Driving back to Sue’s from “Grandpa’s House” tonight I was marveling at the radio stations here in Atlanta. People my parents’ age complain that there is not a good Classic Rock station in Northeastern NC, and people my age complain that all they play on CHR is the same three songs until they are so overplayed we won’t listen to them again until they are Classic Rock.
What’s strange is that despite the huge amount of restaurants and traffic here and the presence of the world’s busiest airport, it took the multitude of good radio stations in the area for me to realize that I was not in what my uncle would refer to as “Mayberry.” What’s really amazing is that today, with an Internet connection and a Wal-Mart nearby, there’s just not that much difference between a big city and a small one.
And so we’ve reached Wal-Mart, and therefore Billy’s favorite: the rant.
The South Park re-run tonight happened to be the one skewering “Wall-Mart,” and did a pretty good job (as it tends to do, despite the way my mom and mothers in general tend to loathe it) of pointing out the downfalls of the world’s biggest corporation, employer and evil empire. We can discuss the cons of Big Box stores all night long, but they are easy enough to see and scarily hard enough to avert that I’ll avoid hypocrisy and carpal tunnel syndrome by skipping right to my point, demonstrated by my third hypothetical encounter of the night with Sam Walton’s corporate monster: this blog.
In case you’re Jerry too lazy to read it, the gist is that Wal-Mart won’t sell Green Day’s new album because the band refuses to release a censored version. I agree with the blogger that it obviously hasn’t been detrimental to Green Day’s sales (215,000 copies sold the first week). I also agree with Billie Joe Armstrong that a “young kid… making a record for the first time” should not be dictated to by Wal-Mart. And yet I strongly agree with Wal-Mart for sticking to their guns and upholding their long-standing policy of not selling uncensored music.
Again, I could write a diatribe here on the hypocrisy of Wal-Mart, which sells rifles, unrated movies with nudity and swearing, and sweatshop-produced clothing, but for some reason sees violence, swearing, and degrading ideas as inappropriate for the single, specific medium of audio recording. But again, not my point.
As a writer, a musician, and a (self-proclaimed) intelligent person (do I say “a” or “an” before a parenthetical phrase starting with a consonant but followed by the continuing sentence beginning with a vowel?) I disagree with censorship on principle. But as a Christian, an (I hope) moral person1, and a 99% reformed foul-mouth, I enjoy at least an attempt at censorship, however ineffectual (because bleeping out words so that you still hear something like mother****er2, 3 doesn’t really do anything to censor the idea).
I will stop here to somewhat expand on the idea of ineffectual censorship. There are two great Spanish-language radio stations here in Atlanta. Obviously, the censors aren’t as strict on them as they are in English (if there are any Spanish-language censors in this country). I heard a word tonight on one of those stations whose English equivalent would never make it onto the radio (at least I hope not, which is why my opinion slightly favors Wal-Mart on this particular topic).
The solution is for artists to just realize the power of words other than the four-letter ones. Upbeat, happy-sounding (realistic) Caedmon’s Call can be much more biting as a social commentary than any of the dirty-mouthed rockers in my collection. And I’d love to see a move towards cleaner music at the source. Because much as I don’t listen to the entire genre of rap because of the generally foul content, I go out of my way4 to make sure I have the original, uncensored recording of any music I do own, because that is how the artist intended it.
At least I’m consistently inconsistent.
1Went with “an” for that one. Hooray inconsistency!
2Insert Billy’s gasp here, at an almost-instance of Danny swearing on his blog.
3Better censor this guy!
4That task gets easier and easier for me every year as what I listen to is more and more “Jesus music” and less and less English.
