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ClearChannel Plays It Safe
mertzman writes: "Rather than wait for the government assaults on civil liberties to reach full steam, ClearChannel, one of the nation's largest radio networks, has decided to do some censorship on their own! According to F***edCompany, ClearChannel has created a list of banned songs with "questionable content" in light of the recent tragedies. Stuff ranging from Drowning Pool's "Bodies" to Nena's anti-war hit "99 Red Balloons" have made their list." ClearChannel owns many radio stations, so this probably affects you. Update: 09/18 18:30 GMT by M : The San Francisco Chronicle has more on this - ClearChannel says it isn't an official mandate, just some sort of internal memo circulating. Update: 09/18 23:18 PM GMT by T : Fuzzy points out that "snopes.com has an explanation of the ClearChannel hoax. ClearChannel has also sent out a press release saying they have released no such list."
During gulf war, some radio stations reffered to Massive Attack as "Massive", period.
Sofa King wee tadd deed.
If you care about music and still think that songs become popular because lots of people like them, you owe it to yourself to read some of this.
Back to the subject at hand, when a major corporate conglomerate decides that the country shouldn't be listening to "Bridge over Troubled Water" it is a sad day.
It's their choice, but its still censorchip.
Censorship has nothing to do with the government, it has to do with the act of censoring.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Yeah, they did screw up the lyrics in the English version (not to mention her singing of it).
The song is about WWIII, the end of the world, by accident, telling us to be careful about running off to war without a real solid reason and target (it started by them at a concert in West Berlin, wondering what would happen if the balloons floating to East Berlin were thought of as hostile).
They took pretty much everything in the songs out of context.
I sent an e-mail to my local clear channel radio station after reading this and this is the response:
no. its just a list of songs that may be inappropriate (and thats left to the broadcasters discretion) when
coming out of a news report....
you know, a news story about the world trade center into "Bodies" by Drowning Pool....would not sound right.
Its just a guide...
No banning. At least not that anyone's told me..
g
I hope this shed's some light on the issue!
Linuxrunner
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Oh really, I always thought that it refered to an event in Northern Ireland's history in 1972 that, unlike the bombing of Libya, is still refered to as "Bloody sunday", and that it was a call to end sectarian violence. See http://larkspirit.com/bloodysunday/ for a clue. U2 are an irish band, and not everything revolves around the US.
This is just a company trying to be sensitive to people who have had their lives shattered by hate-filled people, and playing songs about plane crashes, death, strife, et. al
That does seem to be the aim - otherwise why would they ban Talking Head's dada-psychobable funk track "burning down the house" which isn't about violence, it isn't anything coherent at all. Some idiot thought the title might remind someone. Having coped with loss a while back I can tell you that this is a pointless excercise. You get reminded of the loss by the oddest stuff, and there is no way around this but through the grief.
But it's an ill-chosen, dumb, arbitrary, partisan list - that elvis track, and Loius Armstrong singing "wonderfull world" are out - WTF??
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
Those lyrics are a reference to the novel "The Stranger" by Albert Camus, a french existentialist writer. The main character, Meursault, finds an Arab man on the beach and kills him for no reason at all.
No, this is the abuse of monopoly power in the radio markets to control the content of what we are exposed to.
You're right, some broadcasting companies have almost become monopolies. I live in Orlando, where there are about six Clear Channel stations.
If we don't like this, we should tell our senators and representatives that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 [fcc.gov], which tried to reduce telco monopolies by opening competition, has helped to create radio monopolies by removing the limit on the number of stations a company may own nationwide.
1. Yes the list is legit. It came out last Thursday. 2. They did not ban the songs. They suggested that individual program directors exercise judgement in playing these songs because of the recent terrorist bombing. 3. Originally the list was much smaller. It was added to by the program directors and others at the individual stations. 4. The list was supposed to be internal and confidential. It went out over our private WAN email system. 5. From what I can see, Clear Channel has 'stepped up to the plate' with regard to the terrorism. They're giving a lot of $$ to the Red Cross and others. They have a link on their web page. They're allowing employees to contribute via a deduction in their paychecks. For days after the hijackings they ran information and talk programming about the disaster on practically every station totally commercial free. Though I don't agree with all of CC policies (trust me on this!), I feel that criticizing them fhr the job they've done for the public the past week is ludicrous!
The song is directly, and utterly without metaphor, about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. Richardson (the Big Bopper), and how the narrator's world hadn't been the same since, socially, politically, musically and personally.
McLean's point--and it's a pretty simple one; he isn't exactly James Joyce--is that that plane crash marked the end of the sheltered certainties of the 1950s and the start of what for him were the far more confusing and tumultuous 1960s (Dylan to cute Beatles to scary Beatles to the Summer of Love to Vietnam to Janis Joplin to more, scarier Vietnam).
"American Pie" isn't a deep song or a complex one, nor is it one open to terribly flexible interpretation. Which doesn't mean it isn't heartfelt or affecting or a good starting point for high school students to look at the 1960s from the perspective of someone whose world changed on February 3, 1959, when a plane crash killed three rock'n'roll singers. Period. It's not a "secret". It's not a "wacky interpretation". It's not a "hidden meaning". It's what the song's about. Sort of like how, say, John Lennon's "Oh, Yoko" is about Yoko and not about, say, the Iranain revolution or basketball.
Ask your parents. Or read any of the thousands of tedious interviews poor Don McLean has had to slog through in the decades since.