Music related entry. This one related to censorship. I'm not sure who decides what censor or what criteria  permits a censorship, so this will just be about the censorship in songs.


It kind of amuses me sometimes to hear what kind of words are censored in songs on the radio or through my ipod. In Take You There by Sean Kingston, the word "pina coladas" are censored from the line "We can go to tropics,Sip pina coladas." I think it was because the censorship board didn't want to promote drinking on the radio. Which is weird to me because we have advertisements from beer companies in the papers,on TV football programmes or in cinemas.


Another example is the song Unfaithful by Rihanna. In the line "I might as well take a gun and put it to his head",the word "gun" is censored. I guess it's because we don't want people to go around shooting others. But still, censoring this won't have any effect with all this shooting in movies and video games.


My last example is the song by BEP-I gotta feeling. Two censorships occur in the song-and what is more surprising is that the censorships only just started, even though the song had been aired for a long time. The words "Mazal Tov" and "L'chaim" is a toast which means to life.Now, those are not bad words, and so the only thing I can think of for the censorship of this song is that, they are Jewish words. I think that censoring a word just because its Jewish is just silly. Sure, in Malaysia, we don't acknowledge the existence of Israel  as a nations, and Muslims are not allowed to travel there, but I don't think censoring a Jewish word in a song accomplishes anything.


Actually,generally speaking,censorships today, to me, are slowly losing its effectiveness. Anything that is censored in songs, movies or TV programmes can be easily be found on the internet. I'm not saying that we should stop censorships all together. It is good if the general population can watch a movie without having to worry about excessive sex scenes that might pop up,but if  a sex scene is censored in a movie, what's to stop the audience from just downloading uncensored movies straight from the internet.


Just a thought.