Question: You know how donuts have holes in them, right?
Answer: Yes....
Question: And you can take those holes and sell them as Munchkins?
Answer: Um, yes...
Question: So what happens to the profanity in a song that is edited for radio play?
Some guy or group that goes by the name
ni9e explored this question, and the result was the Explicit Content Only version of "Straight Outta Compton" by N.W.A., edited down into versions that contain only the profanity. For example, listen to the 42-second long version of
Fuck Tha Police.
Checking the back information on this,
ni9e also experimented with using the full length of the song, with silence replacing the non-profane parts (see
Straight Outta Compton for the only example), but decided that the shorter versions were more effective.
Here's a link to the webpage for
the full Explicit Content Only album, along with their calculation of the Explicit Content Ratio for each song (the highest was Fuck Tha Police with an amazing 12.1% ECR). Don't bother downloading the songs with 0.0% ECR; those tracks are 0 seconds long. Or, if you are pressed for time, try
every track played at the same time.
It cracks me up when my iPod tosses a Tourette's blast of profanity in the middle of my song set.
(Sorry that this lesson is just a quickie. (I don't know, this has never happened to me before
) I had a longer one planned, but I have too much work today to put it together. Maybe next week...)