“I like morning.”
If you’re listening to the radio, and Cardi B’s “Money” comes on, you might hear her chirp this pleasant ode to sunup.
Unfortunately, it’s a lie.
Cardi might actually like morning, but she has altered the song, editing out the rapper’s actual line, which is, “I like morning sex.”
I started paying more attention to radio censorship after listening to Amy Shark’s cover version of a Wheatus hit, “Teenage Dirtbag,” and noticing that Spotify bleeps out the word “gun” when she sings, “He brings a gun to school.” The radio edit of the original song bleeps out the entire phrase “gun to school.” The band has confirmed that the week they gave the song to their record label was the first anniversary of Columbine.
Gun mentions are censored elsewhere. When Everlast sings, “He pulled out his chrome .45,” the phrase “chrome .45” is bleeped. In Lil Wayne’s “Uproar,” my local station bleeped out the phrase “gang signs.” Drug references are routinely scratched out.
The strangest part of all this is that you can say and show more and more on TV, whereas the trend on radio seems to be censors standing athwart history shouting, “Stop.”
George Carlin had no idea how good he had it! The late comic started his now-legendary routine, “The Seven Dirty Words,” in 1972. It was reportedly inspired by the night Lenny Bruce was arrested for obscenity during a show. Carlin was there and was arrested when he refused to cooperate with police. According to journalist Timothy Bella, it “was directed at not just the corporate control of the entertainment industry, but also the sterile society that refused to rethink its own attitudes and values toward language.” Now, on radio, there’s apparently so much more you can’t say.
On TV, regulations against “indecency” are more likely to be enforced against nudity, as we learned in the national conversation on Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, than against sailor-speak. “We’ve used the f-word on air now multiple times in the last several years,” FX network president John Landgraf told reporters in 2015. “So we’re on the verge of being, kind of, done with the debate or battle over language. It’s close anyway.”
Landgraf is clearly right about the direction of the wider culture. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to listen to the Salt-N-Pepa classic, “Let’s Talk About.”
