Friday, October 14, 2005
Cursing on the Radio
So, I'm listening to XPN and the 885 albums and something annoying happens. Right in the middle of Pearl Jam "Jeremy" from Ten (#34) I hear the following : "seemed a harmless little neahamragh". Like they do these days on the pussy afraid commercial radio stations they altered the "offending phrase/word" and rendered it inaudible (but I'm sure they thought it was also more musical instead of a beep sound). I say, leave the fucking music alone fuckheads! It's really odd on XPN and independant radio stations when you hear it for a few reasons. First is that songs older than 1990 are all played free and clear, I hear all kinds of curse words in the older songs. Second is that it's not illegal to use most words on the radio. I suppose playing them can cause listeners to complain, but how many complaints would you get from XPN listeners? I mean this is a public radio/liberal/adult audience. I bet the only complaints you would get would be from people like me crying that the art has been soiled and shouldn't even have been played at all. It's like going into a gallery and seeing a famous painting with a big red dot over any nudity.. I mean come on!
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2 comments:
It's not that it's illegal, but the station certainly could be fined by the FCC for broadcasting indecent content - a nebulous and virtually undefined term. Because it is Penn that owns the station license and not the station itself, XPN's management is pretty sensitive about these kind of things.
XPN almost lost its license in the 70s back when it was run by students.
It was pretty much a rebel station when I was at Penn in the 90's too. Call me crazy but shouldn't our colleges and universities be embracing the first amendment instead of censoring art so they can minimize the risk of fines? I read in "The Week" this week (issue 230, p18, summarizing Kathleen Parker from the Orlando Sentinel) that our higher education centers across America are self censoring their student newspapers so that people won't be offended by what they see in them. I really find it counter productive for our higher learning institutions to be teaching that the first amendment is only ok if nobody gets offended. It is this public correctness that has virtually removed all public debate in this country and it's a shame.
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