iLike iTunes, iDo

I love my iPods. In fact I've got two. This sounds like I'm building up to some sort of crude sexual innuendo, but it is in fact true. And I love iTunes as well, as it means that, with the appropriate headphone-jack-to-phono-plugs adaptor gizmo, I can run the stereo in the lounge off the laptop, DJ stylee, and have access to my entire CD collection without having to leave the sofa.

It appears iTunes also flags up certain tunes as having explicit content, in the same way as some CD packaging does, thanks to the slightly sinister efforts of Tipper Gore and the PMRC back in the 1980s. I downloaded a song the other day that came flagged as having explicit content; the offending song was Little Star by Swedish weirdstress Stina Nordenstam. Now I used to have a copy of And She Closed Her Eyes, which I bought in about 1994/1995 on the strength of Mark Radcliffe playing Little Star repeatedly on his late-night Radio 1 show (I'd like to make it clear this was before it was used on the soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, just to head off any accusations of bandwagon-hopping). Anyway, I lost the CD, but had the urge to hear the song again. Sorry, that wasn't a very interesting anecdote.

When I paid my 79p and downloaded it I noticed it had the EXPLICIT flag on it (see below).

Now this struck me as odd, especially as the lyrics don't appear to contain any naughty words. Just in case you're thinking it's the word "hell" towards the end that's to blame, that isn't actually part of the song, it's just a mystified inability to translate, or even transcribe, the Latin segment attempted (almost certainly wrongly) here. Now it could be that this section is actually an impassioned plea from the saucy Messalina to her husband Claudius to take her roughly up the Appian Way, as it were, while oiled eunuchs fan her with ostrich feathers and feed her olives, but it's more likely just a recipe for risotto or something. Maybe they felt simply being Swedish was a sure-fire sign of moral degeneracy.