My time in New Orleans has come to a close and I have returned home. Among the many reasons I am glad to have left it behind, even though it meant returning to a land where I could wake up in the morning to an unexpected and unwelcome dump of snow (as happened this morning), one of the strangest, and most omnipresent, must be the radio.
First off, as a fan of alternative and modern rock, I was disappointed to learn that there was only one rock station, and it played exclusively corporate rock, including an abundance of Nickelback. To make matters worse, their regular playlist consisted of only 16 songs. No, that’s not an exaggeration, I counted, they play the same 16 songs over and over, with only the occasional exception, for a month at which point a few songs are replaced by new ones. It should also be noted that “new” seemingly has a different meaning down there. They featured the premiere of the “new” Kings of Leon song “Sex on Fire” in February. Problem is, the song had been released everywhere else since at least the previous fall, and had been playing in my hometown since June. The only bright spot was that they did play slightly more Canadian music than the stations in Austin did, including the aforementioned Nickelback, Finger Eleven, Gob, and Buckcherry. Lots of Buckcherry, but more on that in a minute.
And that brings us to the biggest problem with the radio in New Orleans: censoring. Now, yes, obviously all North American radio stations employ censoring to some degree, but the extent to which it was used there was obnoxious. They don’t just excise the usual suspects, like the shit and fuck, but virtually ALL curse words, right down to damn, hell, and ass. That wouldn’t be so bad, but they also censor for content, removing references to drugs, guns, and drinking, among others. Even this would be bearable, except the record labels don’t provide tracks with this degree of censoring, meaning the station does it itself. To accomplish this, they use one of two tactics: either they just cut the offending word out – resulting in what sounds like a CD skip, or they play over the word with a “record-scratch”-like sound. The result of both these techniques is an extremely distracting, disjointed listening experience.
You wind up with lines like (censored elements in black, highlight to read):
Sublime – “Wrong Way”
“her seven horny brothers and her drunk-ass dad”
“Happy and sad, wanna shoot your dad”
Third Eye Blind - “Semi-Charmed Life”
“With a tick tock rhythm and a bump for the drop,
And then I bumped up. I took the hit I was given,
Then I bumped again,
And then I bumped again”
Everlast - “What It’s Like”
“And smoked the finest green”
“He pulled out his chrome .45, talked some shit, and wound up dead”
There are two that are even stranger, though. The first is Buckcherry’s “Crazy Bitch”. For this one, they play the word replacement version (“fuck” is changed to “look” or “rock”, etc.) from the record label and then add their own censoring, most notably they remove the word “bitch”. What makes this strange is that when announcing the song, the DJs always refer to it as “Crazy Bitch”. So the DJs can use the word, but the song can’t?
The worst offender, though has to be what they did to Finger Eleven’s “Paralyzer”. The fifth line of the first verse is “It’s been shitty”, which obviously can’t be played on the air. Recognizing this, the label provides an edited version to radio stations with the offending word removed. But instead of using this version, the New Orleans station has created their own. They have cut the line out of the song and in its place inserted the fourth line of the second verse. So, not only did they change the song on their own, they destroyed it musically, since the inserted line is completely out of place. If they had even used the fifth line of the second verse (which would have still made sense lyrically) the result would have been much better, but as it is, it’s just horrible.
Finally, after the station is done playing you all it’s censored music and you’re sent to a commercial break, all of the adds are for porn shops, breast enhancing cream, breast enlargement surgeries, and pills to increase your penis size.
Southern logic.
Sleep well,
DTE
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Songs of the Moment:
Metric – Gimme Sympathy; No Doubt – Stand And Deliver; Franz Ferdinand – No You Girls
Music while I wrote:
No Doubt – No Doubt; Five Iron Frenzy – Upbeats and Beatdowns
