On Tuesday, MTV made news by launching its new site MTV Music and posting to it over 16,000 videos. Ars Technica compared the service to YouTube, speculating that it is making greater progress than YouTube in its mission to host “every single music video ever created.” Today, MTV Music is in the news once again for something it has that YouTube doesn’t: strict censorship.
Earlier today, Techdirt reported that MTV had heavily edited the video of "Weird Al" Yankovic’s Don’t Download This Song, his sarcastic plea to physically purchase his songs rather than illegally download them, so that he can “afford another solid gold Humvee.” The censored words were not expletives however, but rather the names of file-sharing services. These are the lyrics in the first verse of the uncensored version, which you can hear on YouTube.
Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge
To break international copyright law
By downloading MP3s from file-sharing sites
Like Morpheus or Grokster or Limewire or KaZaA
As you can hear in MTV’s version of the video below, the words “Morpheus,” “Grokster,” “Limewire,” and “KaZaA” have all been inexplicably bleeped.
Obviously, the censoring of these words is nonsense. How could the names of already well-known file-sharing applications cause any deal of harm great enough to excuse bleeping them as if they were curse words? The context of the lyrics is enough to deduce the meaning of the omitted words, anyway. The censoring of the song seems to contradict the message of the song, in a way. It supports Weird Al’s view that the music industry is too paranoid about the threat of piracy.
Reading this article was the first I had heard of MTV’s new site, so I decided to explore the site a little. It seemed like a good idea after all, and I was willing to write this off as one very peculiar, isolated incident. I began by searching for one of my favorite songs (which you may recognize), and was pleased to find it despite the video being fairly new. I was impressed – that is, until I got to the second verse, which goes like this.
I want to roll with him, a hard pair we will be
A little gambling is fun when you're with me
Russian roulette is not the same without a gun
And baby when it's love, if it’s not rough it isn't fun
At least, that’s how the lyrics go in the video on YouTube. In MTV’s version below, the lyrics have been slightly modified, replacing the words “Russian” and “gun” with brief pauses.
After hearing the verse for the first time, I had to replay it thinking the audio must have skipped, but each time “Russian” and “gun” were incomprehensibly absent. Still baffled, I could hardly believe my ears when I got to the third verse:
I won't tell you that I love you
Kiss or hug you
Cause I'm bluffin' with my muffin
I'm not lyin’, I'm just stunnin’ with my love glue-gunnin’
Try to guess which word was censored this time. If you said “gunnin’,” guess again. Apparently, the censors feel that glue guns aren’t as threatening as those used in Russian roulette. The word “muffin,” however, they believe is too much for your innocent ears to handle.
That’s right. MTV censored the word "muffin." I don’t even want to know their reasoning behind that.
So is this MTV’s bizarre way of promoting gun control and condemning carbohydrates? Who do they think they’re protecting from these supposedly offensive lyrics? I hope no children would be watching modern music videos, and I don’t think the mere mention of Russian roulette is enough to make anybody want to play it, or even to frighten anyone.
Other than some questionable scenes featuring Gossip Girl's Chace Crawford, the video and lyrics for Poker Face are relatively tame, yet MTV felt the need to butcher it in order to eliminate references to metaphorical weapons and baked goods. Lady GaGa’s other video on MTV Music called Just Dance, in which she violates a plastic whale while singing about getting extremely drunk, is left completely intact. I'm just saying...
1 comment:
Censorship is impossible now a days, since everything has a double meaning behind it from milkshakes to lollipops. So its really hard to decipher what someone real intention with those words. But I do agree that censorship has a double standard.
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