*#@%#*! The Language of Pop Music
At the risk of sounding like a prude, I'm curious what pop music fans think of the growing number of censored words on top 40 radio today. Since Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl" a little over a year ago and its endless "This my sh**, this my sh**" it seems that the only thing multiplying faster than pop hits with swear words are the multitude of ways the words are (barely) concealed for pop radio play.
Kanye West's elimination of the "n" word for radio play of "Gold Digger" seemed to so entertain Kanye that he has taken to performing the censored version in concert before breaking into audience singalong in which white people are free to shout the "n" word. A particularly unusual way of censoring the language in a hit song occurs in the sanitized take on Panic! At the Disco's hit "I Write Sins Not Tragedies." The offending word is actually used for effective emphasis in the original song, but radio plays a version in which a prefix is blanked leaving us with ***damn as the more acceptable term. The brain that can't figure out the word being altered is a sheltered one indeed.
Moving forward in time the 2 most recent top added pop songs on radio incorporate their fair share of foul language in the original unexpurgated versions. Fergie luxuriates in an "Oh Sh**" chorus on "London Bridge" (replaced in other versions with either "Oh Shh" or "Oh Snap") and former boy band star Justin Timberlake sings the MF word on "SexyBack." Perhaps this is all a sign of the times since, despite the FCC continued escalation of fines for indecent broadcasts, President Bush finds it acceptable to utter the word sh** when meeting with G8 world leaders.
What is your opinion? Is the language going too far? Has pop radio taken care of the problem?
Vote:
Comments
Call me a cynic, but it seems if you slap a parental advisory sticker on an album these days it’s a way to gaurantee a boost in sales. What happens when one downloads an album I wonder?
I am a teacher in the UK and foul swearing is commonplace. After a while you either become desensitised to it and it means nothing, or you make a big deal about it and try and make it taboo.
As a singer/songwriter I find the use of swearing pointless except in extreme cases to make a point. For Example in Alanis Morrisette”s you Oughter Know or Green Day’s American Idiot. Surely a good songwriter can use metaphor and innuendo to get a point accross far more effectively, as in Billy Idol’s Dancing with myself?
I am sure there is no real answer to this one. For me a barrage of swearing/foul language in a song is tedious and boring, it seems a marketing ploy aimed at kids, so they buy more music. Get a life and be more creative!
Graham with all the crap going on in the world why use music to make it worse, songs in my opinion are to make one happy and just bring a good feeling to you soul
I am disgusted by the increasing use of foul language in pop songs and, thus, in
videos. A songwriter coming up through the more “mainstream” ranks could never get away with this. To me using foul language is a cop-out. Use more thought, intelligence, and imaginatiom to get a decent point across. If you have no decent thoughts, wait till you have some before writing a dull, vacuous, expletive-filled piece of garbage. There should be larger fines or stronger mechanisms by which this low quality, profane lyric writing can be curtailed.
It is not only morally offensive; it is
aesthetically offensive.
Most of the moronic, self-absorbed crap that passes for modern “entertainment,” including “music” is devoid of meaningful content. To think it can be salvaged by shocking language, is silly.
I think everybody needs to relax. A word is just that, a word. If you don’t like it, don’t listen to it. It’s rather simple.
I think that most of the main stream pop music played today is based on how catchy it is, and more importantly, the measure of it’s shock value. Pop music itself is helping to demoralize the mainstream market making it more difficult to find real quality music on the radio.