Censorship of music

Censorship of music refers to the practice of editing of musical works for various reasons, stemming from a wide variety of motivations, including moral, political, or religious reasons. Censorship can range from the complete government-enforced legal prohibition of a musical work, to private, voluntary removal of content when a musical work appears in a certain context.

Songs are commonly edited for broadcast on radio and television in order to remove content that may be objectionable to some listeners or viewers, such as sexual references or profanities, usually to comply with a particular broadcaster's guidelines for content, or to make the song more marketable to a mainstream audience. Songs edited for content in this manner by are often known as a "clean version" or a "radio edit". Some radio stations may, alternatively, relegate tracks containing objectionable content to time periods deemed appropriate, such as during late-night hours.

Objectionable content is edited out of clean versions in various ways, including muting, "bleeping", backmasking, or otherwise distorting the words so that they are not understandable, or substituting offending words with new lyrics. For example, multiple radio edits of CeeLo Green's song "Fuck You" were released, including one which changed the titular lyric to "Forget You", and "FU", which muted "fuck" wtihout replacing it. Since the song's subject matter was deemed too inappropriate for airplay pre-watershed, BBC Radio 1 played a clean version of Rihanna's song "S&M" during the daytime hours under the alternate title "Come On"; after Rihanna objected to the censorship of the song's title, the BBC compromised by titling it "S&M (Come On)".The Black Eyed Peas re-wrote "Let's Get Retarded"—a song from their album Elephunk, as "Let's Get It Started" to serve as a promotional song for television coverage of the 2004 NBA Playoffs. "Let's Get It Started" was subsequently released as a standalone single. When performing his song "Power" on Saturday Night Live, Kanye West similarly replaced a verse containing profanities as well as lyrics directly criticising the program (such as "Fuck SNL and the whole cast") with an entirely new version

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