Funny Censorship is Funny
Rock Band 2 has a lot of songs. One of those songs is “You Oughta Know” by Alanis Morissette, her rather bitter, sarcastic ode to Uncle Joey of Full House (Which is a bit creepy in itself; Dave Coulier is about 15 years older than Morissette is). Given its subject matter, it’s not surprising that someone (Be it Harmonix themselves or someone at the ESRB) saw fit to censor some of the lyrics. Besides the obvious removal of an “F” word, there’s additional censorship that is the subject of this post.
Early in the song is the line “An older version of me/is she perverted like me/would she go down on you in a theatre?”, a not-all-that-veiled reference to oral sex in, um, a theatre (Or “Theater”, if you’re particularly anal about the spelling of your band name). For some reason, it was decided that removing the word “down”, and only the word “down”, was acceptable here. This actually makes the phrase even worse/more hilarious. The reason for this is that it leaves “Would she go (pause) on you in a theatre?”, which makes it sound like the subject of the song has a thing for being urinated on during the movies.
Funny censorship indeed! Can you think of anything else like this? The only other real example I can think of is the Playstation 2 release of In the Groove, where the method of censoring used–turning the words into complete gibberish–tended to make things even worse if you listened hard enough/knew what to listen for.
Alanis Morisette.. there’s a name I’ve not heard in many years Theatre would be correct, since AM is in Canada, eh?
Censorship does cause some weird sound blips, especially if you’re listening to a radio friendly version of say, an Eminem song. The one I always remember Dire Straits “Money for Nothing” where the radio version often left the word “faggot” in the song but censored this line:
And hes up there, whats that? hawaiian noises?
Bangin on the bongoes like a chimpanzee
In most versions of the song, it goes: “Bangin’on the bongoes like a mmmppph” They didn’t pause it out, they substituted a nonsense noise! It’s never particularly offensive, especially since the song is “spoken” from a blue collar point of view.
Heh. The radio verion I hear on 105.9 up here simply does away with the entire second verse and chorus (The “faggot” verse, and I think the verse with those lines in it too).
Weird.