Dire Straits "Money For Nothing"

We're all familiar with The Grandfather Clause Of Language, right?

A regular, legal, Grandfather Clause, you know, allows the continued practice of a recently banned act, if the practitioner has been engaging in said practice for a really long time.

The Grandfather Clause Of Language basically means that you are willing to give an elderly person a pass on the offensive (or racist or politically incorrect) things they say, if said remark was not considered offensive in "their day," even if it is inappropriate now.

And there is an equivalent phenomenon in music.

Certain songs we play, going back 20, 30, 40 years, may contain a word that was allowed to be broadcast when it first came out. If a song featuring that same word came out today, the word would most certainly be censored.

How else to explain that no station that I've ever heard, ever censors the word "Nigger" in Elvis Costello's "Oliver's Army"? Cee-Lo Green certainly couldn't use that word (or several others) in his Radio Edit of "Fuck You."

And strangely, most Classic Rock stations have always kept the "do goody-good Bullshit" line intact, in Pink Floyd's "Money." But any current radio song with the same lyric, would have to arrive at the station, "Bullshit"-free.

At Christmastime, you never hear the word "faggot" edited out of The Pogues song "Fairytale Of New York." Yet, when KT Tunstall and Ed Harcourt covered it recently, they were requested to alter that line.

Weirdly, if a song has gotten by the censors all these years, it seems to get left alone.

Until now.

What to make of The Canadian Broadcast Standards Council's decision to ban play of "Money For Nothing" unless the word "faggot" is edited out . . . 25 years after the song came out?

Bizarre, eh?