In a message dated 5/7/2004 1:03:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
audities-owner@smoe.org writes:
This kind of surprised me and then on another level doesn't.
I work in a music store where we can't play anything with profanity (though 
frankly that refers mostly to songs with a certain word beginning with the 
sixth letter of the alphabet and anything with overt sexual context) and we've had 
this debate many times. It seems that when anything is "bleeped" it not only 
draws extra attention to the lyrics of the song, but it also makes the mind 
wonder what was missed. I think that the "dirty" versions are quite often less 
offensive, especially given the tendency to bleep fairly inoffensive words 
(like any drug reference) in the clean edits.

For example, I often play FOW's "Welcome Interstate Managers", but "Bright 
Future In Sales" not only contains s-bombs, it contains them prominently in the 
chorus. Generally, we'll just play through them--this isn't the worst of 
bad-word sins, frankly--but sometimes we'll tailor the content for the customers in 
the store. One Sunday morning there were some kids inside, so we decided to 
"edit" the song ourselves--ie, shut off the speakers for a half-second each 
time the s-bomb is dropped. it's a trick we use often for songs that are good but 
only have a bad word or two. The end result, however, seemed far MORE 
offensive--especially in its choppiness, and it was never worth doing again. Now I 
just skip the track if I'm worried about it.

Strangely I was in Best Buy once and they played a Streets track with f-bombs 
intact on their in-house radio. We'd never get away with that. --Jason