I swear to god, more and more I keep having ‘clean’ versions play on Spotify, YouTube Music, Deezer - despite the song being marked as ‘Explicit’.
And no, I definitely do not have the setting checked for only playing clean versions.
It’s not just me - is it?
I have a 2000s playlist on YouTube. The censoring throws me off and interrupts my vibe every time.
I chimed in with a, “haven’t you people ever heard of closing the [conspicuous empty beat] damned door?!”
While i dont listen to music popular enough to be affected, the world is absolutely slipping back into prude bullshit. I think we let our guard down because the new prudes don’t sound like the old ones, instead of using Christianity they use liberalism (as in, tokenizing identities and treating a negative peace as the highest goal possible). It’s the exact same minds raised under a different set of morals.
What im pissed about is that they used the censored version when they remastered this:
https://www.discogs.com/release/10057933-The-Doors-The-Doors
How much more censorship like this will happen in the future?
I’ve only noticed this with one song in my Spotify library, Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue”. I saved it years ago and near the end is a line “I’m the son of a bitch that named you Sue”. Out of nowhere about a year ago the album version changed to be “I’m the [bleep] that named you Sue”. It still shows the full lyrics, it’s just the audio that’s changed and it drives me up the wall.
That happens to a lot of songs with a a snippet of “socially” frowned upon lyrics. From a “Boy Named Sue to “My Dingaling” to When You Get a Hair Cut” to “Money for Nothin’”. Recording artists often have recorded 2 different versions of some songs - one for people to buy and one that can be played on the radio due to “decency laws” set by the FCC and local ordinances.
It’s been that way since the 1930s in the US.
I’m familiar with the way censored versions of songs work, I’m more miffed that the version I had saved was the explicit version until it randomly got changed to the censored version.
I’ve noticed this using Spotify. If I manually play an explicit song - either directly or in an album or playlist - I get the uncensored version. If I ask Google Assistant to play the song, I get the censored version.
The worst example is the clean version of Ace hood’s bugatti, you got on an near game trial. Nearly every other word was absent. It was ridiculous.
Not sure if it’s just you, but we were at an event last night and the DJ was playing “Play that funky music” by Wild Cherry and it was censored during the chorus to remove “white boy” and “whitey”…
Tf
white fragility
There is zero chance any white person has ever complained about that song, but I can see some kind of overzealous cenoring busybody treating anything that could possibly be misconstrued as racist censoring it.
It could also be AI automated filtering.
There is zero chance any white person has ever complained about that song
Dunno man, my people are pretty good at complaining.
We don’t complain about getting compliments!
I predict we won’t be able to properly express how someone looks in 5 years, because all words will be offensive.
White/Black/Asian. Fat. Bald. Skinny. Women/Man. Probably all offensive soon.
Oh come on. Extremists gonna extreme. Some will try to make a bunch of words offensive, the others will keep fighting for their right to use these words. The vast majority of the rest of people will just keep living their lives and just use whatever’s the most appropriate word at a given time with the language evolving. It used not to be considered really offensive to insult people with gay slurs when I was in high school. Languages evolve with their times, and that’s perfectly fine.
My guess is it’s probably not extremists per se, but rather corporations that are scared of offending anyone and being the focus of the internet’s bad or uproar of the day. I will say though, at my last company, the younger generation was pushing all this stuff super hard. While I agree with plenty of the general purpose stuff, I’m like, can’t we just do our jobs and not sit in meetings all day about what our job is supposed to be?
Soon? It’s already offensive, you bigot!
Actually the bigot community no longer considers the word ‘bigot’ appropriate.
I don’t know where you live, or what reality you’re choosing to live in, but that’s just such a bad take. I live in liberal ass California right in the thick of it. I have plenty of black and white (among others) friends, fat friends, and gay friends. The only thing I’ve ever had some things around word choice is when someone identifies as a different gender. Even then I’ve called people by their wrong gender and they’ve politely corrected me and I change it.
Same. The other day I mistakenly told a trans woman early in her transition “thank you sir” as a reflex and all that happened was she gently said “I’m not a sir” and we moved on.
Well right now calling you an oversensitive lying baby is still a thing. Figuratively no one’s asking for this from corporations
I bet you’re someone whose nose almost imperceptibly points downward.
- Anti-semite
The sad part is that can actually be seen as discriminatory
Excuse me, it’s high calorie individual.
I noticed this last night! Listening to something with a lot of “fucks” in the chorus, and the lyrics had them had the explicit marker but every instance of “fuck” was blanked over. It wasn’t the last time I heard the song on the service and it’s the only version I have liked (which is what playlist I was listening to it from).
Limp Bizkit - Hot Dog
Oh my God, thank you for the confirmation.
Not just you. It fucking sucks. Patti Smiths Song “Rock n Roll removed” is gone from Spotify too, for example.
That’s weird that the original is gone, the Marilyn Manson cover of it is still on there. In a more egregious example, the Anal Cunt song “Beating Up N*s That Sell Fake Crack” is still up too.
Why did you write removed rather than whatever word it actually was?
Your Lemmy instance is censoring it
I didn’t know programming.dev censored words, that’s disappointing
Admin here, there should be nothing censored atm apart from a couple scam links
Not sure why that says removed but its not on our end (and its like that everywhere). Lemmy probably has some handling where it also censors if the posters instance says so
Some apps or instances auto censor some words, like the N word in the song there, or retard is another, it’s other use is using a retarder to slow a chemical reaction.
I got banned on Facebook for saying “fatty acids” because “fatty” is a bad word.
“if you think fatty is a bad word you might be a fatty”
Don’t fat-shame the acids!
This sounds so stupid that I believe it could be true.
Retardation is also something to do with maths.
And ignition timing for engines.
Yeah, my retardation kept me from passing it
😂 Lmao same
…jeez, the irony
I worked on exactly this for a while, a long, long time ago. It turns out to be an annoyingly difficult bag of problems. The record companies don’t really care, they sell (sold, I guess) pieces of plastic. (Idk if they fixed it yet, but the same Turbonegro album kept getting sent with the same scratches, kept getting taken down a while later, for years.) So, good luck trusting them to label anything.
Puritans are so much more aggressive than sane people that making mistakes one way is much more expensive than the other way.
Anyway, we ended up trying to work out which tracks are actually the same song, (Easy for you, harder for friend computer, yes?) and then if one of them is marked explicit, they all are, unless marked “radio edit” or “clean”, or whatever. If you think about this for a minute, if one track is labeled “radio edit”, maybe the other ones should be marked explicit…
It’s a deep rabbit hole, is what I’m saying.
And the people with the pitchforks are never happy.
I get that it’s not necessarily simple, however… Firstly, surely streaming companies could push for a standard formatting to make their lives easier. And second, why does a track that was previously explicit suddenly start playing as the clean version one day? Why is the data for it continually being changed?
Could ‘push’, yes, as in, “we mentioned it in passing when rock and roll grandpa wasn’t paying attention, so he wouldn’t throw a hissy fit and withdraw from the service”. Oh, you meant to the labels? Ha ha ha, NO. The labels have basically nuclear option veto powers.
As for changes, well, updates get delivered all the time, for various reasons. (The scratched Turbonegro album being one frequent flyer.) I think a lot of those are bullshit SEO-like reasons, but it is what it is.
Which artist appears in most frequent releases? I forget, but I think it’s Elvis. Possibly Johnny Cash. Why? Because some material has gone out of copyright in some jurisdictions, and so people have the idea to upload them again in ‘new’ compilations. (The content team don’t even beat these down personally – that’s machine work)
Haven’t noticed this on Spotify
I did with teenage dirtbag. album version good, some weird collection album was edited to shit.
yeah I can understand the motivation for removing “gun”
but “her boyfriend’s a dick” is a perfectly valid lyric. How in the fuck-flavoured fuck is “dick” so offensive to people?
Not just you… I’ve had both clean and explicit versions playing of the same songs coming up randomly and it’s annoying.
I legit want an option to only use the explicit versions, the clean ones never sound good where they clean it up, and sometimes they even use those stupid sound effects that just frankly destroy the song. If the service only has the clean version, I think I’d rather it just not play it at all
I honestly never even knew the cleaned up versions existed before we went on a trip to america and that s all that played on the radio.
It haven’t been an issue on Prime Music yet. At least not that I’ve noticed.
I mostly listen to music on Bandcamp, where so far as I know nothing has been censored. Except maybe la femme’s last album cover.
I prefer buying music over renting it, but I understand it’s not for everyone.
I must say, I did not notice this lately.
If this really is the case it would mean a big step back. 30 years or so ago, censoring was mainly due to prudish broadcasting networks.
Nowadays it probably will be to not offend the easily offended crowd. Let’s hope it won’t catch on.
It’s all about that ad dollar.
It always was
