Odessa

Carlin said there were 7 words you could never say on television. Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cock-sucker, Mother-fucker, and Tits. He was wildly optimistic.

Corporate censorship has risen unceasingly throughout my lifetime. Over the last couple 15 years, more and more songs have been edited for radio. The new trend, as you noted, is to remove drug references.

The problem with it is that every time a drug reference becomes mainstream, a new term is invented.

However, I do enjoy a certain hypocrisy here. Modern hip hop style music is heavily edited for drug references. But woe on any radio station that would attempt the same style of edit on songs from the 60s and 70s.

It's hilarious to me that these people grew up in an era of rampant open drug use but now have the sack to say you can't even talk about using drugs.

Of course, removing the word doesn't really help. Doesn't matter what word you bleep or silence, the point is still taken. The kids you're trying to protect already know what the slang that should go there, just like they know that 'she aint messin wit no broke niggaz'.

You can't protect children from media. Even if you could, protecting the children is worthless if you don't educate them on how to make the right choice in the first place.

In the late 90s, the rapper Everlast had a song called "What it's Like". Half the words in it were censored, but that didn't stop the radio stations from playing it hourly. The censored words included "drugs" and "balls".

There was also the Moby cover of "That's When I Reach For My Revolver", originally by Mission of Burma. When MTV played the video, they didn't like the gun reference, so they changed it to "That's When I Realize That It's Over". Truly ridiculous.