Saturday, May 31, 2008

The Word is "Joint"

Last night while watching a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers concert on TV, I noticed the interesting censorship that is going on this silly country.

In the song You Don't Know How It Feels, they messed with this line:

Let's get to the point. Let's roll another ????

WTF? (They do it on the video I linked to above, also.
Here's an uncensored version of the song.)

The censured word is joint. As in a marijuana cigarette. I am about 1000 percent sure that when this song was released in 1994 that the word joint was NOT censured. I wonder if it's censured these days on the radio, too. Maybe they just don't play it anymore.

Let's get to the point. Let's roll another joint.

And what doesn't get censured? What objectionable things did I hear Tom Petty sing about last night that wasn't bleeped out?

How about ... drinking booze and getting into a woman's jeans? It's not okay to roll a joint ... but it's okay to mess around and possibly impregnate a woman. And it's okay to get drunk.

I am so glad we have our priorities straight in this country. (That was sarcasm in case you missed it.)

I suppose this is part of the war on drugs. Another government initiative that has never made sense to me.

No, I don't use drugs but I think the policy of locking up someone for smoking MJ is ridiculous. Europe treats drugs as a health issue, not a criminal one, and I think that is the better way to go about this.

Obviously our way isn't working, so it's time to look to something that seems to be modestly successful.

In the meantime, government and TV and everyone else who thinks they know what is good for me, stop censuring my art. And everything else. What are we, a bunch of wilted flowers?

I hate censorship.

4 comments:

  1. What?? They censored THAT???

    What a crazy world...

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  2. I wish we did treat drugs as a health issue here in England, but we tend to follow the US rather than Europe in this as in most things. (Just too lazy to learn another language is the real reason, I suspect.) Anyway, the government recently reclassified grass as a category C rather than a category B drug. Didn't declassify it, you note (which I think the only rational thing to do with all drugs especially since one of the most damaging, alcohol, is already declassified). It's still a crime to light up a joint here. And the response? Outcry in the media. Everyone from the far right (the Mail) to the libertarian centre-right (the Independent) and the vaguely centre left (mirror - as far left as we get in this right wing nation) clamouring about bad messages and moral decay and what have you. Lots of stories started to surface linking cannabis use to possible mental damage in a small number of debatable cases (nothing compared with the physical and mental damage done by alcohol). More moral outrage! The government has now sworn to uphold empire and church by reclassifying as a class B drug. And in all of this moral uproar, everyone ignored the police, who were quietly asking for the reclassification to be confirmed and who have declared they will go on treating cannabis possession as a class C offence whatever the Daily Mail demands.

    Whatever is going on here, it has absolutely nothing to do with the objective facts of the matter. Drugs just seem to touch off moral outrage in the middle class like few other things - and this despite the fact that the middle class are themselves adept at taking everything from cannabis to cocaine!

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  3. After I read this I started singing "Don't bogart that joint, my friend." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbY9ePebWB8 A blast from the past. Still good.

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