The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has ruled that Dire Straits’ 1980s hit Money For Nothing is too offensive for Canadian radio. The ruling, released on Wednesday, was in response to a complaint against St. John’s radio station CHOZ-FM. The listener complained that the word faggot – which appears three times in the song is “extremely offensive” to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
The council is an independent body created by Canadian radio and television broadcasters to review the standards of their content. The award-winning song was the first single from Dire Straits’ album Brothers in Arms and has been an international music staple for 25 years.
YouTube link.
The council ruled that the song contravenes its ethics code which states: “broadcasters shall ensure that their programming contains no abusive or unduly discriminatory material or comment which is based on matters of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, age, sex, sexual orientation, marital status or physical or mental disability.”
It ruled that “faggot,” when used to describe a homosexual, is “even if entirely or marginally acceptable in earlier days, is no longer so.”
The offending lyrics:
The little faggot with the earring and the makeup
Yeah, buddy, that’s his own hair
That little faggot’s got his own jet airplane
That little faggot, he’s a millionaire
6 comments:
As much as I can appreciate how good the song is and that the lyrics at the time were acceptable...
with all the suicides & bullying and the context in which the word is being used.. not once but 3 times, I agree with the CRTC
I love being Canadian, one of ten countries in the world were same sex couples are legally recognized.
They totally ignored the context in making this ruling. The lyrics are from an ignorant (and seemingly jealous) character in the song.
Even some of the gay people they interviewed on the news didn't understand what all the fuss was about. They already know there are bigots out there; this song about an appliance mover's outdated attitude shouldn't be news to them.
I love that vevo has blocked the video in Canada because of "copyright grounds".
FYI, this is not the CRTC who made the ruling. It's the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council, which is an industry group, not a government agency. So this is a case of self-censorship, not government censorship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Broadcast_Standards_Council
I agree that the decision was foolish. One of the problems with political correctness is that it gets reduced to a list of "bad" words that one must never say, rather than a program of teaching people to be judicious and compassionate in their choice of words.
This topic was the comic entertainment at my local watering hole today. I had not heard of the ban until then and the comments were amusing to say the least. While I have been listening to the song for a quarter century, the words never came through to me. Seeing them now, shadowed by all that time, I have to wonder why we have enough time to waste on such minutiae. To people in other lands, let me say that it's not the everyday Canadians who drive this sort of thing, folks, it's the bureaucratic fools that have nothing else to do except watch the clock and count the days to retirement. If people are offended, I feel for them, however, I would ask that they look at the progression of time that has passed and remember that the political correctness wave was a lot smaller then. Twenty-five years from now, who will remember this?
It's such a terrible song and the music video looks horribly dated.
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