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HoppedUpMenace | 3 years ago
You must not have been around for what the 80's/early 90's had churned out. Any number of songs from 2 Live Crew and Too Short make WAP seem tame by comparison.
Despite the moral panic at the time surrounding those groups/artists, we still managed to survive and grow as a country, and especially with regards to free speech.
kthejoker2|3 years ago
1. 2 Live Crew and Too Short weren't Billboard #1 artists, they were (perfectly fine) marginal hip hop artists who helped knock down the door on profanity in lyrics.
2. Almost every pop song in the 80s and 90s had no profanity, the ratio was probably 99/1 or higher.
3. As a dad of 4 I can attest that profanity in the top 40 pop charts is waaaaaaaaay up, WAP style songs are mainstream, and I've had to teach my 5 year old to say "radio edit" to Alexa.
I did an informal study, at the end of last year Amazon Music had a "top 100 songs of 2021" playlist, I listened to them all and 44 of them had lyrics I would consider inappropriate for a 5 year old.
I'm not a prude and I'm not making value judgments, but the floodgates have opened on profanity and explicit lyrics, at least in part because of the decline of radio's monopoly, the rise of streaming, the overall fracturing of the monoculture, and the Internet's rewarding of clickbait / extreme behavior.
krapp|3 years ago