Matthew Good Band Album Changed To Save Lives

In an effort to keep students safe from high school killing sprees such as last weeks shooting in San Diego and two years ago in Columbine, the American release of the Matthew Good Band album, Beautiful Midnight has been sanitized for American fans' protection.

Don't expect to hear a Matthew Good Band inspired killing spree in the news as the songs "A Boy And His Machine Gun" and "Born To Kill" have an edited back cover tracklisting of "A Boy And His ------- ---" and "Born To ----" on the U.S. version of Beautiful Midnight.

The band's manager Steve Hoffman remarked, "It's America, my friend," about the changes in the land of free and home of the brave version. MGB were asked to clean the album up by their U.S. record label, Atlantic. The band and management were concerned by the label's suggestions to do so, but nonetheless went with what the big boys wanted.

Although bands' often cite having to clean their records up for Wal-Mart when it comes to making these edits, Hoffman said the largest retailer in America wasn't the cause of the changes.

While we in Canada sit around aghast at the lack of Freedom Of Speech our neighbours to the south of us have, Hoffman's experience with M2, the sister station to MTV leaves us cringing even further.

"They butchered the hell out of [the Hello Time Bomb video]."

M2 came back to MGB with an itemized list of sequences that had to be removed from the "Hello Time Bomb" video before it could be aired.

So, what are we seeing on MuchMusic that our friends south of the border can't see? Well let's see, the word "Ritalin" has been taken out. Apparently, kids in the U.S. are so happy to take the drug that they're crushing it up and snorting it. The other scenes that have been cut include when the Radio Shack employee is tied up and when Matt grabs money out of the cash register and takes off with the coin in a Porsche.

However, if Matt Good was rapping and singing about "backing that ass up" we're sure that he wouldn't have to make any changes. And everyone thought Canada was conservative.