YouTube censors the clip “Plastic is fantastic” by the Nantes group Elmer Food Beat

Latex enthusiasts will have their hearts upside down. Eight years after it was posted on YouTube, where it has racked up nearly a million views, Elmer Food Beat’s “Plastic is Fantastic” music video has been censored by the platform, signal West France. “Distressing”, testifies Anne-Claire Galesne, the press officer of the group, who realized it Monday morning.

The reason given by the American platform to the group is that one of the characters slips his hand into his trouser fly at 2’32, which “violates our policy on nudity and sexuality”, and which “constitutes inappropriate for some users. Since then, the video is no longer accessible to those under 18.

Awareness song

A counter-productive censorship, when we know the target of the title released in 1990 on the album 30cm, sold more than 650,000 copies. With words like “little rabbit, cover your carrot”, the piece was intended as a call to play down and systematize the wearing of condoms, right in the heart of the AIDS years. “The Ministry of Health had even used it in its prevention campaigns”, recalls Anne-Claire Galesne to West France.

“Our future is therefore that of a sanitized, hidden, veiled society, where, in addition to the puritanical morality of some, omnipresent and omnipotent algorithms will decide what everyone is entitled to see or not to see”, denounces she. The group, accustomed to playing with the limits, like the song will not disappear with this censorship. In 2020, the group from Nantes had published a cover of the song, entitled “Plastic is dramatic”, produced with the association The SeaCleaners, to denounce the plastic pollution of the beaches and the sea.

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