you know, I was just listening to the song Fuck It by Eamon. The thing with the song is I had only recently heard the Explicit non-radio version. It’s weird. Half of the meaning of the song is lost in the clean version. Not only is the verb fuck removed, but so are the nouns shit, ho, bitch and head. Without them, half of the song is just lost. And even if you do get the meaning behind the song based on the rest of the lyrics, it really does lack the emotional punch behind the song without the curses. He has a great voice, but without the swearing its just a nice sounding pop song. With the swearing its intensely bitter heartfelt poetry. The man could be the next Lenny Williams. Maybe its not just the ability show boobs on the air. Maybe all of the FCC regulations on broadcasting appropriateness need to be reexamined. Perhaps I will be inspired to write 1000 words of free flowing hostility soon.
om
Maybe you can do something about it while you’re in congress making sure that Kayleigh doesn’t get a desk.
was just talking to Mike and realizing that Kayleigh has got to be really close to legal these days. I’m sure she’s become quite the nubile young teenager. Soon, on her 18th birthday, one might be tempted to take her and throw her on a desk and show her the joys of being only a woman… only there’s no desk… SHIT!
with so many terrible things going on in the world, it’s hard for me to understand how you can get outraged over limiting someone’s ability to degrade someone in a song. Or is that somehow art?
ah, well there are several justifications
1) honestly, I’m not all that outraged. Hence the not having 1000 full words of hostility.
2) Yes it is art. FCC regulations exist as a means of protection in the general circumstance, not as an ends to themselves. The purpose, in theory, is not to offend general sensibilities of people who might happen upon the broadcast on accident. They are regulations, not laws. With permission, they are bendable and even breakable. Hence the FCC allowing ER to use the word “Shit” to make the death of Mark Greene episode more memorable and powerful. They would not however allow you to put an hour long program on where the word shit is just said over and over for shock value. I would argue that the Fuck It song fits into the former category and therefore is artistic expression
3) As you are very aware free speech and free expression is a way huge very important issue to me. I personally do not believe that the FCC regulations should exist at all. I understand their purposes, but I disagree with them. Afterall, they’re arbitrary and meaningless and they only defend us against cultural taboos that we have inserted ourselves. In other words, the word fuck is bad because we want it to be. Remove the regulation and it ceases being a problem. If Janet had worna pastie or a lacy bra, there’d be no argument before us about appropriateness, despite the fact that she would be placing essentially the same message. Similarly, if the lyrics had been “Screw what I said, it don’t mean crap now” instead of “Fuck what I said, it don’t mean shit now” there would be no censorship despite the message being identical. It is merely the artificial taboo we have added that creates the taboo. And the flagrant disregard for the taboo makes it shocking and thus forceful and thus art.
4) if you’ve got a broken leg, and then you break your arm, the broken leg doesn’t go away. Just because there’s a down economy, and a war, and terrorists, and buildings blowing up and Mars landers being lost, that doesn’t mean issues of free speech go away. If we don’t promote and defend the basic freedoms and ideals of democracy in our country, what the fuck are we fighting outside of it to save anyway?
There you go…
They would not however allow you to put an hour long program on where the word shit is just said over and over for shock value.
…but they would allow a half-hour animated show to say shit 162 times for shock value.
I was wondering if someone would bring that up.
no they didn’t… that happened on Comedy Central. Comedy Central is not a broadcast network and therefore does not fall under FCC jurisdiction. Any standards that need to be adhered to are completely determined by the Standards and Practices division of MTV networks (who owns Comedy Partners, the holding company that owns Comedy Central) and perhaps Viacom’s Standards and Practices division since they own MTV Networks. Generally speaking, Basic cable networks attempt to more or less hold themselves to the standards of broadcast television so as to gain as much mainstream market exposure as possible (if you curse and show boobies, Comcast or Adelphia or whoever might drop your network, so you make less money) but they technically aren’t recquired to.
So basically that’s how they got away with it. They asked if it was ok….
As an interesting side note, on Monday, Jan 26th, six whole days before the Superbowl, WWE Raw, which airs on SpikeTV (which is also a Viacom network) asked Viacom S&P for permission to display brief female toplessness (both breasts, albeit with pasties, that they tried to keep the home viewer from noticing with creative camera tricks) and that was granted.