Why has pop music developed a bad case of tourettes?

 First of all. A big "Guten Tag" to my reader in Germany, who has somehow found this blog. I guess now would not be a good time to mention the football.... I'm sure Bayern Munich will come back again next year. But please keep reading and feel free to leave a comment.

 Today is Sunday and so I guess it is time for me to mount my moral high horse. As you know from my previous posts I did two DJ gigs this weekend, one at a Working mens Club in Leeds on Friday and the following evening at a rather posh wedding in a well known Yorkshire Stately home.

At the engagement party on Friday, about halfway through the night, which was well attended and successful in terms of numbers on the dance floor and feedback from the couple who had booked me I played "Starships" by Nicki Minaj. Nothing particularly unusual about that you may ask. On the dance floor at the time was a mother dancing with her (lets say about 8/9 year old son.) To be honest I quite like song and is a very good, lively song to play at most occasions. Halfway through the song, however is a line containing two f**** in it. That is the only bit of the song with swearing in it and I do not want to sound prudish here or like Mary Whitehouse, but it just seems highly unnecessary and also inappropriate for a family occasion. The mother sort of looked up at me from the dance floor (I was on a stage) and I sort of said over the microphone to the boy "just cover your ears mate," which raised a smile among the audience. Don't get me wrong I can swear like a trooper sometimes, but only in the presence of an appropriate audience.

When I first started DJing in 2004 there was only really the odd Eminem song that I had to be wary about playing in the presence of children, but these days it seems that almost every other song in the charts is littered with swearing and/or sexual innuendo. These are mainly about exactly what a man wants to do to a girl he has spotted in a nightclub; or in the case of a female singer, exactly what she wants the man to do to her. In fact every song that Nicole Scherzinger has ever recorded has all been exactly this subject with the words twisted round a little bit each time. It's like she's obsessed or something. There are of course radio edits, but these are increasingly harder to find on download sites as they prefer to sell you the album version, which of course contain the explicit content.

I'm sorry, but this boorish expression of sexual desire and bad language is boring, sad and is fast taking the fun out of pop. It is also taking the innocence out of childhood, and over sexualising children at a young age. Rihanna is basically a stripper who sings a bit. It must have been very chilly for her in Northern Ireland when filming her video for "We Found Love!" Chris Brown, and other similar male artists are nothing more than a nightclub voyeurs who lust after every girl they see like a herd of sexually frustrated billy goats. Even Beyonce' that symbol of female empowerment just dances along to the male view of women as a sexual objects by writhing around in her underwear. 

What is pop music teaching our children? For boys it is  that girls are merely sex objects which the more you have the bigger your "rep" becomes and for girls it is that to get anywhere in life they have to take off all their clothes and wiggle their bottoms.

I'm not saying that pop music should become full of bands like The Jonas Brothers, but I do not understand the "swearing for the sake of it" mantra that seems to be endemic in today's pop culture.

Take Eliza Doolittle's 2010 hit, "Pack Up," a lovely song to play to a family audience...that is until I discovered that it contained a swear word in it, which to the untrained ear may pass unnoticed, but in the context of the song is still highly unnecessary. Cee-lo Green's hit , "Forget You" also had an alternative version, "F*ck you, but why could he not just leave it at the former title? Moves Like Jagger as well has s*it in it, even Bruno Mars' "Lazy song," one that is commonly requested by children contain the lyrics, "had some really nice sex" and "she screams this is great."

Pop music, up until five or so year ago and with the odd exception would be far more subtle when it came to dealing with sex and barely contained any swearing whatsoever. What is more they were sung in a way that as an innocent child any content would have gone straight over their heads. Speaking from personal experience even the most notoriously explicit song of the 80s, "Relax" by "Frankie Goes To Hollywood" went straight over my head as a child and it is only until I got older did I realise what the song really meant. In 1991, Salt n Pepa's "Let's Talk about Sex" was also  controversial, but it never actually went into so much detail about the subject other than what the title says.

This pop-porn is destroying pop music, which used to be a fun and innocent pleasure for people of all ages. Now it seems that it is just contributing to an ever-more sex-crazed society which is making our children into mini Rihannas and Chris Browns and quite frankly it is not only bad for the next generation, but is actually very very boring.