Radio, radio

While we try to listen to the Merge (93.3 FM) as little as possible — we’d rather just watch Say Anything — we couldn’t help noticing that at least one of the songs on the station’s playlist seems to have been on the receiving end of a makeover recently. Sublime’s “What I Got” (yeah, we’re not sure why they keep playing it either) has had most of its drug references lifted. Where the late Bradley Nowell once rhymed “pot” and “rock” (as in crack), now he pairs, well, two moments of silence. Why did the Merge decide to edit the song, which has been a fixture on the station’s playlist since it began broadcasting last year? They didn’t, claims programming director Scott Strong.

“When we started playing Sublime, we just grabbed something off the album,” Strong says. “Normally, the station will send the single, but we didn’t have that when we started playing them. That’s probably what we have now. We just use what the record companies send us. We don’t edit any songs here at Merge. I mean, we might edit something if it had the f-word [fuck] or the s-word [shit], but that’s just because of our license.”

Now that that mystery has been solved, we wonder what it would take to erase Sublime from the Merge playlist completely.