There's not much reason for someone like me (i.e., someone who not only remembers the first President Bush, but was old enough to vote for him--or not) to watch MTV these days, but I recently caught the current Maroon 5 single "Wake Up Call" on the channel and paused to listen to it, since I find it a welcome change from their typical pale soul thing. But I was struck by something: unless I completely overlooked something, the video played essentially without any deletions or bleeps in the song itself. Considering the song is about taking revenge on a girlfriend by killing the man she's cheating with (and it's implied, revenge on the woman too) and the video features a gun, this surprised me some.
At some point in MTV's life cycle, the channel began censoring not only the usual things that get censored on television--language and nudity--but references to drug use and violence. Until the Maroon 5 video, I had assumed this policy had no wiggle room because a lot of the things that have been bleeped out over the years have really been pretty innocuous and hardly "glorfiying" (I hate that expression) of drugs or mayhem--the use of the word bong in the Breeders' "Cannonball", Rihanna likening being "Unfaithful" to shooting her boyfriend in the head, Sean Kingston's use of suicidal in the obviously non-depressive "Beautiful Girls."
Needless to say, this sort of censorship has been most prevalent in hip-hop, to the point where you even wonder why MTV bothers playing certain videos. I'm not sure where I would draw the line if I ran the network, but you'd have to be pretty dim to think that the reference to robbing jewelry stores in the silly Nelly single "Grillz", which MTV has never let pass, is a real invitation to crime. Which brings up Maroon 5, which is to put it mildly not a particularly threatening band. Could a band made up of actual black people and not wannabes like Adam Levine and co. actually get a song with the lyric "Came without a warning so I had to shoot him dead/He won't come around here anymore" played on MTV with the lyrics unbleeped? This question is of course rhetorical.
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