Clean? Yeah, right!

I recently started using this music program called Spotify.  Its pretty cool cause I find pretty much any songs that I want and then organize them into playlists.  Its quite convenient for when I'm working on my computer or just doing something in my room and I want to listen to a specific set of songs.  Over the last couple of days I've been organizing and expanding my collection of songs.  One of those collections is what I call my "edgy" songs, basically songs that have cussing in them, talk about drinking and drugs, etc.  They're not the best songs, but I do like to listen to them on occasion.  As I was looking for one of those songs, I saw that there was a "clean" edition available.  So, I was like, cool, I can still listen to this song I like but without the cussing.

I was curious how they cleaned up the song so I started listening to it.  As I listened I started thinking, how exactly is this cleaned up?  Its not one of those songs that's just full of cussing, its actually pretty minimal, but as I was listening they still said the d-word.  By the end of the song I was thinking that it was just some kind of hoax or something cause it definitely wasn't "clean".  But then there it was, they blanked out the s-word.  At the end of the song I was just kind of like, that was it?  You blank out one of the four or five cuss words and the song is clean?  It made no sense to me and as it was they left just enough of the blanked out word in that you knew what it was even if you'd never heard the song before.

At that point I was curious to see if that was how they all songs.  So I looked up a few of the Nicki Minaj and P!nk songs that I like and sure enough, it was exactly the same.  A few words were blanked out, but others were left in, and again enough of the word was left that you knew what was being said.  And it was the same with the edited versions as well.  Nothing was really different.  As I was listening to some of these songs, I couldn't help but wonder what the point was.  Why label a song "clean" when its really not?  In all honesty, I don't know.  Maybe people feel better because they're listening to a song that labels itself as clean, even if it really isn't.  Maybe they like the fact that the song doesn't have the box saying "explicit" next to it.  I don't know, but to me, it seems like a lie.  I know for me, I was so excited cause I thought I could listen to some of these songs I really like without the cussing in them, only to be terribly disappointed when that wasn't the case.  If you're gonna label the songs as "clean", then make sure they're clean.