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And Finally Artist News Media
Kanye West argues against “unwarranted censorship” on Billboard performance
By Andy Malt | Published on Wednesday 20 May 2015
Reps for Kanye West have issued a statement expressing disappointment at the previously reported censorship of his performance of ‘All Day’ at Sunday’s Billboard Music Awards; censorship which resulted in him being “seriously misrepresented”. Apparently.
Of course, this is the second awards show that has felt TV audiences would be better off only hearing brief snippets of audio from the song, there being a similar incident at the BRIT Awards earlier this year. The editing of the live broadcast was seemingly intended to cut out swearing and uses of ‘the n word’. However, the statement suggests that broadcasters were so intent on removing any racially sensitive words that they also dropped mere mentions of the word ‘black’.
Published by Pitchfork, the statement reads: “Kanye West was grossly over-censored at the Billboard Music Awards. Non-profane lyrics such as ‘with my leather black jeans on’ were muted for over 30 second intervals. As a result, his voice and performance were seriously misrepresented. It is ridiculous that in 2015, unwarranted censorship is something that artists still have to fight against”.
The losers here are the rapper and the viewers, the statement continues: “Although West was clearly set up to face elements beyond his control during the live broadcast, he would like to apologise to the television audience who were unable to enjoy the performance the way he envisioned”.
While the BRITs performance did make it onto YouTube uncensored, it was decided that the muted TV broadcast of the BBMA set was good enough for the world. I mean, who wouldn’t want to watch a video with half the audio missing and which mainly only shows smoke and some out of focus pyros?
