10 Songs That Were Censored For Utterly Ridiculous Reasons

4. Weird Al Yankovic - "Don't Download This Song"

Weird Al has made a career out of being just the right amount of stupid and clever. His songs are a curious mixture of deft puns, silly sound effects (armpit farts haven't entirely lost their place in modern music), and a blatant disregard for anything that might be considered "cool." Weird Al is wonderful. He's also harmless. Which is why it's so weird for MTV to go after a guy like Yankovic. But that's what happened in 2006 when the spoofster tried to get his new music video for "Don't Download This Song" onto the airwaves. The song mocked multi-millionaire musicians who were quick to persecute anyone linked to file-sharing websites like Napster. The takedown was much appreciated from fans who'd grown weary of guys like Lars Ulrich going after middle-class kids who downloaded a few of his band's songs for free. MTV didn't care about that message, though, and insisted that if he wanted the video to be put into the channel's (sparse) rotation, he'd have to remove the names of the file-sharing sites from the lyrics. This was in part because The Powers That Be wanted to avoid telling youths exactly where to find all of the free, illegal music. Right. Because how else would they ever find out about Kazaa and LimeWire if not for the assistance of man-child Weird Al? Proving that he has no shortage of pride, Yankovic bleeped out the "offending" words as obnoxiously as possible so that listeners would know he was being censored.