As the aftershock of Super Boob Sunday finally subsided, I began to dwell on how exciting a media jolt can be - how gratifying, almost liberating it is when someone slips one by the censors. And as Miss Jackson (if you're nasty) has illustrated, music seems divided on the best way to go about doing it.

     Take Eamon. When you hear his No. 1 smooth R & B hit “F**k It (I Don't Want You Back)” on the radio, you don't hear the F-word 25 times. What you do hear is the F-sound, which seems to be an increasing trend in hip-hop and pop music. Rather than inserting a bleep to make absolutely certain that the listener knows some sort of swear has been edited out, radio edits either mute the word entirely or mute right before the first vowel comes along. Why is it that they think the vowel sound in a swear word is the most offensive?

     Moreover, what ever happened to trying to get away with actually swearing on the air?

     When artists that are now considered classic rock were still making viable music, the FCC never seemed to catch their fuck-and-run approach to getting dirty words on the airwaves. Thirty years ago, Pink Floyd got away with saying “bullshit” in the song “Money.” And speaking of money, in the second verse of Eddie Money's 1983 hit, “Shakin',” he squeezed in the line, “her tits were shakin'” and got away with it.   

     Who knew that the nation would be in a moral uproar some twenty years after Mr. Money sang about bouncing breasts, when at a Super Bowl half-time show a performer would display just that? Of course singing about how a boob shakes is not the same as watching how a boob shakes on national television. So are we moving forwards or are we moving backwards?

     Take newly anointed Grammy winners Outkast’s #1 single Hey Ya, where the radio edit has taken out Andre 3000’s swear-free but sexual sentiment of “just want to make you cumma,” But then take last fall’s Strokes single 12:51, a song where fuck snuck on the air again.

     “Fuck going to that party,” sings Julian Casablancas in a bored voice in the second verse.

     12:51 spent over three months on the Billboard Modern Rock charts, and although the words are slightly buried beneath the keyboard-like sound of a guitar, after one read of the lyric sheet, there is no doubt about what he says. It even sounds clearer after reading the lyrics.

     Now every time I hear the song on the radio, it excites me in a juvenile way similar to the way the aforementioned Eddie Money song and Legs by ZZ Top used to excite me. You know the line at the end there.

     “Whoa I want her, shit I’ve got to have her.”

     I confess that it used to make me feel uncomfortable as a kid. I used to cough at the exact moment a line like that came through the speakers of the car radio while riding around on errands with my mom. I didn’t want to subject her to the filthy gritty sexuality that appealed to me in rock n’ roll. I was ten years old. In addition to swear words in songs, I was also allergic to the part right before the ‘reach down between my legs’ line in the monologue portion of Panama, by Van Halen. It would always cause a two-second coughing fit.

     Assuming that the FCC doesn’t have people riding along with them at all times, coughing at appropriate moments, how do these songs slip by?

     The answer is simple: The FCC does not act as a watchdog group. It only investigates complaints made by listeners. And since the youth of today mostly listens to hip-hop, it is the genre that parents find themselves scrutinizing most closely. The complaints aren't pouring in over The Strokes, because either parents don't mind the music as much or their kids aren't blaring it round the clock.

     In The Strokes' case, the obscenity is like a little exclusive club. They give a shout-out to their fans and say, “Yeah, rock & roll is still about rebellion. Look at us, we're playing rock and saying fuck on the radio, and we're getting away with it.”

     By my count, this is only the fifth time in rock history a song with a big swear has slipped through the censors and only the second one I can think of with the F-word.

     That part at the end of The Who's “Who Are You?” where Roger Daltry slips in an “Aw, who the fuck are you?” always made me giddy. And listening to it now, it is the only redeeming aspect of that song for me.

     I guess something about sticking a well-timed swear in a song really represented those rebellious roots of rock n’ roll for me. Now though I just think it’s funny because it seems so out of character with the rest of the song that a grown adult is asking the listener who the fuck they are.

     The other song with a big swear that still gets radio play on the classic rock stations and used to thrill me as a kid was the Steve Miller Band’s version of Jet Air Liner, where he sang that he didn’t want to get caught up in any of that “funky shit going down in the city.” Although some versions have it as “funky kicks.”

     Then we have Bono. Last October, the FCC ruled that it was OK that the U2 front man uttered the phrase “fucking brilliant” on air at the 2003 Golden Globe Awards. The ruling reasoned that the material aired during the awards program met with its guidelines.

     “The word 'fucking' may be crude and offensive but, in the context presented here, did not describe sexual or excretory organs or activities,” said the FCC. “Rather, the performer used the word 'fucking' as an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation.”

     So is that it? I can say “fuck” as long as I'm not talking about screwing, and I can say “shit” as long as I'm not talking about poop? Is that why The Strokes can say, “Fuck going to that party”? Because it's not about having sex with the idea of “going to that party”?

     It's not quite that simple. Suzanne Tetreault, chief of staff of the Enforcement Bureau with the FCC, told me that although the Commission did a policy statement on indecency within the past few years, there is no list of what can and can't be said on the radio or television anymore. George Carlin's comical “Seven Dirty Words” summary became obsolete in the 1980s as the FCC decided to approach complaints on a case-by-case basis.

     I asked Suzanne if I could get played on the radio with a song I called “Fucking Brilliant,” in which I either sampled Bono in the chorus or sang “that's fucking brilliant” over and over. She gave me one of those quick exhalation laughs through her nostrils before addressing my question with a quote that I could easily imagine lacquered on a piece of log art above her desk:

     “The rules are applied to individual cases, and if a station listener filed a complaint with us, we would look into it,” she said.

     I felt like she was challenging me to spend a lot of money recording a song that may or may not ever receive airplay. I did get the sense through our discussion that if you're talking about fucking and calling it “fucking,” you're going to get bleeped out, and if you say it more than once in the song, there's a good chance you're going to get bleeped out too.

     The aforementioned “F**k It” is a perfect example of this.

     “Fff what I said/ It don't mean shhh now.” And that's the chorus!

     In the unedited version of 50 Cent's hit “In Da Club,” he says “fuck” five times. Of course, each instance is edited out for the radio, and the radio plays it tons. It's selling a lot of albums, too - a sh**load more than The Strokes' latest, to be precise. But maybe that's why hip-hop is still selling well in this day and age - because the radio plays the edited versions and the only way to have the unedited versions is to buy them.

     While rock is remaining rebellious and getting away with a swear on air here and there, hip-hop is playing it smart and selling its swears. The clean versions are simply sneak previews. And to quote Bono, that is fucking brilliant.