Via Denise Howell (via Facebook via Twitter, really… or is it the other way around… gosh…) Weird Al Yankovich reveals the unsurprising fact that despite its pride in bringing us many aspects of the worst popular culture has to offer, MTV has its limits in terms of free expression — when it comes to the competition:
The foul-mouthed musician swept up by MTV’s speech code is Weird Al Yankovic, whose lyrics to “Don’t Download This Song,” a tongue-in-cheek complaint about file-sharing first released in 2006 included those so-called offensive terms. (Since then, two of those sites — Grokster and Morpheus — have become inactive.)
In an e-mail message on Sunday, Mr. Yankovic wrote that he had bleeped out the names to the file-sharing sites in his song two years ago, after MTV “told me that they would refuse to air my video” otherwise. “Instead of subtly removing or obscuring the words in the track,” he wrote, “I made the creative decision to bleep them out as obnoxiously as possible, so that there would be no mistake I was being censored.”
In a world where commerce, culture and even class are so disproportionately premised on entertainment, there are some taboos that are not to be challenged.
Ultimately via laconica…http://army.twit.tv/dhowell/ 😉