zed equals zee

Last week I had a conversation with my friend Paul, about how venerable newspapers bend over backwards to make you hear the word ‘fuck’ in your head, without actually writing it. I ran into this phenomenon in the audio realm a few weeks ago, as I was choosing songs to play on WMBR. I listened to all my choices carefully, so that I wouldn’t be responsible for an FCC violation (some albums were more of an issue than others). I knew that Mother Mother used the line ‘to help me get me fucked’ in their song “Touch Up,” so Keith fired up the audio editing software. But we had to listen to the song a couple of times to realize that the station already had the radio edit; the context and the initial ‘fuh’ sound were enough to trick our brains into hearing the whole word if we weren’t playing close attention.

Furthermore, this video is the definitive evidence that sometimes the bowdlerized version can be way, way dirtier than the original.

MP3: Mother Mother – Touch Up [unexpurgated version, so consider yourself warned]