Is There Such A Thing As Clean Rap
The Ying Yang Twins in the "Look (The Whisper Song)" video. YouTube hide caption
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The Ying Yang Twins in the "Wait (The Whisper Song)" video.
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If you lot listen to music on the radio, chances are you'll hear a lot of lyrics that don't match the ones on the original album recordings. When songs become profanity, obscenity or references to drugs or sex removed for broadcast, it's a procedure known every bit clean editing. Joel Mullis is one of the masters of the art.
"I can see a cuss word — you lot know, from doing so many clean edits," Mullis says. "I don't even take to heed to them a lot of times, considering I recognize what an 'S-H' looks like, what an 'F' looks similar, in a waveform."
Engineer Joel Mullis in the studio. Shante Slagle hide caption
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Shante Slagle
Engineer Joel Mullis in the studio.
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Back in the early 2000s, Mullis was an engineer at The Zone, a popular recording studio in Atlanta. He worked with many of the big names in Southern rap at the time — Ludacris, David Banner, Immature BloodZ and others. Later on recording the artists in the studio, Mullis was often responsible for going dorsum into the mix and making a broadcast-friendly version of a rail.
"For a long time, that basically meant going in and chopping out the cuss words," Mullis says. "Simply 1 thing that I got known for was making the make clean edits part of the song."
He won major brownie in that regard afterward he tackled a Ying Yang Twins track called "Look (The Whisper Song)." The song is incredibly raunchy, and to make information technology safe for airplay, Mullis had to piece of work a lot of magic.
To brand his edits sound natural, he replaced certain naughty words with advertising-libs, sampled from other songs by the group (hence the clean version's distinctive hook, "Wait till you see my ... oh!"). Elsewhere, a woman'southward moans, which Mullis pulled from a stock sound effects library, get the message across.
Mullis' edit helped the song become a striking, only his version wasn't prophylactic enough for some outlets. He says that while at that place are sure specific words that broadcasters are prohibited from airing, at that place's as well a lot of grayness area.
"MTV had things that they were more sensitive to, so BET had things that they were more than bothered past — and then we did all these different versions, brought them back into the studio, recorded alternate lyrics," Mullis says.
In one case a song ends upwardly in the hands of a radio station, it tin make even more changes. Ability 106 in Los Angeles is one of the biggest hip-hop stations in the globe, and its music manager Emanuel Coquia, better known as DJ E-Man, takes clean edits seriously.
"You'll hear a clean version that comes in and it could be partially cleaned — you won't hear the total F-bomb edited out," Eastward-Man says. "We want to brand certain that information technology is completely taken out, not leaving the 'F' or the 'CK.'"
His rule is that before any song plays on Power 106, iii sets of ears must screen information technology for profanity, sex and drug references. "We do it for every song, because yous never know," he stresses. "I heard the new Ariana Grande record — she said 'southward***.' No one is gonna expect that from her."
If they feel anything crosses the line, they edit information technology out with one of a few get-to techniques: A word can be reversed, slowed downwards so information technology's unintelligible, or muted entirely. E-Homo says muting is the safest option, but if you listen closely yous'll hear dissimilar types of tweaks on different stations.
There are networks that play information technology even safer. "The give-and-take 'damn' is something that comes up from fourth dimension to fourth dimension, and that is something that nosotros do not allow," says Phil Guerini, general manager of Radio Disney.
Though it'southward now almost exclusively a satellite and streaming entity, Radio Disney still makes lots of edits because of its target audience, 8-to-16-yr-olds. Guerini says Disney has a standards-and-practices section that pores over songs word past word — and and so listens to how those words come up across in context.
"When said in an up-tempo manner, information technology may non be an issue," he explains. "Simply if it'south said suggestively — or, we talk about the tone in the voice: Is that sensual? What is that?" Radio Disney is big enough can become dorsum to a label and say it wants songs cleaned even more. Artists frequently oblige so they can reach the tens of millions of teens, tweens and moms who tune in.
When I spoke with Guerini, he said well-nigh half of the more than 50 songs on rotation at the time had been edited. That includes a tweaked version of Meghan Trainor's "All About that Bass," in which the line, "She says boys similar the girls for the beauty they concur within" stands in for the more explicitly haul-positive original. The goal, Guerini says, is that families can listen together and things won't get weird.
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Over at Power 106, DJ Due east-Human being says things can get weird when stations clean upwards songs too much, as well often. It can drive listeners to the competition — be it another station or an online streaming service.
"It's tough. We tin't take away from the creativity or the freedom of voice communication in the music, and if it happens to be the audition's favorite song, OK — this is what they wanna hear," he says. "But allow'southward nowadays it to where information technology'due south advisable for everyone to mind to."
Too, if a dirty version is what you're afterward, it's only a click away.
Priska Neely is a reporter at KPCC in Los Angeles, and a onetime producer for weekends on All Things Considered.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2015/11/08/454606994/the-art-of-the-clean-version
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