Prom DJs are told to play it clean

Boston-area high school administrators, worried about students' increasingly vulgar music tastes, have been delivering a pointed message to DJs: Keep it clean, or we keep the paycheck.

As teens gravitate to hip-hop hits like ''Candy Shop," ''Magic Stick" and ''Get Low," which are loaded with sexually explicit lyrics, school administrators say they are facing more pressure from parents to police the playlist for next month's proms.

In the past three years, principals have been pulling disc jockeys aside before school dances and warning them to avoid vulgar songs or play the less explicit radio versions, DJs and principals say. DJs say parents are more knowledgeable about the music being played, and principals are listening more to parents' concerns.

A Cambridge high school administrator said she carried through on a threat last year and withheld pay after a DJ played a raunchy song at the senior prom.

At Marlborough High, student dance organizers hire the DJs and submit a playlist ahead of time. Administrators rely on the DJs to filter out the vulgar or sexually suggestive songs because the DJs are more familiar with the lyrics, said Paul Kamataris, assistant principal at the school for 25 years.

''If things aren't going right, we're going to shut down the dance," Kamataris said. ''They're aware of their responsibilities. They know what's appropriate. I control the purse strings, and you're going to play the music I want or you're not getting paid."

Ken Cosco, the chief entertainment officer of A Touch of Class DJ's in Marlborough, which entertains at hundreds of school dances, graduation parties, and other teen-oriented events every year, has a do-not-play list -- topped, he said, by rapper 50 Cent's ''Candy Shop." The song makes thinly veiled references to oral sex by using a lollipop as a metaphor for the male sexual organ.

Marlborough High students said administrators are wasting their time cracking down on songs because teens listen to unedited versions of the raunchy songs at home or in their cars anyway and know the lyrics. The uncut versions are available in music stores and on the Internet.

The second song on Cosco's list is ''Get Low" by Lil Jon & the Eastside Boyz, which has a radio version that gets played at Marlborough High dances. Students say banning it makes little difference -- they simply shout the real lyrics over the sanitized version played by the DJ. During one verse, when the radio version of the song says ''Till the sweat drop down and fall, till all these females crawl," the students shout the original line, which includes a graphic reference to male anatomy and a vulgar term for women.

''Sometimes people don't even know it's the edited version because we're singing it anyway and we're louder than the music," said senior Christina Amato, 18.

''You don't want to play music that's offensive to people, but at the same time, you don't want to be out there dancing to 'YMCA,' " said junior Maria Delano, 17.

The Marlborough students said they plan to request ''Candy Shop" at this year's proms just to see what happens.

At Brookline High, radio versions of most songs usually pass muster, but not ''Candy Shop," said Gretchen Tucker-Underwood, the dean of students.

''Don't tell me he's only talking about lollipops," Tucker-Underwood said. ''I don't want to have to go through the double-entendres."

Brookline administrators tell DJs to use their discretion, and they instruct them not to play songs with profanities, racial slurs, or overtly sexual lyrics, she said.

''We can't be the music police, but I tell the DJs, 'I'm an old lady, and I'm standing over there in the corner. Don't make an old lady walk across the floor on you,' " Tucker-Underwood said. ''If you see me coming, you know something's up."

Adult objections to teenagers' popular music are not new, and principals say they have always had to walk a fine line between appeasing parents and making sure teens have fun and get to dance to music they know. Parental protests go back as far as Elvis and the Beatles. Parents even objected to the protest songs of the 1960s and to disco. In the 1990s, high school administrators and parents were more worried about students hurting themselves while slam-dancing to heavy metal and grunge hits than about the lyrics, some principals say.

Cosco said DJs need to try to please both the administrators and the students and as a result, need to come up with alternative songs. If students ask DJs to play ''Candy Shop," Cosco advises the DJ to play another 50 Cent song, ''In Da Club," that is less suggestive.

At Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, a student committee approves music before it is played at a dance. But at last year's senior prom, assistant principal Caroline Hunter said, she had to turn the music off during the last song because the DJ played something ''very negative." She would not reveal the song. Hunter withheld the DJ's $300 paycheck until he wrote an apology to the school and made a scholarship donation.

The lowering of musical standards, Hunter said, ''makes it harder and harder for schools to support these functions."

Other songs on Cosco's do-not-play list include Nelly's ''Hot in Here," about taking off clothes at a club, and Tweet's ''Oops (Oh My)," about female masturbation.

Patty Bailey, a social studies teacher at Boston's John D. O'Bryant School of Mathematics and Science, has chaperoned dances for the last 20 years and has seen the problem worsen. Her school doesn't allow uncut versions of songs to be played, but she wants the school to form a committee of adults and students to review the music.

Brookline's Tucker-Underwood said she is reluctant to screen the music because she wants the prom to remain fun for students.

''If only those children today listened to jazz, this wouldn't happen," she said jokingly.