Criticism
The total censorship of a song is often reported in the mass media and often has the effect of drawing more attention to the song than it would have received had it not been banned. Equally, the censorship of a word can highlight it to such a degree that it makes it more obvious what the singer has said.
In 1993, when Nirvana's In Utero album was released, it was forced to be censored by their label as well as by distributors Walmart and Kmart. Nirvana's frontman, Kurt Cobain, responded by saying "I just feel bad for all the kids who are forced to buy their music from big chain stores and have to have the edited music". The name of the song "Rape Me" was changed to "Waif Me" for these stores. The name change only appears on the back cover. The original title is still stated in the liner notes and the album insert.
Read more about this topic: Censorship Of Music
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)