This is the strangest thing I've seen in a *while* -- but I guess anything is permissible these days in attempting to sugar-coat artists for "mainstream" distribution on radio... and if you're not playing on radio, you might as well not be playing (apparently).
Anyway, the lyrics to Eminem's latest song have been so *whacked* that (on radio) he seems to be "describing indigestion brought on by over-eager mountaineering" (thank you, NTK!). Take a read, I can't imagine how anyone lets this stuff play *at all* -- they lyrics are *so far* from even *plausibly* making sense in the rewrite version. Listen, folks: if the lyrics can't be played on the radio, then *don't play the song on the radio*. What's so hard about that?
I think this is the final sign that our society has become so paranoid about protecting our children from anything even remotely in the commons that we've lost our last bit of rationality.
See also Not In Front of the Children, a book by Marjorie Heins, excerpted on the EFF's Censorship page. I think I've come to the conclusion that effective parental *monitoring* of your children's radio-listening/web-surfing/book-reading activities is the *only* rational and effective solution. Not censorship. *Monitoring* -- and the magic of computers means that the review doesn't even have to be in real time!