence. We all know that you have been mucking with his ish. And the human mind, knowing that you wouldn’t have taken out non-offensive words, immediately inserts the most offensive thing it can think of to fill in the blank.
Now, if a little kid hears the new Matchbox 20 song on the radio and the line that is played sounds like “You better get your ___ together,” they will fill in what makes sense to them. They will probably imagine the word “stuff” or the word “act.” Or if they have caught on to the whole censorship thing, they will stick in the worst word that they know, which is “poop.” And so the censorship has done its job, protecting the small children from what I will henceforth refer to as “the s-word,” or, alternatively, “shit.” But for those of us who are not in kindergarten, the censorship has not worked, because we all know what Rob Thomas was really saying, even though they bleeped it out.
Where it gets really hilarious is when they start bleeping things that maybe aren’t so bad, like drug references. Who bleeps what is really pretty subjective, it seems to me. Some radio stations scramble up the words “crystal meth” from Third Eye Blind’s “Semi-Charmed Life,” but others do not. And if you don’t know the song yourself, and you hear the line “Doing ________ will lift you up until you break,” then your brain is going to have to guess what the line really was. And you might come up with crystal meth on your own, or you might come up with something even worse, like “tons of chicks,” “it in a Taco Bell bathroom,” or “The Macarena.”
My favorite bit of censorship comes during the Kid Rock song “All Summer Long,” in which he mentions that he was smoking funny things. I guess incense must not be a funny thing, nor are clove cigarettes or BBQ ribs, because many radio stations bleep out the first part of the word smoking. Now, instead of imagining Kid Rock experimenting with different blends of marijuana or making dinner for his friends, we get the line “We were bleep-ing funny things,” which to my mind conjures up something else entirely, possibly involving vacuum cleaners and/or sheep.
Honestly, they could be bleeping perfectly innocent words all the time, and we would never know! We just assume that the words they are taking out are bad, but maybe for fun, they sometimes remove good words too, for the hilarious effect. If you have ever seen the censored Count video from Sesame Street, then you know what I am talking about. Maybe that Nine Inch Nails song that I heard on the radio the other day, in which they sang “I want to bleep you like an animal” actually contains the word “pat,” and I have only assumed it was something naughty this whole time.
My point, if I have one, is that if we have to live in a censored world, we might as well make the most of it and have some fun in the process. The next time you hear some words removed from a song or a movie, don’t just assume that it is the worst thing you can think of. Try out three or four different options before settling on the one that you like the best. After all, if they aren’t going to provide the entire artistic work to you, it only seems fair that you fill in the blanks however you want in an act of creative defiance.