Oh, fleeting expletive the FCC and the horse they rode in on

Rico says that Noam Cohen's article in The New York Times has to skirt the issue, but he doesn't:

There is a world where when you see someone driving in a fancy car with the girl you love, you shout out: Forget you! It’s the same world where friends will talk smack about the crazy stuff their dads say. That world is called traditional entertainment.
And while traditional entertainment increasingly relies on the anything-goes-internet to cultivate and stoke interest in music, television shows, and movies, there are still some important boundaries. The return to civilization comes at a cost.
A case in point is a recent viral musical sensation, a bouncy song by the soul-pop singer Cee Lo Green with over three million views on YouTube in little more than a week. The singer is peeved at a girl who has left him and concludes that:

If I’d been richer, I’d still be with ya and though there’s pain in my chest, I still wish you the best... followed by a certain crude phrase, and an ooh, ooh, ooh.

This is hardly a fleeting expletive of the kind the Federal Communications Commission has tried to regulate. While songs with vulgarities in them are a dime a dozen (actually more like $12 on iTunes), Cee Lo’s single is unusual in that the crude phrase is the title, chorus, and punch line to the song, said Craig Marks, the editor of Billboard magazine. He could conjure up only a handful of hit songs in a similar bind; rarer still was the song that played a peppy tune against the crude lyrics. “Even if it is the most happy song, radio is not going to play it,” Mr. Marks said matter of factly, imagining crude lyrics praising sunshine and lollipops or even the joy of radio itself.
Hence the riddle for Elektra Records, Cee Lo’s label, part of the Warner Music Group, which will release his latest album, The Lady Killer, in December and hopes to sustain interest in the single offline.
Cee Lo already has cut a cleaned-up version of the single for the radio called Forget You!, which has been played in England and may be soon in the United States, too. But Forget You! can seem inauthentic— the peculiar phrase for such foul-mouthed-turned-mealy-mouthed expressions is “minced oaths”— and probably will not get the girl’s attention.
Rather than mince their oaths, however, radio stations have edited the song themselves, bleeping out the phrase but interrupting the musical flow. That will be true, one imagines, even with the smoother official edit that the record company is to release soon.
Indeed, much about the Forget You story is instructive about promotion of music online. And the main lesson: the Internet simply will not play by the rules, even for a business that tries to leave as little to chance as possible.
Cee Lo, who is from Atlanta, is probably most famous for being half of a duo called Gnarls Barkley, which had a hit, Crazy, that itself was a viral phenomenon in 2006. But Crazy was nothing compared to Cee Lo’s latest.
A first wrinkle: The video for something similar to Forget You that has racked up so many views on YouTube was meant to be a place holder before a “proper video” is released this week. The Cee Lo single, though, has been aided by a nifty design that used the lyrics to great effect. They bounce along with the song; appearing and disappearing, growing bigger and moving across the screen. The title words, unprintable in a family newspaper, are largest of all.
“I was only approached a couple of days before the song needed to be released on YouTube,” Terry Scruby, 33, who created the video, wrote in an email. “I designed and animated the entire song in only one night, and actually had to drop additional ideas I wanted to incorporate to take the video to the next level because I simply didn’t have time.” Mr. Scruby, whose company, based in London, is called TD4, said he had never been caught up in an Internet phenomenon before. “It has been the first piece of my work that has been forwarded back to me by my friends and colleagues in a ‘You must see this’ type way, which really highlights the viral nature of how this song has spread,” he wrote, adding, “Yep, that’s right; none of my friends who posted the link on Facebook knew that I had made it. I hadn’t told anyone about it because I had no idea it would be so popular.”
The second wrinkle is that viral sensations move much more rapidly than even the greatest optimist could imagine. The bright-flash success for Cee Lo caught many by surprise, including the record company. For the first week, while the song was being played to death on YouTube, the single was not actually for sale. By Thursday, it was. The iTunes store, where it is listed with an Explicit warning label, charges $1.29. It had risen to No. 28 by Sunday afternoon. Cee Lo’s website sells the single at the same price and also packages it with a T-shirt of some of the lyrics for $20.
A final lesson for people like me is that, no matter how pervasive the Internet has become, it still prospers in conjunction with the mainstream entertainment world, not separate from it. Few recording artists are too big or too Internet focused to ignore radio.
Likewise, the creator of a popular Twitter feed about the stuff his dad says, only put a bit more colloquially, ended up writing a book that added an asterisk where a vowel should have been in the uncensored title. When it appears as a TV show on CBS this fall, it will be $#*! My Dad Says, which uncannily resembles the word, but has plausible deniability.
The two worlds feed off of each other. Stuff My Dad Says might never have caught anyone’s attention, no matter how clever those comments may be. And had Cee Lo’s song started out with bleeps, or even worse, as “Forget You it might never have been forwarded online.
“I have heard the radio friendly ‘clean’ version,” Mr. Scruby wrote from London. “I feel it loses some impact. Part of the attraction to the song is how upbeat and joyful it is, whereas the insulting lyrics offer a counterpoint that strikes a perfect balance.” He added: “As far as I’m aware, there are no plans for me to make a ‘clean’ lyric video, and certainly no one has even mentioned doing it.”

Rico says joke 'em if they can't take a fuck...