MTV rules Weird Al offensive

Most people wouldn't judge "Weird Al" Yankovic to be offensive. Yankovic's song parodies and his other hilarious tracks have always been relatively clean-cut.

But MTV isn't most people.

That's because in the strange, fucked-up world of MTV, the words 'Morpheus', 'Grokster', 'Limewire', and 'Kazaa' are all considered highly vulgar terms. And when Weird Al released a tune in 2006 called "Don't Download This Song", which was about file-sharing, MTV demanded that the names of these 4 file-sharing sites be deleted.

Because MTV didn't want to encourage eeeeevil file-sharing sites, you see.

Censorship has become all too emblematic of MTV in recent years - when they play videos at all (which they seldom do anymore). The amount of lyrics censorship on MTV generally exceeds even that of corporate radio.

To protest MTV capsizing into the abysmal depths of the toilet, Weird Al provided a video of his song in which the offending words were bleeped - but he did so "as obnoxiously as possible" (as he put it). As a result, it is believed that MTV dropped the tune from its playlist altogether.

All of this came to light recently when MTV launched an online music video site that nobody uses. Evidently, MTV's site carries Yankovic's video, but with the offending words still bleeped.

This is like when the library censored the word 'e-mail' from my site, isn't it?

Uproariously, however, Weird Al still offers the unedited version of the video on his YouTube on MySpace pages.

So the joke's on you, MTV!

(Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/03/business/media/03mtv.html)