Check out the music children listen to, and you will hear rap and hip-hop songs about sex, violence, women as objects, and domination. Sometimes the questionable language is explicit and sometimes it’s implicit, veiled in metaphors. Ask children if the content is appropriate or what the song is about, and you will get one of four answers:
“I don’t know. I just like the music.”
“I don’t know, but it’s OK because it doesn’t have any swears in it.”
“I know it has cursing in it so I listen to the ‘clean’ version.”
“I know it’s about sex and violence, but I like the beat.”
When children think that music is inappropriate, most often they believe that the moral infraction lies with the use of profanity. If you clean up the words, you cleanse the moral space and thus are free to listen, they believe. In fact, YouTube is littered with tunes that are designated “clean” because censors have “bleeped out” the swearing in them. But that really isn’t good enough. Full article
