Censor THIS Sucka

So I've always had beef with censorship in general. I do it myself from time to time, putting asterisk's in the place of vowels in "dirty" words here on my blog. I do it, however, because otherwise I'd need to add an "over 18" protector to my page and I really don't want to do that. Sure the word is still pretty much there and coherent but at least I'm not truly "spelling it out".

Aside from that, I rarely if ever censor myself. I'm a good girl with a bad mouth and there's not a single bit of shame in my body because of it. I've been told that I cuss like a sailor, that I'm "rude crude and socially unacceptable", and that I should reconsider having such a potty mouth.

But honestly, I don't care. I will refrain from cursing around the elderly and people who have had the courage to ask me to please not swear in their presence. Although, occasionally dirty words still slip past my lips, as is just simply in my nature. But generally I'm not worried about dropping an "F" bomb or 26 in normal everyday conversation.

But back to my primary reason for this blog.

A song recently hit the Top 40 charts and the local airwaves that I have grown to like. The first two or three times I heard it I hated it because I couldn't understand all of the lyrics and thus didn't understand the song. It had a catchy tune, however and the mystery of the non-discernible lyrics steered me onto the Internet in search of a site that had the lyrics posted.

As it so happened the lyrics were of a darker nature than I'd imagined.

The song, "Pumped Up Kicks" by the band "Foster the People" has a chorus that says:

All the other kids with the pumped up kicks you'd better run, better run, outrun my gun.

All the other kids with the pumped up kicks you'd better run, better run, faster than my bullet.

Now when I first heard this song I thought it said "out run my girl" and "faster than my Betty".
Oh how many lyrics are misheard! I listened to the song over and over on the local Top 40 station and it just kept growing on me, even after I read the lyrics and knew the dark nature of the content.

Now understand that this song was played "as is" on the radio umpteen times, for weeks probably, maybe even over a month, unedited and untouched in its' entirety. Then suddenly the other day I heard it on the radio and was humming along when I realized they'd changed the song.

Of course it wasn't much of an alteration, all they had done was sort of scramble the words "gun" and "bullet", so that there wasn't any conceivable word to be heard. But the rest of the song sounded as though it were intact as was intended by the creative force that is "Foster the People".

The first time I heard it I was kind of miffed. But after hearing it again and again over the next few days I started getting angry about it. I mean, there are other songs that are edited on the radio. Yes. But they are usually edited to remove foul language. Take any Eminem song for instance. Some of them they might as well not even play on the air with all the editing done to clean them up and make them "presentable".

But this one outraged me to no end. If I mistook the lyrics then surely other people did too. And only those curious enough about them to be bothered by it decided to go in search of the actual lyrics and as a result learned of the unpleasant and macabre allusions.

But it just irks me. If you're going to censor a song then why agree to give it airtime? If you find it offensive or think it will create bigger societal issues then just reject it and find something else to play in its' place.

Don't mutilate a perfectly acceptable piece of musical art.