Britney Spears' one-woman tribute to Ronnie Barker, If You Seek Amy, is causing American radio stations to spontaneously explode as they try to decide if they can play it or not, what with it sounding a little rude. But the phrase isn't rude, but you could imagine it to be filthy, and once you think it sounds like F-U-C-K me, then you can't not see it like that any more. It's like the hidden arrow in the Fed Ex logo, once someone points it out to you, you're always aware it's there. But what can you do? The phrase isn't filthy. But it is.
Naturally, the US media is known for nothing if not its craven collapse in the face of getting into trouble, and so they're yanking Britney off:
"It's OK to put in on an album, have fun with it, but we're publicly owned, you know?" said Patti Marshall, program director at Cincinnati's Q102, a pop station in a decidedly conservative Midwestern market. "We have a responsibility to the public ... you put this ... out and act like we're all fuddy-duddies, like we're trying to make moral judgments. It's not about us. It's about the mom in the minivan with her 8-year-old."
Ah yes, an eight year old who is familiar enough with both stevedore's language, spelling and wordplay to suddenly ask "but Mummy, what does 'fuck me' mean?". That could be embarrassing. If only Britney had stuck to songs about being hit and womanizers and so on, none of this would ever have happened. No mother driving an eight year old in a minivan is ever going to feel uncomfortable being asked 'when that lady says she'll be your slave, does she mean she's going to give you a pyramid?'
Britney could care less if a few radio stations run shy of playing her new single. After all, what's a slot at 8am on a Cincinnati FM station compared with acres of press coverage you get for releasing a song that sounds a bit like Fuck Me?