Cleanups of CDs Don’t Clean Up

When the debate over controversial music content hits Capitol Hill, Hilary Rosen is often a central figure as the president of the Recording Industry Assn. of America, the music industry’s powerful trade group. But on a recent afternoon of holiday gift-buying, Rosen was just a curious bystander when the issue popped up at a department store cash register.

Rosen was in line behind a woman buying “Country Grammar,” the hit album by rapper Nelly, as a gift for her young son. The cashier offered a warning: The album is rife with lewd lyrics, so perhaps instead she might want a “clean” version, one edited for young or sensitive ears?

“The mother said, ‘Oh no, I want him to have the real thing,’ ” recalls Rosen. “She said, ‘It’s not the first time he’s heard those words. He’s not going to like it, and we’re not going to like it, if it’s not what the artist said, if it’s what some censor did.’ ”

Rosen was disheartened by the mother’s response, but she wasn’t surprised. No one seems particularly thrilled with clean versions these days.

With the holiday shopping season in full swing and the music content debate back in the headlines, you would think that these edited-for-content discs would be a popular alternative in an age of edgy music. Wrong. Young fans and artists hate them, many merchants disdain them, parents are confused by them, and even industry honchos like Rosen find them wanting in quality.

“I wish more artists would take the edited versions seriously and make them more compelling artistically so people didn’t feel the only choice was some garbled words or the original version,” Rosen says with a sigh.

In their defense, the clean versions do create a middle ground between parents and youngsters: If their son or daughter wants, say, a Jay-Z or Papa Roach CD, the clean version allows the parents to take a stand but not fully forbid its purchase.

But the clean versions, sometimes tossed together almost as an afterthought by music makers, usually have so many bleeps and gaps that they can be as maddening as a broken record. That’s one reason, Rosen says, that the unedited versions of titles outsell their clean counterparts by a 10-to-1 ratio, even though some mass-merchant chains refuse to carry the former.

And there’s another big problem: The clean versions often aren’t all that clean.

Charles Gilreath, publisher of the Family Entertainment Guide, an online publication informing parents about questionable album content, points out that the electronic sound effects used to mask profanities are so sonically flimsy or brief that any listener can easily tell what word is being excised.

On Limp Bizkit’s song “Full Nelson” from its current album, for example, the lyrics are punctuated with edits that leave in a “sh” sound that hardly disguises the vulgarity. “I don’t think the censored records leave anything to the imagination,” Gilreath says. “Everyone knows exactly what’s being said.”

The clean versions became a staple of the music industry after record companies agreed 15 years ago to put parental advisory stickers on albums with explicit lyrics or sexual, violent or drug imagery. The stickers were a grudging move to stave off the cleanup crusade led by Tipper Gore and the Parents Music Resource Center.

Massive retailers such as Wal-Mart and Kmart, with an eye to their heartland images and clientele, then said they wouldn’t put stickered albums on their shelves. Those chains account for one-fifth of the overall U.S. music market, so record companies began minting the so-called clean versions to keep the inventory flow going.

But even the activists whose efforts led to the stickers and the clean versions are now soured on the fruits of their crusade.

“A lot of people don’t know there are two versions out there,” says Barbara Wyatt, leader of the Parents Music Resource Center. “A parent then thinks that if there’s no [sticker], everything is all right.”

While parents may be unaware of the sticker program or fuzzy on its application, that is not the case among fans of rap or hard rock, the genres most often cited for explicit content.

“The [stickers] don’t do anything but encourage interest by younger people,” Gilreath says. “If they want something raw, they want it as raw as it comes.”

Indeed, some music industry insiders laugh and note that fans seek out the stickered albums first and won’t buy a disc that isn’t “hard” enough to have one. “It’s the ‘Bad Housekeeping’ seal of approval,” was how Michael Greene, president and chief executive of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, summed it up earlier this year.

Despite fan disdain, the clean versions are not completely free of raw content. Just as no one enforces the stickering of albums (record companies agreed to use them but go by in-house, rarely discussed criteria), there are no hard or fast rules about what can be included on non-stickered, clean versions.

The choices made by the companies can be somewhat odd. Take the non-stickered version of Eminem’s hit album “The Marshall Mathers LP,” easily the most controversial disc of the year. Interscope Records opted to edit out the words “guns,” “knives” and even “Vicodin,” presumably to tone down violence and drug imagery, but there is relentless use of a five-letter word that denigrates women. There is also a minute-long oral sex skit, with lewd sound effects intact, that MTV journalist Kurt Loder has called “possibly one of the vilest things ever committed to record.”

Still, give the clean version of “The Marshall Mathers LP” to true fans as a stocking stuffer, and watch them roll their eyes. The endless stream of edits makes the songs sound as if they’ve been run through a blender.

Rosen says she wishes artists would take more care with edits to make the clean versions a more viable choice. Some artists already seem willing to use craft on the cuts; on “Country Grammar,” for instance, a sly Nelly uses the sound of someone inhaling to replace a marijuana allusion and a phone being dialed to replace a sexual reference.

The trade association leader says she’d also like to see the creation of an accessible and simple directory of lyrics on the Internet that parents could use to make informed decisions about the music they buy for youngsters.

Maybe that would help consumers get a bead on the confusing system of stickers and clean versions, but until then there will be plenty of customers scratching their heads at cash registers.

At a Kmart in the Fairfax district, a cashier said last week that she double-checks when customers bring clean versions to her register. But it isn’t to save the ears of children--it’s to save time at the service counter.

“People bring them back,” she said with mild exasperation, “because they’re edited.”