Car karaoke is a not-so-guilty pleasure that I don’t get to indulge in all that often in Denmark. Between the high-quality bike infrastructure (even for someone who doesn’t consider herself a cyclist!) and the ease of public transit, most of my travels aren’t suitable for belting out cheesy pop lyrics. But plenty of vehicular time during a recent stay in my homeland gave me ample opportunity for sing-alongs — and made me appreciate yet another thing I hadn’t realized I’d missed while living away from Denmark.
Mouthing the words while listening to a Canadian radio station, a missing word I was sure came from Bebe Rexha’s throat caused me to fumble:
Right, I remembered; there’s no swearing on Canadian radio stations. Or on network TV (meaning channels that used to be free-to-air when broadcasts happened via the airwaves rather than the Internet). So-called ‘bad words’ are bleeped or muted, or radio stations play edited versions of tracks with potentially offensive terms stifled or replaced with alternate terms like ‘freaking’ or ‘dang’. (The practice of muting words makes for some unintelligible — and accidentally hilarious — songs with most of a verse or chorus missing, leaving listeners wondering whether there’s any point in broadcasting a song that’s almost not there.)
Canada’s southern neighbours operate in the same vein. There’s no cursing in American print media like newspapers or magazines. No explicit four-letter words in advertisements or on packaging in either the United States or Canada, with long-standing decency standards restricting what the public hears and sees (regulated by the Federal Communications Commission in the US and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission up north).
The UK has similar public decency standards, although broadcasters lean into showing content that may be considered unsuitable for children after a certain point in the evening (called a watershed). If you’ve ever spoken with a North American who’s stumbled across the British dating show Naked Attraction (which gradually reveals fully nude potential partners that a clothed contestant chooses from), you’ll know how shocking post-watershed programming can be to people who aren’t familiar with it! (It’s interesting to note that a Danish equivalent, Date mig nøgen, ran for three seasons on TV2. Local audiences likely found the nudity far less titillating than stereotypically more reserved watchers in the UK.)
In Denmark (and across much of Europe), governments see no reason to protect the public from so-called naughty words. I suspect that’s related to the country’s overall belief that people can be trusted to think for themselves and that no one type of person is seen as more deserving of formal manners than anyone else. As my Last Week in Denmark colleague Josephine writes, the Danish concept of janteloven champions the idea that “nobody should consider themselves inherently superior to others.” That potentially means words aren’t intrinsically bad; they’re just words.
So-called naughty words crop up in advertisements and product packaging, often with English and Danish words mingling. The other day, I spotted flour tortillas at the grocery store billed as ‘fucking normal’, whatever that means. A local business touts one of their offerings as handling shitstorms.
From my experience, people in Denmark don’t have problems swearing in conversation, even in the workplace. This approach means I’m comfortable telling my Danish physiotherapist when something fucking hurts or telling an older member of the kayak club that the water was shitty.
And it goes without saying that Danish radio stations broadcast lyrics in their entirety, just as the artist intended.
There’s an open, unrestricted quality to this unfettered use of language — and there’s some indication that the lack of censorship leads to more appropriate language use overall. Americans may not hear as many swear words on the radio or TV, but an Australian study shows they’re more vulgar online than people from other countries.
Perhaps it’s time I start singing along to Danish tunes while I ride my bike, relishing in the casual (and un-bleeped!) swearing and knowing that the people around me are unlikely to care about the occasional F-bomb. I think ‘En Wannabe Darth Vader’ by Nephew (it’s just too fun!) sounds like a good place to start.
