Censorship

Media censorship is the action of suppressing any type of speech or public communication that the government, media outlet or other controlling body may deem offensive, harmful or inappropriate to anyone in the public domain. Censorship can be used for a number of different reasons including religious, military, political and moral. When applied to the music industry, media censorship may involve filtering out certain aspects of a song such as inappropriate language or showing a censored version of a music video as it includes violent or sexual images that may not be suitable for people of all ages. An example of an artist who had to filter out his music video as it included inappropriate is Nick Cave and the Bad Seed's with their single 'Jubilee Street'. An uncensored version of the music video is also available on YouTube.

Some artists may go against having their music censored but it means it probably won't get played on mainstream radio especially during peak times or lead to it not being played at all. Radio stations have special methods like 'bleeping' for example to help filter out bad language in songs. The general aim of media censoring is so music can be played at any time, for anyone, on any radio station or television program/advert, etc.

Examples of how pop songs are censored for radio use include:

-Bleeping- when a 'beeping' noise is play over the word or lyric so it cannot be heard.
-Blanking- when the song is completely muted for all or part of the offensive lyric/word in the song.
-Re-sampling- overriding the original lyric with music or a like-sounding portion of vocals.
-Re-singing- replacing the inappropriate lyric with another by singing over. Perhaps a word that sounds similar or fits without changing the context of the original lyric.
-Backmasking- taking the original audio of the bad language and reversing so it can no longer be heard.
-Repeating- repeating the word before the explicit word was used so it isn't as obvious. This can sometimes make the lyric sound strange and hard to understand.
-Skipping- removing the inappropriate word without a time delay.

 Here is an example of a song by Kanye West called '25 to Life' where words that may cause offence are blanked out and can no longer be heard.