Songs That Wouldn't Get Airplay Today

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Gob
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Joined: Tue Apr 06, 2010 8:40 am

Re: Songs That Wouldn't Get Airplay Today

Post by Gob »

Sir Trevor Phillips has attacked the BBC for censoring the N-word in Bob Dylan’s anti-racism protest song Hurricane.



The former race equality chief said it was ‘incredibly patronising’ of the BBC to let black artists on urban radio station 1Xtra use the word, but then censor other musicians.

He described the decision of Radio 6 Music bosses to edit out a line of the Dylan song featuring the word as ‘absurd and insulting’.

The song, about the boxer Rubin Carter, who was wrongly convicted of murder, had the line ‘and for the black folks he was just a crazy n*****’ removed when it was broadcast on Tom Robinson’s 6 Music show, Now Playing, on April 24.
All of Rubin's cards were marked in advance
The trial was a pig-circus, he never had a chance
The judge made Rubin's witnesses drunkards from the slums
To the white folks who watched, he was a revolutionary bum
And for the black folks he was just a crazy nigger
No one doubted that he pulled the trigger
And though they could not produce the gun
The D.A. said he was the one who did the deed
And the all-white jury agreed

But one indignant listener – who had noticed that station’s bosses had ‘deftly omitted’ a line from the song without telling the audience – contacted Radio 4’s audience response show Feedback.

The listener pointed out that the song itself was an ‘impassioned anti-racist account of a notorious miscarriage of justice’ and that ‘the line you fellows deleted is very much a key moment in the story’.Sir Trevor, who is chairman of Index on Censorship, appeared on the Radio 4 show to discuss the issue and was scathing about the way the BBC had behaved.

He told the programme: ‘Bob Dylan has used that word for a particular reason in one of his most powerful pieces of work –which by the way is a profoundly anti-racist piece of work and for somebody, who frankly shouldn’t be there to judge a genius, to tell me I’m too fragile to listen to what Bob Dylan has done with his work of art – I think this is both absurd and insulting and actually not what the BBC is there to do.’

When the presenter of Feedback Roger Bolton suggested that the BBC would allow the word to be aired occasionally on Radio 1Xtra because the word had been ‘reclaimed’ by black musicians, Sir Trevor disagreed.
“If you trust in yourself, and believe in your dreams, and follow your star. . . you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

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