LittleBigPlanet is, according to my friend who got in on the beta, awesome and amazingly addictive. But now it’s also surprisingly controversial thanks to background music that includes two expressions from the Quran – an inclusion that some warned would be offensive to Muslims and which Sony is rushing to cover their asses from remove from the game before its official release.
The phrases, according to PlayStation forums that helped bring the matter to light, were: “Every soul shall have the taste of death,” and “All that is on earth will perish.” Not exactly uplifting or what you’d expect to hear while you play through a platformer in which your character is a cute, customizable, and unassuming sackperson.
With LBP you can make an Evil Knievel sack who alone understands the lyrics. His costumed and naked friends may live on in ignorance.
What should Sony and game developers everywhere take away from this? The same thing most sensible people already know: don’t go singing or licensing a song with lyrics you don’t understand just because it sounded cool. It’s a simple matter of self-preservation, Sony. Otherwise we’d all be belting out lyrics that roughly tell a native speaker:
Hey you’re mom is hot, she’s been around the block
Let’s pick a fight, I’m carrying a knife
No one knows I’m out, so no one will know I’m missing
No this isn’t just a song, it’s you that I’m dissing.
– All images are borrowed from Amazon (www.amazon.com)
2 Comments
I find it curious that the song in question is a licensed song from an individual of the Muslim faith. There was no outcry when the song won a grammy 2 years ago. Why is there a big deal now that it’s in a game?
*sigh*
I guess this just means more time to play Star Ocean PSP before it comes out.
@Alice the Sister
While I’m not extremely familiar with the whole episode, I’m guessing it’s the sheer possibility of exposure to the song that’s the problem in this case. It’s easy to avoid an artist whose music you don’t agree with but harder to avoid the song randomly appearing in a mainstream game release.
I roughly equate it to popping in Super Mario and hearing “Wait (The Whisper Song).” It’d be kind of awesome in my book, but not in others’.