Diane called me this morning to say she heard Kid Rock’s “All Summer Long” (a VERY clever riff on both “Werewolves of London” and “Sweet Home Alabama”, btw) on a country station in the Quad Cities this morning, and they edited out the word “smokin’” from the line “we were smokin’ funny things…”.
Are you kidding me? Seriously? The right-wingers that run this station (and yes, they are right-wingers, I know them) think that country listeners will be offended by a reference to wacky-backy? They might want to ask Sarah Palin about it, but that’s another story.
Seriously, we’ve got country stations that are finally wise enough to play what the listeners want with this latest Kid Rock song (despite country consultants’ collective aversion to it, and for that matter anything not recorded by a Kenny, George, or Toby), and then they edit out the word “smokin’”? Sheesh.
As a person who has never smoked “the stuff”, I couldn’t care less if someone references it in a song, and it’s not going to make me want to smoke it, either. I’m gonna let the folks at Clear Channel in on a little secret: psst…some people that like country are a) Democrats who b) have enough of a brain to make their own decisions.
Thanks. Carry on.
2 responses so far ↓
1
mortonmalaise
// Sep 10, 2008 at 8:41 am
BJ,
You DO know, of course, that they’ve been doing this to rap songs for 10+ years, right? Is it OK to censor rap songs and not rock/country songs?
2
BJ Stone
// Sep 10, 2008 at 10:01 am
I was talking about music, not rap.
But seriously, I’ve always had a problem with censoring words, even with the curse words. If a song has so many curse words that it’s offensive to listen to, then my choice as a program director would be to simply not play it.
But have they been eliminating non-curse words from RAP songs? That would make even less sense than the country ones, you’re right.
I just think it’s funny/sad that country consultants and pd’s have no problem with 62% of the songs directly referencing drinking to excess, but they’re going to sensor a reference to smoking weed.
And like I said, if rap stations are sensoring references to weed, hell, that’ll mean they have more silence than sound.
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