My daughter had to come up with a dance routine at school today. She chose "Funhouse" by P!nk, which I believe is pronounced "pink". It would be easy money to play the bewildered dad act, so I won't lie - I knew of the song. But we don't own a copy, and it was needed on a CD this morning.Of course, I was told this at twenty past eight.
Not wanting to set a bad example to my children, I then went looking to buy the song as a download. I've had problems with burning CDs from files with digital rights management protection, so iTunes was ruled out. All other versions available had the warning that they were "explicit".
Let's make this clear: I'm not Mary Whitehouse. I can eff and jeff as much as anyone. I just don't expect to be PAID for it. We're not talking about "Evidently Chicken Town" by John Cooper Clarke here; "Funhouse" has a single swear two minutes in that adds nothing. I'd have laughed if the radio version had bowdlerised the line to "burn the bugger down", but my sense of humour doesn't travel.
The singles chart is absolutely full of this stuff - the mild thrill of BBC radio having to mask any instance of Paul Weller singing "shit" in a Jam song is in the distant past. I've had to tell my kids that this isn't the sole preserve of professional misanthropes like Eminem - chart music is either obsessed with sex or peppered with oil rig vocabulary. Or both. A recent Cee Lo Green single was called "Fuck You". It may as well have been titled "Piss Poo Bum Snot".
I just downloaded the radio version of Funhouse off YouTube in the end. If you feel like reporting me, phone the police. You know their number.
