A Better Reaction to Lyrical Redaction

When I last wrote about the issue of redacted lyrics in 2021, I may have buried the lead. There were a lot of current examples of songs that couldn’t be played on the radio in their intended form, and some that would have probably been OK but were edited anyway. There were a lot of inconsistencies — the word “weed” bleeped from “Peaches” while “Cocaine” played on the Classic Rocker down the hall. Toward the end of the article, I suggested that perhaps these hit songs could play unedited on HD side channels.

Two years later, redacted lyrics remain an issue — annoying the listeners who stayed and helping to make radio seem irrelevant to the ones that we can’t reach. It’s an issue that broadcasters haven’t had the energy to address, but we do have the bandwidth. So let me start with the solution this time:

• Broadcasters playing contemporary hit music need to create parallel versions of their stations that play unedited lyrics.
• Broadcasters and HD Radio provider Xperi should aggressively explore the possibility of making HD Radio subchannels exempt from the same language restrictions as over-the-air stations.
• More obviously, and more immediately, those parallel unedited versions of radio stations should be made available on stations’ streaming apps and by our streaming aggregators. Switching from edited to unedited lyrics, for those who prefer it, could be as easy as a push of a button.

I came back to the redacted lyrics issue this week because of Gunna’s “fukumean” — No. 6 on Billboard’s Hot 100 this week, No. 20 at Hip-Hop/R&B radio and No. 28 at Rhythmic Top 40. That song is structured so that it still works with a radio edit, but hearing it with the hook makes you wish that there could be a “whatchamean?” version coming, something that artists with top 10 songs aren’t usually motivated to do these days.  

But there are a lot of less-obvious redaction issues at Top 40 at the moment, and some of them go way beyond responsibility to the license for an over-the-air radio station:

• Raye can sing about “drunk sex” but not cocaine in “Escapism,” again even though Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” is a top-200 song at Classic Rock radio;
• Anybody who only knows SZA’s “Kill Bill” from those radio stations that play the edit doesn’t know that she just killed her ex; that lyric actually sounds more lascivious with the redaction;
• The money line in the second verse of Post Malone’s “Chemical” is one that has to be redacted on the radio (although the intent is pretty clear);
• The rise of CHR throwbacks means that I’ve heard Nickelback’s “Rockstar” again several times in recent weeks. Even in 2006, I remember co-workers expressing surprise that “drug dealer on speed dial” had to be edited. How was Clapton getting his deliveries?
• Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” does have a playable radio version with alternate lyrics, for which I’m glad. But I heard it yesterday on SiriusXM’s TikTok Radio and it was hard to deny the full emotional impact of the original lyric.

A Top 40 format full of redacted lyrics hasn’t done much to retain those contemporary listeners who decided they would be more comfortable at Christian AC or gold-based formats. They give current listeners a disjointed experience when the original songs are available not just via streaming but on SiriusXM’s Pandora and TikTok Radio channels.

Redacted lyrics solve only one problem for listeners who are unlikely to be offended by that language themselves, but care about what their kids sing, particularly later. With “Rockstar,” there’s a particular irony there. Three years earlier, Chad Kroeger & Josey Scott’s “Hero,” because it was Spiderman-related, was a big hit that had at least a few toddlers singing about “a world full of killing/and blood spilling” with gusto.

It would be logical to offer parents a push-of-a-button option for when “kids in the car” is an issue, and when it isn’t. I originally wrote “easy,” and while that should be the case, it would mean tackling some of the same streaming substitution issues that haunt radio’s streaming experience now. If we did, it would make our streaming apps more robust and offer listeners more options. Searching our existing aggregators for “unedited” did not lead to any station choices when I tried it this morning. 

It’s also hard to imagine broadcasters getting the FCC’s attention about this topic. If they could, however, it would be a boon to HD Radio at a time when the technology is more readily usable, but when many broadcasters are opting to offer fewer subchannels. There would be the accompanying question of whether all HD Radio stations should be free from language restrictions, or only those that are simulcasts. But like satellite radio, HD Radio is effectively opt-in technology. (On my car radio, there is the ability to disable it.) 

Not every broadcaster will want to give up the franchise of being the family station — even if appealing to the whole family is a harder thing to achieve. I understand that decision. Nor would I want you to think that curse words are my entire strategy for keeping radio vital. There’s a lot more that has to happen with the streaming experience, and I’ve been writing about it since “Rockstar” was a current. Radio’s future hinges on personality, a renewed commitment to marketing, and taking control of the available music in many ways, of which this is an increasingly obvious one.