I was watching the Wawa Welcome America concert on NBC 10 Tuesday night and they had Ludacris up there. Not sure whose idea it was to put a rapper on local television, but he closed with “Move Bitch” and they damn near censored half the song:

I appreciate Luda’s smirk about four seconds in, like “I’m gonna do this song and they know what’s coming.” At that point the person on the dump button was either sweating bullets or reaching for the Atrial Fibrillation beta blocker. Then the director just decided to cut to a single-camera shot and leave it on the DJ while muting the audio entirely. That lasts a full SEVENTEEN seconds, which is an eternity in live broadcasting. Even four seconds of dead air is considered a lot, so imagine cutting away for an entire pitch clock’s worth of time.

The great thing about this is that Luda actually does not say a single cuss word the entire time. He’s rapping the edited version and just letting the crowd do the dirty parts, which, still, can be an FCC violation if you can audibly hear lines like “Get the fuck back, guard your grill.” But I listened back to it a couple of times and did not hear anything clearly outside of the crowd yelling “bitch,” so NBC succeeded in their endeavour, as comical as this was.

As an aside, it must be noted that Ludacris had bangers back in the day. Word of MOUF is as good as anything that came out from 1997 to 2002. It hit #3 on the Billboard charts, went 4x Platinum, and had four singles! And even then, the cuts that didn’t become MTV music videos were great, interspersed between some of the funniest skits on any hip hop album ever. Luda was always the shit. Tell your friends.