You can't say that on radio
When I worked in radio, we often received safe edits for songs from labels. Even adult contemporary acts like Sarah McLachlan sometimes required the exclusive airing of a clean version of a single. A memorable line from her 1997 No. 13 Hot 100 hit "Building a Mystery" became "you're a beautiful, beautiful (silence)-ed up man" when heard on pop radio.
It's not even just inappropriate words that can be barred from airplay. Questionable content also prompts creative makeovers. Mariah Carey's most recent Hot 100 top 10, "Obsessed" (No. 7, 2009), contains the line, "It must be the weed, it must be the E." The song climbed to No. 8 on the Pop Songs radio airplay chart, but when you heard it on your local top 40 station, you likely heard garbled sound effects in place of the two suggested mood enhancers.
Adult radio has especially been careful with potentially risqué content. As music director at WSNE Providence, I was instructed to disguise the following lines in Avril Lavigne's No. 22 Hot 100 hit from 2004, "Don't Tell Me": "Will get you in my pants? I'll have to kick your ass and make you never forget. Get out of my head, get off of my bed, yeah, that's what I said."
Upon leaving the production studio, I had simply deleted the entire second verse, leaving us with a safer (and barely two-and-a-half-minute-long) radio-ready version that we referred to as the "no pants, no ass, no bed" edit. (excerpt from Ask Billboard)
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