Thursday, February 21, 2008

Drugs and consensual sex are wild; exploiting women, not so much.

On my way to the gym this morning, I was singing along with Nickelback to "Rock Star":

'Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars and
Live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars
The girls come easy and the drugs come cheap
We'll all stay skinny 'cause we just won't eat
And we'll hang out in the coolest bars
In the VIP with the movie stars
Every good gold digger's
Gonna wind up there
Every Playboy bunny
With her bleach blonde hair
And we'll hide out in the private rooms
With the latest dictionary of
Today's who's who
They'll get you anything
with that evil smile
Everybody's got a
Drug dealer on speed dial, well
Hey, hey, I wanna be a rockstar

Except, the station I was listening to bleeped out the word "drug", so the line was, "The girls come easy and the ... come cheap." And, you know, I take offense at that. It's ok to talk about women like they're disposable, but God forbid we talk about drugs?

Even more funny to me is that the next line about staying skinny and not eating kind of depends on the drug reference.

And everyone can figure out what a "bleep-dealer" is. I mean, you wouldn't have a car dealer on speed dial, right?

But what really ticked me off was that the next song was Lou Reed's "Take a Walk on the Wild Side." And in this bizarro land of radio censors, "giving head" is not ok and needs to be bleeped, but "colored girls" can sing all they want to.

To recap: Drugs and consensual sex are bad. Treating women as disposable sex objects and talking about women of color as "colored" is just dandy.

Fucking censors.

1 comment:

Stuff Daddy said...

I guess I always read that Lou Reed line as being self aware and extremely conscious of the term and its underlining meaning. A studio exec, might say "Lou, you should put some colored girls singing "do, do do, do do, do do do do" right there. I always thought he said this as an acknowledgment of the exploitation of African American music and it's influence in the industry. I'm not saying this is the case, but in a song describing the troubled lives of transsexuals and transvestites I never saw that as just a gratuitous racial slur.