When I audition CDs for the Taproot Radio rotation, I try my best to give every song a fair listen while at the same time getting the good stuff into the play list just as soon as possible. Sometimes this means that I don’t fully grok the beauty, niftiness, or coolness of a song until it’s well into rotation and I’ve listened to a song a dozen times or so. But after a couple of initial listens, I can usually decide whether a song should go into rotation or not. Most of the time, a song that makes it into rotation grows on my more and more with each listen.
Most of the time.
The problem is that sometimes I don’t fully comprehend all the lyrics of a song on the the first few listens and sometimes a song makes it on to the play list with really stupid lyrics. Sometimes a song makes it onto the play list with offensive lyrics.
I’m not going to try to define “offensive.” I’m just gonna say that I know it when I hear it. It’s not just a matter or eliminating a few words here and there. That’s often a pretty god triage device. But I’ve marked songs as off limits before even though they didn’t use any of the obvious forbidden words.
The reason this is on my mind is that this past week, I put a song into rotation that had a really bad word in it. I mean one of the Really Bad Words. It was online for about three days before I noticed it and I took it off rotation as soon as I could.
I can’t guarantee that mistakes like this will never happen. I make some reasonable efforts and keeping the Really Bad Words off my station but as this week proved to me, it’s going to happen every now and then.
What I can guarantee is that I’ll quickly address any Really Bad issues that show up on either on the Live 365 station or the on-the-air show at WCOM. So please, if you hear something that is Really Bad in terms of offensiveness on Taproot Radio, please let me know via e-mail at feedback@taprootradio.com.
And if you hear a song on Taproot Radio that’s reall bad just because you think it’s stupid or crappy or boring, well, I want to hear that too.
