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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."
Kim Peterson, a talk show host here in Atlanta was making fun of the Clear Channel list yesterday. I thought at first it was a joke, but apparently its not.
I wonder when Kim Peterson will get "talked to" over it (he was playing the list as bumper music. Many may not agree with what he has to say all the time, but at least he stands up for it.
Sorry, but music doesn't make terrorist.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I mean, they have "Walk Like an Egyptian" by the Bangels on this list...
Is this a joke or is this just a list of songs that radio stations should 'tip-toe' around for the next week or so to keep people from getting depressed??
Bah to it all. Why can't people just realize that human adults censor what is inputed in to their brains to begin with? I mean, come on! How does censoring music that has some relation to the NYC bombing help anything at all? Those people died for certain liberties and rights sort to speak- why take away what they died for just to try to soften the impact that they died?!!
If I died in a terrorist bombing in the United States, the supposed country of freedom, I would be rather offended that this country of freedom that I died in is now restricting it.
They took away the second amendment, but I didn't complain since I had no guns.
They took away the fifth amendment, but I didn't complain since I had nothing to fear from the courts.
They took away the first amendment, and I couldn't complain.
--- Ãther SPOON!
Hey, they own those stations, so they have a right to choose what to play. If they think something is in bad taste, the won't play it. That's not censorship that's choice. The government hasn't told them not to play questionable songs, they decided it was in their best interest as a business or maybe in their interest as humans. This is not censorship this is a business esercising it's freedom to choose to do what it wants.
As x approaches total apathy I couldn't care less.
Is the posted list of banned songs complete? One of the more obvious candidates, "First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin" by Manfred Mann is missing.
//Wegge
I notice The Cure's "Killing an arab" made it thru...
Warning: May contain nuts
I listen to one of their stations here in central NY, The Nerve and they play a lot of these songs, or they used to.
The fact that they banned Don McLean's "American Pie" really outrages me. This is one of America's songs. I used to like this song when I was 6 and I still do. Sorry if it's not like "Don't Worry, Be Happy" but jeesh.
BTW, I didn't read any articles, is this ban permanent?
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.
This Song is ANTI terrorism and was originally written about an act of terrorism.
I mean the lyrics go "I cant believe the news today" and continue "How long must we sing this song?"
Its the perfect song to be the Anthem of the whole anti terrorism campaign.
It appears they are just stopping playing everything that could possibly remind people of the whole event. Songs about war,terrorism,suicide and fire. Even when the majority of these songs are against these things.
Will they ban wacko and spears duet which they are recording to raise money for the relief efforts as it will remind people as well?
I noticed in the list: "All Rage Against The Machine songs"
you've got to be kidding me. This seems like blind censorship to me. I'm doubtful they've listened to all of Rage's songs.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
Isn't it Ironic, dont you think?
What gets me is the large amount of songs which are only teniously related to this and the general anti-war (what is it good for?) songs on the list. It's almost as if the station is asking you not to think about the solution to this problem (IMHO it isn't bombing the shit out of a country which has had 20 years of having the shit bombed out of it)
I'm all for showing a little consideration, 'Leaving on a jet plane' is certainly guaranteed to upset someone who has lost a loved one, but any RATM song? this situation kind of reminds me of their song 'Bullet in the head' -Nothing proper 'bout your propaganda...
J-aims
--
Yo, whatever happened to peas? Join T( H)GS
You've heard the English version of the lyrics, right?
Of course, personally, in this time of warrior rhetoric, I think the song is more apt than ever.
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If you're interested in a little geektavisim, you could then burn all the MP3s to CD audio and distribute them for free at all Clear Channel(TM) events with some propaganda stating how evil they are and how they've banned these (whichever 13 or so are on the CD) and other songs, include the list if you like.
John Lennon's song Imagine is on the list. Isn't that song meant to promote peace? I can see why you wouldn't want people thinking about that... It would just be wrong.
I must have missed the subliminal messages within the song that can only be heard by a Radio Executive.
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.
Did anyone else no that there was NOT A SINGLE HIP-HOP SONG! Also there were VERY FEW pop songs. Call me paranoid, but I think this a direct attack on rock and roll. Does anyone else think we're slipping into the 50's, where rock and roll is now the scapegoat for anything that goes wrong in america?
Got Freedom?
Thinking?
No. Your repeated postings seem to indicate an inability to differentiate between "censorship of the American public as a whole" (for example, the FCC declaring that you can't show bare breasts on broadcast television) and "censorship by a corporate entity of its own content" (for example, Fox Family channel voluntarily censoring the word "damn" as part of the more family friendly programming they want to produce).
Now, just because something isn't government censorship doesn't mean it's not censorship. However, just because something isn't government censorship doesn't mean it's a good thing. It also doesn't mean it's a bad thing. Each case must be examined on its own merits. Also, it being a bad thing is not synonymous with illegal. For example, if a given publisher chose to stop carrying stories on Linux, that wouldn't be illegal (as far as I know), but it would certainly be a bad thing. They would receive certainly criticism (rightfully so, IMO) for their non-illegal censorship.
Of course all that being said, things get a little more interesting. Clear Channel isn't on equal footing with other companies. Like Microsoft, they enjoy a rather large market share. Furthermore, they've been granted the right to use a limited, public resource (part of the radio spectrum) by the government. This places there actions under much greater scrutiny. Unlike, say, the widget manufacturing industry, a new-comer can't decide to pop into the radio market and start playing the songs in question. As such, their situation is closer to government censorship. However, regardless, their overall actions are still censorship and should be scrutinized by consumers.
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
In my Massachusettes high school (late 80s), the DJ at the dances was not allowed to play "Sunday Bloody Sunday" but was allowed to play Eric Clapton's "Cocaine."
No, there's no making sense of any of it.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
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.
As others have pointed out, "American Pie" isn't as much a 'plane crash song' as it is about changing times and worldviews. Don McLean wrote about "the day the music died" as a focal point, an event after which the way everyone related to their country and their world changed. This change could only be marked (to McLean) with a melancholy, a recognition that beyond the tangible, clear losses, something intangible--but just as irreplaceable--had also been lost.
How Clear Channel sees it is their business (literally), but it seems to me those thoughts are more timely at this moment than they've been in decades.
Yet more evidence that censorship always backfires...