Spring Awakening fans may have noticed some self-censoring done by the Spring Awakening performance last night on the Tonys.   

For example, in the song "Totally Fucked", the offending word (not "totally"; the other one) was replaced with the cast members covering their mouths.  At another point, they sang "totally screwed".

Not that bnit of self-censorship, I can understand.  It’s a harsh word.  It doesn’t bother me particularly (especially in the context of the song), and it doesn’t mean (in the context of the song) sex.  But it’s a strong word, and it’s okay to modify language for the more faint-hearted viewers.

However, in the song "The Bitch of Living", the word "breast" was replaced with "chest".  So instead of:

See, each night, it’s like fantastic-
Tossing, turning, without rest
‘Cause my days at the piano
With my teacher and her breasts…

it became:

See, each night, it’s like fantastic-
Tossing, turning, without rest
‘Cause my days at the piano
With my teacher and her chest…

The moments later, the lyric is supposed to be:

I mean, God, please
Just let those apples fall

and it became something about "I want it all".

Now here’s my issue: in the clean version, don’t we still know what he is talking about?  It’s still clear that the singer is talking about his adolescent fascination with his piano teacher’s mammorial endowment.  If the meaning is clear, then what difference does it make whether he uses the word "chest", "breast" or something else ("bodacious funbags")?  Are people offended by the word "breast" but somehow "chest" is okay?  I don’t get it.

Anyway, this was going to be a long post not about morality, but about the law surrounding the use of certain words on television and radio.  But a poster had BlueNC has done a nice job covering the legal history of the FCC and "naughty words" up to and including the recent Second Circuit decision which basically took the FCC to task for arbitrarily fining networks for supposed decency violations.  I urge anyone interested to read it as it does a good job of laying out the competing interests of (1) the First Amendment and (2) parental privacy (i.e., not having your kid exposed to evil words).