Saturday, November 20, 2010

Censorship bored

A few weeks ago, at the internet shop, I heard for the first time, and many times thereafter, a song which is probably very familiar to young people and to those who listen to their music. (“Their music.” That it! The final confirmation! I’m old.) What struck me was what passed for a chorus and if it did not stick in my mind for its content it certainly did because of seemingly endless repetition. It was, “I wanna be a billionaire so fuckin’ bad…” The lyrics may be very clever but that is all of the song that I noticed enough to remember. It was played, at considerable volume, over speakers, not only in the shop, but in the open area shared by a snack bar, a salon, a tiny general merchandise shop and anyone who happened to be passing by.
The first thing that struck me was ‘billionaire’. ‘Millionaire’ is no longer a sufficient goal for semi-illiterate song-writers; they want to be billionaires.
The second was the free use of the once-shocking word ‘fuck.’ In the distant past, perhaps forty years ago, a comic who specialized in social commentary did a bit about “the words you can’t say on television” (which included ‘hell’ among others) and part of the appeal of his monologue was the frequent repetition of the word ‘fuck’. (I do not understand the coy bowdlerism, popular in newspapers, of ‘f--k’ or similar substitutions for ‘fuck’. How is that less offensive than the word spelled out?) In fact, another comic, Lenny Bruce, a short generation earlier (For comics, ‘generation’ is defined by the brief time that their humor is unique or ground-breaking.) was removed from the stage and arrested for using obscenities in his routine, and chief among them was the word ‘fuck’. Now it’s broadcast for anyone to hear, whether they choose to or not.
I probably wouldn’t have thought to write about it but on Sunday I took the kids to a 7th birthday party for one of Shintaro’s classmates, Zeus, (pronounced Zay Ooos, something like ‘Hey youse’.) First and seventh birthdays are particularly important here. I think it’s a Chinese influence or perhaps it’s common throughout Asia, or even all third-world nations, and I suspect it’s a celebration that the child has survived the first and second most dangerous periods of his life. It’s a big deal. It was held at Jollibee (a MacDonald’s clone and probably more successful here than its role model. Jollibee, the mascot, is more popular here than Santa Claus.) and, as you might have guessed, nestled in the ‘background’ music (‘Background’ in quotes because it was loud enough that you had to raise your voice to be heard above it) I heard, “I wanna be a billionaire….”
A few years ago there was a song which included, again as an endlessly repeated chorus of sorts, the lines, “Lick my legs, my back, my pussy AND my crack…” Aside from the personal nature of the young lady singer’s public expression of her sexual preferences, I was struck by the emphasis on the conjunction ‘and’. It seemed as if the other words were so mundane that even a simple conjunction took precedence. I probably would not recall this otherwise eminently forgettable bit of ‘music’ except that, similar to the situation with the other song, I heard it played during intermission at a theater where I had taken the kids to see a children’s movie.
The Philippines has an organization, which I think is called something like “The Catholic Bishops Censorship Board”, which reviews movies and other media and seems to have the power to prohibit public dissemination of offensive material. I’m wondering what they do. I’m beginning to suspect that they view their primary role as insuring that no one mentions the word ‘contraceptive’.
God bless
D

©November 18, 2010

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