I used to be totally against any form of censorship, but as I’ve got older and I have two young nephews I find myself becoming a bit of an old fuddy-duddy about it. I kinda want to protect their innocence as much as possible.
When I’m in the car with my nephews and the news starts I try to flick to a CD to avoid the talk about sex, drugs, rape and murder. Call me a coward, but I want to avoid the barrage of questions on those subjects and the whole can of worms they will open. I remember one such occasion when nephew number 1 asked me what they meant by, “found her body in a ditch”, after listening to the news on our national radio station (Radio1). Shudder…
I kinda like the idea of everyone taking responsibility for themselves on the censorship front. Having said that you can’t be with them 100% of the time etc.
So now on to the item that prompted this post…
My favorite advert at the moment is from Google. It’s one of those generic, “Use all Google products because they are hip and so by extension, using them makes you hip!”, type adds. Why do I like it? Purely because of the music. It’s a track called Traktor by Wretch 32, which I love. Why did it prompt this post? As with most hip-hop songs is contains some adult language and themes. So what did Google choose to censor? The words in bold were blanked in the add.
“My lifestyle’s terribly wild, but you’ll never catch me on the Jeremy Kyle show”
“Explosive, terrorist style. Don’t think I’m a blow I’ll get you therapy now woah”
“I ride this mothafucking beat like a tractor. I ride this mothafucking beat like a train”
“Zoom zoom down the rabbit hole. More women more alcohol here”
So “Jeremy Kyle” is censored, which I can understand because his show is truly worthy of the “Jeremy Vile” nickname. The word “terrorist” is censored, which seems a little odd to me. The song is not promoting terrorism, so it hardly seems worth messing with. What is surprising is that “mothafucking” (not my spelling) is not blanked. Well to be fair they do play some traffic noises over it, but it is still clearly audible in the chorus. Seems a little strange for an add that runs throughout the day, especially since this was blanked on the radio edit of the song. As for the last quote, I assume somebody at Google understood what that meant before they OKed it in a national advert right? 🙂
Censorship is a very tricky subject, because as this advert shows, we all have different opinions on what should (if anything) be censored.
Cheers
Tim…
Being born in a then fascist state, I was exposed to censorship from a tender age.
Mostly, I found it as stupid as the folks implementing it.
Ie: get smart folks, it might be useful. Get idiots – or worse: bureaucrats! – and all heck breaks lose.
I guess there are now buraucraps at Google? 😉
wow, an actual Post-It sized comment field.
I still giggle at the part of Start Me Up cut out of the Windows 95 intro.
My kids are more self-censoring than I am censoring. Yet I remember being more South Parkish at their ages. I know some kids got kicked out of computer lab in my kids middle school for looking at porn, and some girl at the high school sent a pic of her ex-boyfriend naked to the whole school (didn’t see it myself, don’t know if it was ‘shopped – it’s considered distribution of child pornography here). So there’s no real protecting them from it, all we can do is instill values and hope they don’t rebel too strongly when the get rebellious. 14-year-old girls pushing strollers around opened my older one’s eyes his first day of high school.
That reminds me of Band Hero, where they’ve blanked out the word “whiskey” in the chorus to American Pie, but not the word “rye”…