MTV’s new video site is bleeping out the names of file sharing sites in Weird Al Yankovic’s 2006 song “Don’t Download This Song”:
In an e-mail message on Sunday, Mr. Yankovic wrote that he had bleeped out the names to the file-sharing sites in his song two years ago, after MTV “told me that they would refuse to air my video” otherwise. “Instead of subtly removing or obscuring the words in the track,” he wrote, “I made the creative decision to bleep them out as obnoxiously as possible, so that there would be no mistake I was being censored.”
He complied, “because I was proud of the song and the accompanying Bill Plympton video, and I wanted to do everything I could to maximize exposure for it.”
Here is the original unbleeped version of the lyrics, readily available on YouTube:
Once in a while maybe you will feel the urge
To break international copyright law
By downloading MP3s from file-sharing sites
Like Morpheus or Grokster or Limewire or KaZaA
Last month Wired did a major profile of Yankovic, dubbing him the Forefather of the YouTube Spoof:
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Yankovic’s first music video, “Ricky,” in which he reimagined Toni Basil’s “Mickey” as an ode to I Love Lucy… Though many people at the time considered Yankovic to be thoroughly disposable—just another Reagan- era fad, like parachute pants or the Contras—he never went away. In fact, Yankovic had his biggest hit just two years ago, when he reworked Chamillionaire’s rap hit “Ridin’” as the geek-pride anthem “White & Nerdy” (“X-Men comics, you know I collect ’em / The pens in my pocket, I must protect ’em”). The song was Yankovic’s first track to break the Billboard Top 10.
Yankovic recently inked an iTunes deal in which he bypasses the album model for the faster and more flexible approach of releasing his songs one by one as they’re finished. Read/Write Web thinks he’s missing the point, “he has a big enough name to either give his songs away for free or to sell them himself”