The wise words of Eminem once told us “The FCC won’t let me be…they try to shut me down on MTV, but it feels so empty without me.”
Lately it seems like the FCC won’t get off my back. The Federal Communication Commission is currently running my college radio broadcast. I knew that when I started to DJ a radio show that there would be some kind of restriction but the FCC rules just don’t seem necessary.
The FCC did once make sense for radio stations to be censored but not anymore. People should be able to say an play what they please. It is difficult to find a good clean version of a song or a radio edit because it changes the way it was meant to sound. If a song says the word “shit” once through it, it won’t be played on the radio. Now I’m not condoning F-bombs throughout entire songs- but a single curse word muffled behind a beat and a few background singers really wouldn’t do much harm.
We are supposed to have freedom of speech in this country, right? So wouldn’t that mean being able to broadcast obscene words in songs? Or is that just too against the rules? We want to believe that we have the right to freedom of speech but in reality the FCC has control over what is broadcasted.
Maybe this censoring of obscene language is important with big stations like Z100 and KISS FM, but for my tiny little college radio broadcast I should be able to play a song with a bad word.
Censoring these broadcasts is like scribbling out bad words in a book, sure it might shield readers from whatever inappropriate information the author wrote, but they may be missing out on a good story.
Listeners shouldn’t have to miss a good song for the radio edited censored version. Trying to "beep" something out doesn't fix the problem. The blankness in the song or the beep makes people think of what they are actually saying and make us focus on that bad word longer then we would. The beep isn't neutral; it only makes the song more obscene.
Most people actually like the original. A few years ago Cee lo Green created a song called “F*** You” but also made a clean version called “Forget You” and the uncensored version got 52 million more views on YouTube.
The FCC should not pertain to small stations like my own at college. Besides who is listening to my college broadcast anyway? My mom? Certainly not young children who we don't want exposed to bad words. The FCC actually also states on their website that the commission’s rules prohibit the broadcast of profanity and indecent material between the hours of 6 a.m. and 10 p.m. So if your show started at 10, technically you would be able to say what you want. Granted many people still would not say bad words on the radio.
The FCC should not be the ones holding me back from playing the original versions of my favorite songs. They should be less focused on radio as a whole since it is certainly not the primary source of information and entertainment. And they shouldn’t be controlling the set list of an hour-long show from a sophomore in college.
