I expect simple behaviours here. Friendship, and love. Any advice should be from the perspective of the person asking, not the person giving! We have had to make new membership moderated to combat the huge number of spammers who register
Location: Canada
Registered: March 2010
Messages: 188
How many things over the years have been taken for-granted just because they have "always been that way" and nobody bats an eye? After someone finally complained about the 1985 hit "Money for Nothing" by Dire Straits, the song has finally been banned in Canada for its' anti-gay slurs. I have always like the songs' beat, and the rest of the song was good but every time they sang "That little faggot" (which was 3 times in the second verse), I cringed. I totally hated that part of the song so I never listened to it at all if I could help it.
Location: U.S.
Registered: August 2003
Messages: 565
There is an article about this over at box turtle bulletin, though they apparently actually listened to or read the lyrics as a whole, seeing past that one word.
"Now there is no doubt whatsoever that the lyrics of this song are sexist, racist and homophobic. But the important matter is whether the song celebrates these attitudes or mocks them.....
....When I first hear Money for Nothing, the “fagg*t” language was jarring… until I finally realized that the protagonists lyrics answer himself, are a reminder of what his own bigoted values have given him. His choices have led him to hauling refrigerators and installing microwave ovens.
But I guess the Very Serious People at the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council just don’t get irony or sarcastic social commentary. So no more “I want my, I want my, I want my MTV”
(\\__/) And if you don't believe The sun will rise
(='.'=) Stand alone and greet The coming night
(")_(") In the last remaining light. (C. Cornell)
Location: US/Canada
Registered: September 2009
Messages: 733
I'm sorry Peter, but the use of the word faggot in the lyrics of this song just does not rise to the level of bigotry and being an offence that our Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has determined.
I equate this as censorship no different than that Professor who has republished Mark Twain's Classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and edited out the word nigger.
It is a matter of contextual usage Peter. Look, yeah if that slur was directed at you or a particular living group of LGBTQ persons with the intent to harm, demonise, or attempt to minimise, then by all means absolutely block it.
But here's a reality check as well, that song is over 25 years of age and the only air play it gets is on classic rock stations right?
We need to be very careful about how much of feces storm we raise over issues, especially in direct relation and context to those that have significant negative impact on the greater LGBTQ community in all of its various segments and the lyrics of this Dire Straits song just don't get anywhere close.
Then too, if you look at those lyrics in context, they are rich in irony & sarcasm Peter.
Location: Canada
Registered: March 2010
Messages: 188
I agree that the lyrics have to be taken in context and there is sarcasm there too, but many people don't listen to songs as a whole and in the context that they were intended. Rather they pick out parts of songs to sing along to, and "that little faggot's got his own jet airplane" and such are the lyrics that I mostly hear people singing along to. Youth tend to copy and they are especially vulnerable to the music that they listen to.
It may be just me, but that is one word that makes me cringe every time I hear it, maybe because I find it to be so derogatory. I would like nothing more than to have it totally removed from the English language regardless of the context that it is used in.
I also agree that the song has been around for a long time, but peoples' views are changing. We are evolving in the right direction. People also used to buy heroin and cocaine over the counter as medicine for minor ailments... things change as we come to realize our wrongs.
As it stands, Mark Knopfler is changing "faggot" to "fudger", and I'm not quite sure if I think that is any better.
Location: U.S.
Registered: November 2009
Messages: 630
It makes you wonder since if Dire Straits had not issued this song all those years ago we would not be having this discussion...or would we?
If not the word "faggot," which at the time I always assumed was suggestive of David Bowie or Lou Reed, it would certainly be another piece of language.
I get the sarcasm in the lyrics, and after all the song is about MTV which has been the source of so much degrading imagery towards homosexual people...heterosexual and bisexual as well.
Long after Dire Straits disbanded, MTV was showing images of half naked women cowing to large masculine thugs. Words like "F**K," bitch, booty were commonplace. MTV changed the way the generations talked and changed the music they admired.
I despise MTV for the pervasive violent rap music and the images they allowed into millions of homes. They have assaulted the minds of several generations and need to be removed from society. If something needs to be banned let's start there.
I think banning or censorship of a word in a song that is decades old misses the point. In this context "faggot" is hardly the negative assumed by those who would censor. But I can understand someone being offended and my advice...don't listen.
If their objective is to clean up the recording industry they need to start with the sex and violence portrayed in all the music issued since Dire Straits. We know that won't happen, there is too much money involved. This is a level of political correctness that will flop.
Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read. (Sir Francis Bacon 1561-1626)
Quite honestly I would not wish to see this scene portrayed in any other way or censored of the word. It is one of the most emotional and compelling moments in the film.
[Updated on: Sun, 16 January 2011 13:57]
Age appears to be best in four things; old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read. (Sir Francis Bacon 1561-1626)
Location: Adelaide, South Australia
Registered: September 2010
Messages: 127
By strange coincidence, I just walked joined my bf who was watching the 1970 movie, The Owl and the Pussycat, starring George Segal and Barbra Streisand.
The scene I walked in on was where George lets Barba into his apartment and within 30 seconds or so, she has accused George Segal's character of being, "Faggy, queer, and a fag."
Does this discovery mean we should demand the film be edited or that we should ask Barbra to overdub her words with something more acceptable to these 'modern' times?
Or should we ban farce in our dramatic works regardless of, as Brody puts it, contextual usage. Unfortunately, I think some people actually would ban Barbra from her long time status of being the icon she is to so many in the LGBT community, if they saw this scene.
We have created recorded works, movies, songs, videos, etc., which will age, become irrelevant or have altered meanings to current usage both now and in the future, and we should be mature enough to view these works without offence if we are to benefit from the legacies these recordings provide for us, even if they do cause us to debate current usage.
DesDownunder
Call me naive if you want, but life without trust in the goodness of others would be intolerable.
Religious indoctrination: It gets better, without it.
Location: Adelaide, South Australia
Registered: September 2010
Messages: 127
The black and white minstrels show would probably be inappropriate to try to restage today. Till Death Do Us Part, is satire as you say.
However these shows exist and to try to make them politically correct by editing is alter history. Let them be seen with reasons why we regard them as we do today. The point is they are recorded shows, which we have only had for a a little over 100 years. They serve us with a direct link to our past, and the attitudes of the past.
The very first 'talkie' (movie with sound) had this scene and to censor it or ban it would be an atrocious act of censorship, as well as affront to the enormous technical and artists efforts which brought sound to the movies.
DesDownunder
Call me naive if you want, but life without trust in the goodness of others would be intolerable.
Religious indoctrination: It gets better, without it.
Location: Canada
Registered: March 2010
Messages: 188
Wow. Controversy. I didn't intend to stir up so much of it, but the debate is good and has many valid points. My main concern in this is how impressionable young people are especially via the music medium. If they hear someone singing "That little faggot" it can easily become a part of their own vocabulary and can be used in a totally different context as when it was used in the song. Because it is used musically over the public airwaves, it can be misconstrued as an acceptable phrase and can be used in a hurtful way, thus bullying.
Maybe it is just my hate of this particular word. None of the other epithets bother me quite so much, possibly a throwback to my youth.
Location: Adelaide, South Australia
Registered: September 2010
Messages: 127
Interestingly (for me anyway) way back in 1970 I had to write a scene for a play in which a young man is told he needs security. I chose to have an insurance man corner him with a sales pitch that was I thought plainly satirical: "You need security, Sir." blah blah blah.
The audience laughed at all the right places, but then one night towards the end of the play's run an elderly couple came up to me after the performance and congratulated me on getting the message of the need for 'security' to the young. And they weren't laughing. They had completely missed the irony which everyone else seemed to get.
The point is that no matter how much you try, there will usually be someone who misinterprets what is said.
Similarly I dare to suggest that well-meaning people do not always understand the nature of satire and try to correct it with so-called 'politically correct' speech or censorship, which I might add usually offends somebody else.
There are jokes which cross the line of decency, there are representations which are crass, barbaric and frankly, obscene, and it is correct for them to be criticised as such. But these are different to what passed as acceptable entertainment in the past. No one (I hope) is thinking that that would excuse feeding Christians to the lions again, or burning woman at the stake, but there are places where ridicule is a harrowing experience, intimidation, bullying, is used to marginalise a person's self esteem, and that must be addressed with some fortitude. Likewise we should deplore the stoning of other human beings regardless of the laws of the land in which the stoning is done. Monty Python has a wonderful stoning satire in the Life of Brian, which is funny because it is parody, and politically incorrect.
For a wonderful discussion on censoring the n-word (the one used to describe black people in America, the original opening song of "Showboat" with its line:
"N*****s all work the Mississippi,
N*****s all work while the white folk play."
is discussed in the liner notes of a DVD recording of some years ago in which the producer had tried to faithfully recreate in sound, the experience of the opening night of the show.
Note: the song's lines are both accurate language of the time, and are simultaneously attacking and revealing the racism of the period. I need hardly add that the words have shocked audiences from opening night to the present day, to the point where they have been changed, or the song omitted altogether thereby depreciating the anti-racist nature of the message of the whole show. Old Hollywood (30s and 40s) is full of movies which addressed racism, but also guilty of using black actors and singers for novelty. Let them be a lesson in themselves to encourage our humanity towards each other.
In similar manner, gays have been used in plays and movies as figures of derision for no other purpose than titillation of the audience. Having it register in the audience that calling someone a f*g in a movie is in fact wrong because it is a degradation of a human being is one way to educate the audience, but like my insurance salesman, somebody in that audience is likely to misconstrue the message. When the person who misconstrues is a member of the politically correct brigade, we will probably have a call for censorship.
DesDownunder
Call me naive if you want, but life without trust in the goodness of others would be intolerable.
Religious indoctrination: It gets better, without it.
Location: US/Canada
Registered: September 2009
Messages: 733
Well Peter, here's another opinion that I feel expresses quite accurately how I think quite a number of folk feel about this:
"Shakespeare would be rolling over in his g-word. When you ban a word, you make the word more powerful. All this banning that’s going on just makes (the hate) go deeper and deeper into the soul, where it festers. Let it it out. I want to know what you really think. I can handle it. It makes me feel like we’re five years old and need to go potty. The n-word, I guess, is number 1 and the f- word is number 2."
- Kids In The Hall star Scott Thompson, responding to Canada's banning of Dire Straits' Money For Nothing for its usage of the word "faggot."
Columnist Gordon Clark, of the Province editorial pages and author of the hugely popular GORDZILLA IN THE CITY column weighed in with:
Sheesh, I’m away a coupel moths . . . sorry, let me fix that . . . a couple months. . . with the world’s dumbest unjry . . . sorry, injury . . . and I come back to find that the thought police are once again trying to dictate in Canada what we can and van’t write. (Ah, heck, close enough.)
You see, back in October I hurt my right hand playing hockey. Two weeks later, when I went to the hand clinic at St. Paul’s Hospital thinking I was going to learn how to splint my fingers or, perhaps, ice the injury, I was told I’d torn a tendon off inside my hand and would need more-or-less immediate surgery to prevent a permanent disability.
I thought I’d be away for a couple days. But here we are 10 weeks later and thanks to the care of my wonderful hand therapist Maritess, I can typr again! (Well, we’re getting there.)
Now that I can actually write again, imagine my great relief in knowing that the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council has absolutely no control over what I’m allowed to write.
The CBSC — which really ought to stand for the Completely Bumbling Song Censors — is the self-regulatory body of the Canadian broadcasting industry behind the asinine decision to ban the Dire Straits’ song "Money for Nothing" from the airwaves because its lyrics contain the word "faggot."
The group’s decision stems from a complaint by a single, anonymous woman in Newfoundland who says she’s a member of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. This one individual, having heard the 26-year-old, award-winning song on OZ FM, was able to stop every radio station in Canada from playing the tune thanks to the CBSC’s frighteningly inadequate review of complaints.
Without seeking the advice of language experts, writers or other artists, the CBSC accepted the woman’s completely false claim that using the word "faggot" in a sentence can mean just one thing — "an unavoidable connotation of hate" that promotes discrimination. What hogwash.
Within the gay community, and even outside of it, people often call each other "***" or "faggot" in a very lighthearted, non-menacing way. It’s not something I would do, but I know it is done.
Dan Savage, the well-known gay advice columnist, for instance, initially planned to name his column "Hey Faggot!" and did use the phrase at the start of his work for years as a way to reclaim the word, and others such as "queer," from bigots.
The word can be said ironically, in humour. It can also be used artistically, as Mark Knopfler does in "Money for Nothing," when he inserts the word into the mouth of a fictitious character in its full, derogatory sense to make a point about the character’s bigotry — not to promote hatred. Eminem frequently uses the word *** in his lyrics, as did The Pogues in their song "Fairy tale of New York" that you hear each Christmas.
And I’m certain there are other ways I haven’t thought of — or none of us have yet dreamed up — where someone could use the term and not be out to oppress or hate homosexuals.
If we ban "Money for Nothing," there’s a long list of other great songs that will need to be banned too.
The CBSC, and its national chairman Ronald Cohen, don’t seem to understand any of this. Cohen, who arrogantly defends the fact his group allows no appeal of its decisions ("it would be cumbersome," he told QMI Agency) claimed in one justification for the ban that the term "faggot" was somewhat OK in the past but no longer. Really?
If anything, the opposite is true. When I was a kid it really only had one, derogatory meaning. Certainly its use in "Money for Nothing" hasn’t changed over the years.
Cohen told the Globe and Mail that in the huge backlash against the ban — which has included radio stations, thankfully, repeatedly playing "Money for Nothing" in protest — "virtually nobody is saying that the word is OK."
Well, I’ll say it, unless, shamefully, you are using the term during a verbal or physical attack on a gay person, or as a derogatory term in a conversation about homosexuals. It can be a word that wounds, but not always.
In that way it is like the word ***, likely the most politically charged words in English. While I can’t ever image uttering the term myself, it’s commonly used as a term of affection among blacks (and even between black and white close friends, one Afro-American pal of mine from the U.S. South once told me) and is commonly found in lyrics. Should we now ban songs, books or other pieces of art that use the n-word?
Where does all this banning end? Maybe I, as a heavy-set redhead with a Scottish cultural heritage, should call on the CBSC to ban the Austin Powers movies because of Fat Bastard, Dr. Evil’s morbidly obese henchman. I just may, if I can ever stop laughing long enough thinking about him in his little sumo outfit.
Location: Canada
Registered: March 2010
Messages: 188
There are so many different opinions, and I have but one (you'll notice I added a question mark to the subject line to infer this). I am feeling somewhat on the defensive here, and that could be because in this instance, I am somewhat hypocritical. I am against censorship in it's entirety... save for this one word. It could very well be because it is the one word that was most thrown at me in my teens during the few times I was beaten up. It was an empty word at that time as nobody knew one way or the other with the exception of course of the ones I bedded, but obviously they were never involved in the fights.
I am not saying the song should be banned, I like the song. But that word. Call me gay, call me queer even in a derogatory fashion and I will be fine with that for the most part, though I will stand my ground. Call me a faggot and I will most likely flatten you.
Most people want to ban the things they don't like and subsidise the things they like without batting an eyelash.
I like my freedom to refer to Christians as "Jewish Zombie fuckers", though. So I think it's only fair for them to have the freedom to call me "faggot" in return.
I try and be consistent on this point (as you probably noticed when I was commenting on the tensions between bullying and free speech).
My opinions aren't holeproof either, though. I am just as right (or wrong) as you are! All we really have are opinions.
Look at this tree. I cannot make it blossom when it suits me nor make it bear fruit before its time [...] No matter what you do, that seed will grow to be a peach tree. You may wish for an apple or an orange, but you will get a peach.
Master Oogway
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Re: Another "small step for man"... in the right direction 
Re: Another "small step for man"... in the right direction 
