Dire Straits Censored! What?!?!

[TimWilson]

Brothers, brothers, you've all been taken in. This is nothing more than a very bright music publicist's scheme to quickly and cheaply revive widespread attention to a long-dead item in the old catalog, sending a fresh little flurry of buyers to Amazon.com/iTunes, etc., to spend those dollars. Yes, the ruling in Canada is an official thing, but I'm SURE it was driven by clever staffers at the publisher's office, not an offended Canadian f**.

These guys get paid to think of new and creative ways to generate cheap publicity for artists, and to REgenerate publicity for old stock, where they make even more money. And when they can get the press to do all the shouting for them by creating a little firestorm like this one...

...well, that's money for nothing!

 

[BeyondFiredUp]

Typical PC garbage. USA is headed for the same spineless path. Oprah and her lemming crowd is probably smiling, so pleased we are becoming the casturated world of those to call free speech unacceptable if it "offends" the ones screamng for "tolerance, tolerance, tolerance"...!!!) Double-standard wussies...

 

[ggunn]

We added this song to our setlist a couple of months ago. Just before our first gig playing it last month, I asked the guitarist/singer what he thought about dropping that verse or modifying it, lest we risk offending. He said he'd been playing it for years without any complaint. Freedom of artistic expression is great, but I wouldn't want to lose a gig over it, no matter how stupid that would be.

FWIW, I have the "Money for Nothing" greatest hits CD, and it omits the verse altogether.

-jb

At a gig a couple of months ago, our songwriter and sort of band leader cut our cover of "Drug Store Truck Drivin' Man" from our set because he saw a table of black folks in the audience. I thought it was silly at the time, and I still do.

 

[ggunn]

Um, that word is already censored from songs when they're played on the radio.

But just by swallowing the vowel a bit, the Who got away with putting the F word in the song "Who Are You". So did... oh, who was it... I'm listening to something else on the radio and can't run it in my head. But anyway, the lyrics go something like "...making movies of themselves and they don't give a fck about anybody else..."

 

[lomo]

This is an example of completely misguided political coorectness-absolutely pathetic. It's as bad as renaming Sesame Street Sesame Park, and changing the Cookie Monster to Veggie Monster. I need to find another planet to live on

 

[lomo]

Yes, the ruling in Canada is an official thing,

That's enough to be disgusted at IMO. You may believe it to be a publicity stunt.....but I do not.

 

[cnltb]

TORONTO - Canada's broadcast standards council has ruled that Dire Straits' 1985 hit Money for Nothing should be censored because of a homosexual slur in its lyrics.

The council said the British band's use of a slur referring to gay people three times in the song breaches the national broadcasters' code of ethics. The council said an edited version of the song could be played.

Read the full article here:

Link Removed

If that is really true then that would be completely pathetic IMHO
It surprises me to hear this about canada.

 

[duff beer]

I feel like being a poop disturber, so maybe I'll head over to the local museum and complain that the nude paintings and statues are offensive to me...

 

[ggunn]

"N" word is still a loaded gun, one that should be respected. I was in slight disagreemnt with folks when they censored ****** out of Mark Twain's works recently.

When they censored it out of Blazing Saddles, they just missed the point. With his repeated use of the term throughout the movie, Mel Brooks was attempting to unload the gun.

 

[Bassmickeyd]

But remember this only stands up for the playing of the original unedited version. ...... Some versions cut that word out or change it or they've remixed the tune with that verse cut right out. ....... And this is only in Canada. ..... In the big picture they don't release this will give the band the biggest boost in years. .... They'll probably do a world tour this summer on the strength of these publicity.

 

[napawino]

I found this on Twitter, and it cracked me up.

@NikkiSixx
The only thing that offended us about Dire Straits was that it burned when we peed after we slept with their wives...

 

[OtterOnBass]

Let's stick to facts and not just blame people we don't know or don't like.

 

[KevInDaBassment]

I'm agreeing with the whole "look at it in context" argument, same as in Games Without Frontiers by Peter Gabriel.

In that song he's referring to the irrationality and thoughtlessness of war in general. There's a line in the song that says "Whistling tunes we piss on the coons in the jungle" ("coons" being a southern racial slur for african americans) and was censored early on. Later it got released as they saw the context of how it was presented in the song. I really think they should consider the context of this as well and understand where the artist is coming from.

My ethnic group is widely generalized as "white" and we're frequently called "crackers"...the justification for which is that many years ago white people owned slaves of African descent. Never mind that my ancestors were still in Scotland and nowhere near wealthy enough to even own much land, I'm still a "cracker" lol.

 

[michael_atw]

I don't harken back to the "good old days" when you could say what you wanted (you couldn't, Ricky and Lucy didn't even sleep in the same bed in early episodes), because for many, those good old days weren't such. Not if you were black in the south in 1955, or gay, or Catholic, or Jewish. People tend to have a glowing memory of days gone by, but my opinion is that this is largely a distortion.

Exactly. Generally, the only people who think they were the "good ol' days" are white, anglo-saxon protestants. Those were the only people not getting persecuted before 1965. I think the romanticism of an un-tampered time in history where we all had a good job, a big family, a big piece of land, and a woeful ignorance of the burdens of another man a thousand miles away is just that: romance.

But in relation to Dire Straits, I was reading up on "Money for Nothing" and the song has been getting censored since it came out. This is nothing new.

 

[BassyBill]

FWIW, I have the "Money for Nothing" greatest hits CD, and it omits the verse altogether.

-jb

A lot of compilation albums do have the shortened version and this has had more airplay than the full version for years and years now. I think the song was probably cut down just to get the length of the track okay for radio. After all, the original version is over eight minutes long.

 

[Bryan R. Tyler]

Moving to OT to be merged with the other thread

 

[MIJ-VI]

Much more than PC hypersensitivity!! Do we all know now that there is really NO freedom of speech in Canada? How many words or phrases does the government have to ban before freedom of speech no longer exists?

C'mon...

 

[Jim Campbell]

Brothers, brothers, you've all been taken in. This is nothing more than a very bright music publicist's scheme to quickly and cheaply revive widespread attention to a long-dead item in the old catalog, sending a fresh little flurry of buyers to Amazon.com/iTunes, etc., to spend those dollars. Yes, the ruling in Canada is an official thing, but I'm SURE it was driven by clever staffers at the publisher's office, not an offended Canadian f**.

These guys get paid to think of new and creative ways to generate cheap publicity for artists, and to REgenerate publicity for old stock, where they make even more money. And when they can get the press to do all the shouting for them by creating a little firestorm like this one...

...well, that's money for nothing!

i wish it were only that.....but this is one of the most pc,stickupbutt,afraid to offend anyone except middle aged white guys and americans place you can imagine..........wanna be a swimsuit model,but your faith requires a burka, come to canookistan..... canooks will bend over backwards to please.....

 

[MIJ-VI]

Right , and you can't call me a nazi punk, only I can.

"N" word is still a loaded gun, one that should be respected. I was in slight disagreemnt with folks when they censored ****** out of Mark Twain's works recently.

Sometimes we need a 2X4 upside the forehead to remember how assbackwards things were, and how far we still have to go before we can really call all of ourselves human beings, living on the same piece of dirt.

For those non US, our U.S. Constitution, which many of us beleive is quite a Supreme document, was trashed soon after it was adopted by slavery. Those souls were not considered human beings apparently. So the U.S. Constitution withstood that anomoly for near ahundred years before the whole country blew up in civil war over it. So, here in America, imho, we should allow the word ****** in press, in the right context, to remind us of how much that word, that concept, cost this country in the past.

Plus, here we adhere to the primacy of freedom of speech. Its not all good though, that means you have to put up with things that might bother you. Its the nature of an open society. So, SUCK IT UP!

BTW, if gay citizens had the same marrying rights as everyone lse here in USA, maybe they'd not be so hung up on trivial jibes anymore!

OK bordering in politics here so.......

Peace . out.

Right on! Let's hear it for equal divorce!

 

[Jools4001]

'"The panel concludes that, like other racially driven words in the English language, '******' is one that, even if entirely or marginally accepted in earlier days, is no longer so," [CBSC chair Ron] Cohen says in an official statement.'

I would like to know by what right these self-appointed paragons of virtue see fit to determine the meaning of the English language.

Over here in England, the word '******' has very limited homosexual connotations. It's is (rarely) used as a somewhat old-fashioned word for a small bundle of firewood but is still in common usage to describe a sort of meatball. As far as I'm aware the only homosexual slant on the word over here has come about through being re-imported from the US and in making it's way back over here, somewhere over the Atlantic, it's venomous intent has evaporated. It has about as much of a sting as calling breasts 'boobies'.

Since I'm not gay I can't speak for gay people in the UK to see whether they find being called a ****** offensive, I'm just basing my observation on the fact that my openly gay son and his longterm partner fall about laughing at it - maybe they are just unusually thick skinned.

Maybe I should drop a note to Ron Cohen asking him to ensure his statements about the usage of the English language carry a PC disclaimer about being confined to the American and Canadian usage of the word only in case his proclamations about English usage offend people in the country where the language originated.