...here's my Top 10 Moses. Not a single song on the list but just wait.
Matt Gurney: If we’re banning songs, let’s ban these too
Matt Gurney: If we’re banning songs, let’s ban these too
On Wednesday, the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council released a decision banning original versions of Dire Strait’s 1985 smash hit Money for Nothing from our radio waves due to the use of the word “faggot” in the song. The CBSC opened their investigation after a complaint from a listener in Newfoundland, and concluded the song breaches several of its policies designed to protect Canadians from “abusive or unduly discriminatory material.” Bizarrely, though the CBSC permits the use of offensive language if it has fictional merit (for example, racist language in a movie set during the South during the Civil War), it did not apply this exemption to Money for Nothing, despite its use in the song being self-evidently not an example of prejudice, but of commentary on a prejudiced person who would use such a term. Given the precedent set by the CBSC, will the following songs be next?
The Beatles, Happiness is a Warm Gun (1968): It hardly seems necessary to explain this one. Happiness is a warm gun, bang bang, shoot shoot? Yikes. Can we say “incitement to violence?” What’s the point in registering guns if the Fab Four can just go out and call them neato? Better get this off the air, pronto, before some poor gentle soul happens to be listening to it while surfing Sarah Palin’s Facebook page, leading instantaneously to a violent rampage.
Jimmy Hendrix, Hey Joe (1966): A man finds out that his wife has been having an affair (running all over town), so logically, he goes after her with a gun in his hand, and plans to flee to Mexico after murdering her. So that’s violence against woman, unsafe use of a firearm and illegal immigration all in one. Sorry, Jimmy. You’re banned.
Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues (1955): It doesn’t matter if you regret what you did and hang your head and cry when all the rich folk ride past in a train, drinking coffee and smoking big cigars. You should have listened when your mom told you to always be a good boy and never play with guns, but instead, you shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. Sorry, Johnny. No way we can expose Canadians to this. Banned.
Frank Loesser, Baby, It’s Cold Outside (1944): This song can be summed up in two words: Illegal confinement. Date rape. Banned!
Collective Soul, The World I Know (1995): Look, I don’t really know what this song is about, just that I listened to it a lot during high school, and it talks about a guy who’s crying, walking up on high and stepping to the edge. Where is he walking? What edge is he at? Who knows? If it prevents one crying man from jumping off a bridge (or a cliff, or a balcony, or a roof), though, this song has got to go.
Elton John, Jamaica Jerk-Off (1973): Again, not really sure what’s going on in this song, but let’s just deem it both racist and overtly sexual and call it a day. It’s not exactly I Guess That’s Why They Call It The Blues, anyway, so no big loss.
Kurt Weill & Bertolt Brecht, The Ballad of Mack the Knife (1928): Mack is a bad dude, guys. In the English version of the German ballad first popularized by Bobby Darin, Mack stabs a guy, robs another, and is seen possibly throwing a body into the river. And that’s tame compared to the original version, where he rapes a widow and commits arson. How can we be a progressive nation when we let filth like this play on easy listening and swinging standards stations? Old people are impressionable too, you know.
Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You (1967): Is this a love song, or a song about an obsessive man stalking a woman who, as he readily admits, is too good be to true, thus suggesting some degree of mental illness? I’m not sure, and you can’t be either, so, sorry, cast of Jersey Boys. You’ve been promoting criminal behaviour all along.
Huey Lewis and the News, I Want a New Drug (1984): No explanation required. But at least it gave the Ghostbusters theme something to work with.
National Post
mgurney@nationalpost.com
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