Tag Archives: censorship

Does Censoring Profanity in Music Diminish the Musician’s Message?

Music, Writing, , , , ,

I picked up the new Pink cd the other day for her album, The Truth About Love. What I noticed is that a lot of her music this time around is filled with profanity. Personally, I don’t mind because I really like her music. But then it got me to start wondering about the purpose behind swearing in music, whether it was necessary, and whether or not the song would change its meaning by filtering out the swearing. This was brought home to me on the shuttle bus trip from the parking lot, when I heard “Blow Me (one last kiss)” on the radio speaker playing on the shuttle. The song, from Pink’s new album, is the first release, and the words “fuck” and “shit” appear quite frequently, including a part where the chorus sings: “I’ve had a shit day/You’ve had a shit day/We’ve had a shit day”. The radio version doesn’t even try to address this, basically sounding like: “I’ve had a it day/You’ve had a it day/We’ve had a it day”. In other words, they just removed the voiced part of the song to make the word miss the “sh” sound to it. This got me to wondering if the song actually still maintains the same meaning. The complaint in the song is that she wants to break up with whomever it she’s with and it’s part of the realization that she had a bad day, he had a bad day, and they both had a bad day, but she still needs to pull the trigger on the relationship. With “I’ve had a it day”, I’m not sure the point is completely made.

But going back to her previous album, Pink Greatest Hits…So Far, her hit F***** Perfect was probably the best example of the problem inherent in a musician trying to be mainstream, sell records, AND be played on the radio.  The actual song was titled Fucking Perfect, and she sings those words throughout the song, but in the radio version, the word “Fucking” is aired out, and all you hear is silence during that moment while she’s saying “Perfect” so you get the impression the song is called “Perfect”. What’s significant about this is that the whole song is about forced conformity, and her real dilemma is that people are forced to be “fucking perfect”, not just perfect. It’s somewhat ironic that the song is changed on her to conform to radio standards, and I would not have been surprised to hear that there were probably radio and studio executives who might have been advocating for her to call the song “Perfect” just to avoid the problems of disc jockeys not being able to say the correct name on the radio when announcing the song. What I did notice on the few radio stations I listed to was a tendency to just call it “Perfect.”

So, my question is: Does changing the author’s wording also change the meaning of the song? Granted, in some genres of music, and with some musicians, there is a tendency to add profanityjust to look cool or hip, but one thing I’ve always noticed about Pink’s lyrics is that she doesn’t appear to be doing it just to get a reaction. This latest album appears to have more blatant profanity than the previous one, but I’m still left thinking that that is just a part of her writing style, and that she probably talks a lot like she writes lyrics.

The Problems with Facebook & Google No One Talks About: Censorship

Business, Social Networking, Technology, Writing, , , , , , , ,

Some years ago, when the Internet was very young, I was one of the early adopters of the new technology and started building web sites for companies, organizations and individuals who wanted them. In the beginning, it was interesting in that the people who needed web sites tended to be in three categories: adult businesses, churches and social celebrities. To be honest, the social celebrity market wasn’t really launched yet, so you really relied specifically on adult businesses and churches, a somewhat unique duo of activity.

My first web site I built was for a church. So was my second one. And then members of those two churches contacted me, asking me if I could build a site for them as well, as there were no web designers around yet. It turns out that the people who contacted me were professional dominatrices, looking for new ways of attracting clientele. Not really one to care where business came from, I built their sites, and almost out of nowhere, dozens of brand new clients showed up, all wanting my business. What I discovered then, and later, was that I was one of the few web designers around they came across who just wanted payment (not the rest of what their activity had to offer). What had happened to them in the beginning of the Internet was potential clients saw a way to get free sessions from them, and then basically held them hostage (they would have control over their web sites) until they got all of their “needs” met. With me, they paid me money, and they got everything they wanted without any hassle.

This was great for me, and them, and lasted for years until I went back to school and had less time. Then I slowly pushed my clients off onto other designers I came in contact with, and slowly ended doing that sort of business. It was good to do so, too, because that’s when everyone started to learn how to do web sites, and a specialty designer like me was easily outnumbered by paint by number designers who really dirtied the whole industry. I kept a few clients over the years who knew I was a designer first, and not just a spaghetti code generator (the kind of people who used pre-packaged software that was impossible to maintain and change without continuing to use the same pre-packaged software, and it was also impossible to personally configure if you wanted to do something different than the software did out of the box).

Anyway, the reason for mentioning this is that one of my clients was an adult bookstore, and at one point, we were using a shopping cart service (before I learned to design them in php from scratch). In the middle of the night one evening, they shut down her site, deciding that they didn’t like her “pervert crap” and no longer wanted to do business with her. To them, it didn’t matter that her business had been around longer than theirs had, and that we had put a LOT of work into designing the site. They shut her down in the middle of the night because their owner suddenly “found God” and no longer wanted “smut” on his sites. The thought that he didn’t “own” her site meant nothing to him; however, his control of the shopping cart software, which configured the site’s business end, practically ended her business overnight. So I had to learn php, build a brand new shopping cart (when people weren’t doing that sort of thing yet) and then relaunch her site over a weekend during a week of tests at school. It was a nightmare, but I got her going again.

What I most remember about that incident is that the shopping cart manager wouldn’t return a phone call, and when I finally got a hold of him, he was the rudest person I ever spoke to. He really felt that he was talking to scum, so he didn’t have to address that person as a human. It was an eye-opening experience.

Years ago, I was asked to fix a woman’s business site because Google had shut her down completely. She was a pro dominant, and she knew about me through mutual acquaintances who had known someone who had done a site through me years ago, so she contacted me in the middle of the night, crying, saying that Google had just shut down her online business and she couldn’t even get anyone to answer why. She had followed all of their rules to the T, and she was in compliance with everything she could imagine would need compliance. Yet, out of the blue, they shut her down. Which meant everything that was tied to Google for her was also shut down. I tried to contact Google, and kept getting the run-around from them. Finally, I told her she could rebuild her site from scratch with a new Google account, or she could be smarter and just build her site from scratch using a non-Google tied server. So I ended up building her a clean site that had no connection to Google whatsoever. She’s still going strong today, although she’s probably not an early adopter of Google Plus for the crap they put her through.

Last night, I received a frantic phone call from a woman who said that she was shut down on Facebook a few days ago. The person she spoke to wouldn’t even give her a reason, quoting some obscure rule about “compliance with rules” and wouldn’t elaborate. Her gazillion friends are all gone, and much of the networking she designed through Facebook is now gone. She asked me if she should jump to Google instead now that she realized that Facebook is adult-unfriendly. I couldn’t give her a happy answer that she was expecting because I knew what her future would probably be with Google.

And that’s what I wanted to talk about. Two of the biggest kids on the block are fighting for supremacy in social networking sites, and they’re probably the two biggest unfriendly social networking sites around. If you’re doing anything with which they disagree, they don’t just turn their head and disagree, they shut you down completely, forcing their morals upon you because they have the power to do it. Like that shopping cart company from years before, they don’t care that there are thousands who feel as you do. Their personal desires are more important than yours, and if you don’t comply, you lose. And of course, you have nowhere else to turn, so screw you.

That’s what we have to look forward to with Facebook and Google. Now, I know the majority of people won’t ever do anything to worry about being forced out, but honestly, you don’t know that. What it means is that an organization that is trying to gain your business by promising to let you network with people like you is quite willing to shut you down if those people like you are not in agreement with what they personally think is cool, or okay. It’s like the old line of “when they came for the Polish, I did nothing because I wasn’t Polish, when they came for the French I did nothing, because I wasn’t French, and then when they came for me, there was no one left to speak for me.” Now that’s not an exact quote, but you get the idea. Years ago, when there was a huge backlash against the gay community, I was an avid spokesperson against the backlash because even though I’m not gay, I felt that if thugs were able to hurt people who were gay, there’s only a matter of time before someone starts coming after me for whatever weird things I might be into (yes, I know, being gay isn’t a choice or weird, but I’m stretching for an analogy here). For the longest time, I had colleagues thinking I was gay because I was an out spokesperson for gays, and they couldn’t understand why someone would advocate for something they weren’t personally. That’s why that misquoted quote is so poignant. People won’t speak out for others without a personal stake, and that’s why so many atrocities continue to happen in this world.

I’m just saying.

XXX: The Domain That No One Wants

Bizarre, News, Politics, Relationships, Social Networking, , , , , , , ,

An interesting thing has happened to the Internet. It’s adding porn. Yes, in case you didn’t know it, porn has not existed on the Internet until someone decided there was a need for it. Up until now, anyone involved with porn has been required to keep in off line, but some kid with a dream (supposedly a wet one) came up with this pie in the sky idea of creating a web domain so that all of the poor porn purveyors could one day experience pornography on the Internet. So, the government decided to invent XXX as a domain suffix (affix?) that now leads people directly to whatever their heart’s desire, as sick as that might be.

Okay, all sarcasm aside, porn has been on the web as long as the web has existed. You might even say that it led the growth, so to speak, of the Internet. But for the longest time, pornography has been integrated with non-porn sites so that quite often you ended up on a porn site instead of the one you were trying to get to. At least that’s the excuse I’ve been using, but that’s probably another issue. Anyway, the government decided some time ago that if they could create an area of the web where porn could be “controlled”, then everything would be great. So the idea of a XXX suffix was designed. And of course, because porn makes a lot of money, they decided they would charge $100-200 for the usage of the XXX domain.

Here’s the problem with their plan. No one wants it. And I mean “NO ONE.” The pornographers don’t like being separated from the rest of the web because they realize that most legitimate Internet providers will be cajoled into just blocking any XXX area. I’m sure someone will say “it’s for the children”, but whatever the reason, someone is going to make sure that people are unable to access this area of the web. The people who don’t like porn don’t like it either because they think that all of the bad people will suddenly come to the web (like they weren’t on it before). And I’m sure they’re convinced that because “of the children” they’ll need to somehow shut down this cesspool of depravity.

And no one else will like it either because it will mean more crap on the web that they don’t want to deal with. You’ll probably have all sorts of privacy issues and scams and whatnot because of this. What will end up happening is that the porn people will continue creating and making porn on the regular sites, and XXX will be relegated to a few choice names that most people won’t pay attention to. The government will probably step in and surreptitiously design some kind of monitoring system so that they can see who accesses pornography on the web (which they’ll argue is for good reasons, but will eventually be used to shame, humiliate and then blackmail people), so that the only people who use XXX will be those who are clueless at the problems they’re causing by accessing porn the “right way” instead of the logical way.

In the end, the whole project will be abandoned, much like the old newsgroups were destroyed when they were spammed to death by, well, porn. What started out as a great idea always ended up being destroyed by someone trying to make a quick buck, doing whatever he can do to scam you before you figure out what’s happening to you. The only victims will be the ones who went into it innocently because they felt it was the proper way to do things. The bad people, the criminals, and those smart enough to realize the value of anonymity, will continue to do things the way they have always done it. In secret and not where government and censors can find them.

(Update: Turns out I was incorrect on the price of the domain registration. According to Daily Tech, it is $200-300, not $100-200 as I thought).