You gotta love government censorship, especially when it's 25 years later

I think we’re about the same age, but I was in high school when Brothers in Arms came out and I don’t remember anyone bitching about the other songs on it. The idea that anyone was surprised by the rest of the album never occurred to me.

What’s offensive about meat balls?

As a footnote, a Dire Straits greatest-hits compilation from 12 years ago had a censored version of Money for Nothing as well. So it isn’t even private industry censorship, it’s self-censorship!

The original complainant in this case was from St. John’s and the radio station was OZFM. Why a person so easily offended would be listening to OZFM in the first place is beyond me since it’s a very “classic rock” station and generally considered the domain of middle-aged men around here.

Yeah - this is somewhat old news. This was one of the many songs that got modified on all ClearChannel stations (another hit - It’s the End of the World as We Know It, which had the entire verse with the remark about looking at a low plane cut). I remember noticing it on the classic rock station around the same time, though I have no idea whether the two events were in any way related to one another. I would guess not - offensive things about gay people don’t have that much to do with 9/11.

What’s really great is that the only reason you would think the term was intended to be offensive is if you only listened to that tiny segment of the song. The speaker in this song is a mover who is envious of “that little faggot with the earring and the makeup” on television, because all he has to do is plunk on his guitar and he gets “money for nothing.” In the video, the members of Dire Straits ARE the alleged faggots (while the speaker in the song is an horrifying venture into 80s computer animation), so either they’ve got some serious issues with their own self-image, or they’re not using the term to make fun of anybody aside from the speaker himself. The actual offensiveness level doesn’t even rise to the standard of the “N-word Jim” (I think they’re planning on changing it to “Slave Jim,” which would be the world’s crappiest nickname because it’s awkward to say and doesn’t roll off the tongue - they’d be better off just dropping the word entirely if they’re that concerned) argument going on about Huckleberry Finn. We’ve entered an era where the offensiveness of a word, phrase, or image depends less on what you’re trying to convey and more on the worst possible interpretation that any given individual could apply to the object itself without any regard for context.

I’d say that the term clearly is intended to be offensive, for exactly the reason you describe. The speaker is a nasty person, and he means the word “faggot” in the most offensive sense possible.

We clearly aren’t supposed to sympathize with him, of course.

It’s not so much that the song wasn’t beloved, to some extent it was, but what really put it over the top was the video, revolutionary at the time for its computer graphics in music video form. It ended up being used as an MTV bumper, parodied by Weird Al, and copied to some extent in several other videos.

I mean, don’t get me started on “Safety Dance”. Nobody really liked the song (except maybe me), they just liked seeing the dwarf and the hippie Canadians and the cute blond girl dancing around the May Pole like it’s 1599.

That doesn’t explain how “Pop Goes the World” made it to the top 20 in the US.

Just admit it - Men Without Hats were epic.

;-)

I LOVE Safety Dance, actually. But yeah, the video made it extra awesome. I think the same is true for Money.

And Sarkus, I don’t think we disagree here. I’m talking mainly about people who weren’t familiar with Dire Straights. When a single gets THAT big, there will always be people who only know the band through that song. In this case, it isn’t indicative of the rest of their work, really.

The true story is that Knopfler was at an electronics store and overheard some guy who was moving tv’s and fridges around, and he was watching a Michael Jackson video. He’s the little faggot with his own jet plane, not Mark.

From Wiki:

…The lead character in “Money for Nothing” is a guy who works in the hardware department in a television/custom kitchen/refrigerator/microwave appliance store. He’s singing the song. I wrote the song when I was actually in the store. I borrowed a bit of paper and started to write the song down in the store. I wanted to use a lot of the language that the real guy actually used when I heard him, because it was more real…

I know this is a bit tangential but, What flavor of censorship is this?

You should read Remake by Connie Willis. This is not surprising.