And it’s mucked up that I can’t decide… ?

Gina and I just came from a rehearsal with the Melange Theatre house band for our appearance at the September 20th show. The band rocks, and thus we will rock mightily. I hope you’ve bought your ticket.

During the course of said rehearsal I received my first ever request to censor a lyric. The lyric in question is in “Wait,” and goes as follows:

You call me on the phone
and I wish I pretended I wasn’t home,
’cause every time I hear your voice
I let you get too close.
You twist my guts up baby,
and it’s fucked up how we can’t deny
these feelings for long enough
to avoid climbing on for another ride

They asked very nicely, yet I still went into fight or flight mode. Why take out the “fuck” when the song has other gems in it like “next thing I know you’ll come over and stain the sheets”? Is the use of fuck, not even referring to fucking, any more explicit than that line?

The real issue is not that I want to say fuck so bad, but that “fucked up” maintains the assonance on the line, and the device is not satisfied by “effed up,” “messed up,” or “screwed up,” which were so helpfully suggested by others at the rehearsal.

Also, it provides an emphatic point for me to rejoin Gina on harmony, which was one of the reasons we split up the vocals the way we did in the first place.

(At the time I snapped defensively at the change I didn’t realize that I had all of those reasons running through my head, but now that I’m sitting down to write they’re all plain as day, which is exactly the problem with censorship – sometimes content is only part of the intent, and changing one piece of it to a soothing alternate often has a bigger impact than intended.)

If it was a song other than “Wait” I think I’d probably cut it from the set rather than change the line, because I don’t like the precedent it sets for further artistic direction. However, we really like to play “Wait,” and the band liked to play “Wait,” and we don’t really have another tune that fills the same sort of sonic space. So, I’m probably going to change it.

What to, I’m not sure. Suggestions welcomed.