Remember when downloading music was all the rage? Getting your music for free, lots of it, any where, any how – was the thing to do. People were loading up on senseless album collections like ABBA, just because they could.
Well, with the inception and birth of MTVmusic.com, last week, they’ve resurrected Weird Al’s 2006 video “Don’t Download This Song”, which was obnoxiously censored by Weird Al, as a middle finger move to the MTV censors.
GloriousNoise gives the details on an email message written by Weird Al Yankovic, himself on Sunday about how 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.”
The names of peer-to-peer services Morpheus, Grokster, Limewire, and Kazaa are apparently too controversial for MTV to air. Do any of those still even work anymore?