Radio ‘X’ : Popular Rock Groups Often Cross the Line--How Do the Stations Cope?

Guns N’ Roses’ twin “Use Your Illusion” albums are perhaps the most popular and visible rock albums in recent years.

They’re also full of language that many would find offensive: Eight of the albums’ 30 songs contain a four-letter slang term for sexual intercourse or some variation thereof, while two others carry a four-letter synonym for excrement. That means a full 33% of the most talked-about releases today can’t be played on the radio.

Or can they?

Pop and rock radio stations increasingly find themselves caught in a bind: They can’t ignore something as popular as Guns N’ Roses but neither can they ignore federal broadcast regulations and the increasing vigilance of conservative media activists.

In Los Angeles, the major rock and pop stations that play Guns N’ Roses run the gamut of policies regarding obscenity and vulgarity--from pop-oriented KIIS-AM/FM, whose program director says plainly, “We try to keep it clean,” to a number of stations that say they take the matter song by song, to hard-rock-oriented KNAC-FM, which has played virtually all of the Guns albums. In fact, KNAC program director Gregg Steele found only one song, the vitriolic “Get in the Ring,” untouchable for his station.

“We had the album about two weeks before it was in the stores and we played virtually every track to give the audience an opportunity to hear it,” Steele said. “It was just the one track, ‘Get in the Ring,’ that we didn’t air. This is a little too flagrant use of the English language in a way that is offensive without question. Other songs on the albums have just as much potentially offensive language, but we chose to give the audience a shot at hearing them.”

But being the only station playing the whole GNR albums doesn’t mean that KNAC is the only four-letter-word station in Southern California. While the salacious banter of the shock jocks has received most of the attention regarding radio’s content in recent years, the use of street language in pop music is more common than ever. Radio has not entirely shyed away from this trend. Some things are plainly unacceptable--N.W.A’s “Efil4zaggin” received virtually no airplay despite zooming to the No. 1 chart position--but other songs seem to fall into a gray area.

* KQLZ-FM “Pirate Radio” has regularly aired “Man in the Box,” a song by Seattle band Alice in Chains, which includes a common vulgarity for excrement. And while the station hasn’t been airing the profane “Use Your Illusion” songs, it did, while waiting for the anticipated release of those albums, regularly air an older GNR song, “Mr. Brownstone,” which contains a strong vulgarity.

* The Who’s 1978 song “Who Are You”--which features Roger Daltrey embellishing the title chorus to say “Who the . . . are you?”--has been an album-rock radio staple since its release. It can still be heard on many stations, including KLSX-FM and KLOS-FM.

* Romeo Void’s 1981 “Never Say Never,” which employs the same term, is still played occasionally by KROQ-FM and MARS-FM.

* “Gett Off” by Prince, “I Wanna Sex You Up” by Color Me Badd and “Let’s Talk About Sex” by Salt-N-Pepa are among the hit songs that don’t contain four-letter words but which, as the titles indicate, are quite suggestive in content. The songs are on a number of Southern California station playlists.

Part of the reason that stations have different policies regarding these songs is that they aren’t clear on how the Federal Communications Commission defines and enforces its obscenity regulations.

“The FCC grants us our license and the mandate to broadcast in the public interest,” said “Pirate Radio” program director Carey Curlop. “The trouble with them is the rules are not black and white and it’s hard to gauge what they would do (if we played certain material).”

For example, KLOS program director Ken Anthony said, “We just can’t play the songs with blatant language because there are FCC rules and regulations. There are the so-called seven dirty words that George Carlin made famous, and there are terms that are blatantly offensive, like talking about excretory functions.”

But the rules aren’t that specific, said Roger Holberg, supervisory attorney for the enforcement division of the FCC’s mass media bureau.

“The definition of decency we use is ‘language or material which in context depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities or organs,’ ” he said.

He cited as an example Prince’s lurid “Erotic City.” A Las Vegas station was fined $2,000 for playing the song in 1989.

“Context is all-important in determining if something is patently offensive,” he said. “For example, in ‘Erotic City,’ (a sexual expletive) is used repeatedly, but there is no list that says you can’t say that on the radio (in another context). . . . And for decency matters, we are currently limited to dealing with material broadcast (from 6 a.m. to) 8 p.m.”

Holberg said that all FCC investigations of such matters begin with official complaints from the public; the commission does not initiate investigations on its own. In an average month, he said, the regulatory agency receives eight to 10 radio complaints accompanied by a tape or other supporting evidence, but he noted that these generally deal with things said by on-air personnel rather than song lyrics.

Among the recent complaints was one regarding KLOS playing a Guns N’ Roses song and another about a an Illinois station airing “Who Are You,” he said. Holberg said that no decision had been made yet whether to investigate these complaints.

While most program directors spoke of their fear of FCC penalties, which include a fine of up to $12,500 for broadcasting what the commission deems to be indecent programming, they said they measure what is appropriate for their stations by their listeners’ tastes. If there are no complaints, it’s OK.

“Our listeners let us know,” said KIIS program director Bill Richards. “Color Me Badd’s ‘I Wanna Sex You Up’ seemed like it might be a problem, but we didn’t get any complaints.”

Jeff Pollack, whose Pollack Media Group consults on programming matters with 100 stations internationally, including L.A.’s “Pirate,” said that his advice to his clients is tailored for their specific communities. “I’d feel more comfortable playing a controversial Guns N’ Rose song in L.A. or New York than in Des Moines (Iowa) or Baton Rouge (La.),” he said.

In the case of KNAC playing nearly all of the Guns N’ Roses albums, the station’s Steele suggested that he might have gotten complaints if he didn’t .

“It’s the language of our audience,” he said. “We have an aggressive, 18-to-24 (year-old) male audience and a lot of these are people like Axl Rose, angry young men. They use colorful words. . . . By playing a Guns N’ Roses song with (a sexual expletive) in it, we’re not trying to make a statement that we’re a station of bad-asses. We are bad-asses, but we don’t have to use four-letter words to prove it.”

Holberg said that such audience identification does not alone satisfy the FCC rules about programming meeting the standards of the community as a whole.

“Listenership of a station does not matter,” Holberg said. “In radio, people do tune across the dial, so we haven’t limited ourselves to the intended target audience (when considering complaints).”

In the cases of “Who Are You” and “Man in the Box,” not only context but also clarity and manner of speech were mentioned by program directors as allowing their broadcast.

“That’s one of those songs where they say it, but it’s subtle,” KLOS’ Anthony said of the Who song.

Similarly, Curlop of “Pirate” said of the Alice in Chains track: “Unless you read the lyric sheet or are an incredibly huge fan of the band, it’s hard to discern what they’re saying.”

Curlop also noted that there is an alternative “radio edit” of the song provided by the record company, in which the offending word is changed to spit . That’s a common practice of record companies, to whom radio airplay is critical in exposing their product to would-be buyers.

But in the case of Guns N’ Roses, its label, Geffen Records, feels that the band is so popular that there is no need to release radio edits--even in the unlikely event that temperamental Axl Rose would allow such tampering with his songs.

“As far as we’re concerned with Guns N’ Roses, we’re selling all we can manufacture,” said Al Coury, senior vice president and general manager of Geffen.