I swear to god, more and more I keep having ‘clean’ versions play on Spotify, YouTube Music, Deezer - despite the song being marked as ‘Explicit’.
And no, I definitely do not have the setting checked for only playing clean versions.
It’s not just me - is it?
Not sure if it’s just you, but we were at an event last night and the DJ was playing “Play that funky music” by Wild Cherry and it was censored during the chorus to remove “white boy” and “whitey”…
There is zero chance any white person has ever complained about that song, but I can see some kind of overzealous cenoring busybody treating anything that could possibly be misconstrued as racist censoring it.
It could also be AI automated filtering.
I predict we won’t be able to properly express how someone looks in 5 years, because all words will be offensive.
White/Black/Asian. Fat. Bald. Skinny. Women/Man. Probably all offensive soon.
I don’t know where you live, or what reality you’re choosing to live in, but that’s just such a bad take. I live in liberal ass California right in the thick of it. I have plenty of black and white (among others) friends, fat friends, and gay friends. The only thing I’ve ever had some things around word choice is when someone identifies as a different gender. Even then I’ve called people by their wrong gender and they’ve politely corrected me and I change it.
Oh come on. Extremists gonna extreme. Some will try to make a bunch of words offensive, the others will keep fighting for their right to use these words. The vast majority of the rest of people will just keep living their lives and just use whatever’s the most appropriate word at a given time with the language evolving. It used not to be considered really offensive to insult people with gay slurs when I was in high school. Languages evolve with their times, and that’s perfectly fine.
My guess is it’s probably not extremists per se, but rather corporations that are scared of offending anyone and being the focus of the internet’s bad or uproar of the day. I will say though, at my last company, the younger generation was pushing all this stuff super hard. While I agree with plenty of the general purpose stuff, I’m like, can’t we just do our jobs and not sit in meetings all day about what our job is supposed to be?
Enshittification intensifies. I feel like I am traveling back in time. Recently I started ripping music again because of streaming service enshittification, and just two weeks ago I started burning CDs again because an update was pushed to my phone that broke compatibility with my car’s Bluetooth. Last time it took two months for them to hotfix it.
No YouTube is now censoring things that they find profane. I was watching one of my favorite channels and host was discussing the HBO Doc on Nickelodeon and she wasn’t being vulger but everytime she said the words sexaul assault they would cut it. Pissed me off. I am fucking adult and don’t want YouTube deciding what words I am allowed to hear.
Shit getting worse like fucking 1984 when exactly are we going rise up and demand better?
1984 supposes it’s coming from big government and social structures. Seems like a lot of people just aren’t watching what big corporations are doing cause it’s getting at least just as creepy…
Exactly the moment when a person(s) of strong character evident primarily through the way they conduct themselves. No amount of documentation of previous good character can hold up against someone who doesn’t care about it on the first place.
They need be only 2 things: Humble, and undeniably good character. When someone meets them, the only people who won’t think they’re worth following will be people who don’t have good intents, and even they will internally admit and know who they’ve met.
I think the imaginary power couple of Keanu Reeves and Julie D’Aubigny
To be fair, in that specific case it is almost certainly not YouTube directly censoring the phrase. They aren’t known to do any kind of editing like that on uploaded videos.
What is happening is the person that uploaded that video censored themselves…because YouTube’s policy around monetization. They’ll demonetize videos with certain no-no words. Part of that is YouTube and part of that is advertisers demanding their ads not be placed on content that they find objectionable.
Indirectly, YouTube and advertisers are censoring our content. A lot of it is also TikTok, which will ban you for no-no words. This seeps over into YouTube where something that might be fine on YouTube but is banned on TikTok gets censored anyway in case it gets clipped for TikTok.
Genuinely the power TikTok and it’s advertisers have over how we communicate is pretty scary. Imagine how often you hear “unalive” instead of “suicide” these days. “Pdf” (or others) instead of “pedophile.” The list goes on.
A few years ago I was in a car with coworkers and the music was weird……turns out Amazon was playing all covers. Driver said it was a regular Amazon stream. I was never more happy to have my Plex server and have been increasing my CD purchases from eBay.
PSA: don’t forget to wash your “new to you” CDs, they rip much better. Just need a little hand soap and water and boom, clean ass discs ready to go.
different albums release different versions of songs. found this with Teenage Dirtbag. legit album version was fine. spotify isn’t censoring on the fly. lots of albums, like from xibit or busta rhymes released clean and explicit versions of the album. depends on artist and label.
The problem I am finding is that explicit versions I have added to my playlist are replaced with clean versions. Not always, but sometimes.
unless something has changed fundamentally, im not sure how this is possible to change your playlist like that. like i posted last night, i noticed it on the song Teenage Dirtbag, it was edited, i never really spent time to fix it as i always heard it driving and forgot to fix it. it’s possible artists are just posting edited/unedited versions and spotify is defaulting to edited.
this was the version i had saved as it came up first - https://open.spotify.com/track/3LI4MmibTkXH5cGpCGZgyw - and you can see it’s from dawson’s creek, obviously edited.
updated it to this one - https://open.spotify.com/track/25FTMokYEbEWHEdss5JLZS - and it’s the unedited version right from their album.
if you look here, Xzibit has 2 versions of his album Weapons of Mass Destruction, one clean, one edited and clearly labeled - https://open.spotify.com/artist/4tujQJicOnuZRLiBFdp3Ou/discography/album
Not just you. It fucking sucks. Patti Smiths Song “Rock n Roll removed” is gone from Spotify too, for example.
Some apps or instances auto censor some words, like the N word in the song there, or retard is another, it’s other use is using a retarder to slow a chemical reaction.
I got banned on Facebook for saying “fatty acids” because “fatty” is a bad word.
That’s weird that the original is gone, the Marilyn Manson cover of it is still on there. In a more egregious example, the Anal Cunt song “Beating Up N*s That Sell Fake Crack” is still up too.
Not just you… I’ve had both clean and explicit versions playing of the same songs coming up randomly and it’s annoying.
I legit want an option to only use the explicit versions, the clean ones never sound good where they clean it up, and sometimes they even use those stupid sound effects that just frankly destroy the song. If the service only has the clean version, I think I’d rather it just not play it at all
I worked on exactly this for a while, a long, long time ago. It turns out to be an annoyingly difficult bag of problems. The record companies don’t really care, they sell (sold, I guess) pieces of plastic. (Idk if they fixed it yet, but the same Turbonegro album kept getting sent with the same scratches, kept getting taken down a while later, for years.) So, good luck trusting them to label anything.
Puritans are so much more aggressive than sane people that making mistakes one way is much more expensive than the other way.
Anyway, we ended up trying to work out which tracks are actually the same song, (Easy for you, harder for friend computer, yes?) and then if one of them is marked explicit, they all are, unless marked “radio edit” or “clean”, or whatever. If you think about this for a minute, if one track is labeled “radio edit”, maybe the other ones should be marked explicit…
It’s a deep rabbit hole, is what I’m saying.
And the people with the pitchforks are never happy.
I get that it’s not necessarily simple, however… Firstly, surely streaming companies could push for a standard formatting to make their lives easier. And second, why does a track that was previously explicit suddenly start playing as the clean version one day? Why is the data for it continually being changed?
Could ‘push’, yes, as in, “we mentioned it in passing when rock and roll grandpa wasn’t paying attention, so he wouldn’t throw a hissy fit and withdraw from the service”. Oh, you meant to the labels? Ha ha ha, NO. The labels have basically nuclear option veto powers.
As for changes, well, updates get delivered all the time, for various reasons. (The scratched Turbonegro album being one frequent flyer.) I think a lot of those are bullshit SEO-like reasons, but it is what it is.
Which artist appears in most frequent releases? I forget, but I think it’s Elvis. Possibly Johnny Cash. Why? Because some material has gone out of copyright in some jurisdictions, and so people have the idea to upload them again in ‘new’ compilations. (The content team don’t even beat these down personally – that’s machine work)
