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Blue Mink’s Melting Pot causes another radio station reprimand from OfCom
By Chris Cooke | Published on Tuesday 3 December 2019
The Blue Mink song ‘Melting Pot’ has again dropped a UK radio station in hot water with media regulator OfCom. This time it’s Scottish community radio station Black Diamond FM that has been cautioned by the regulator.
Global Radio’s Gold station was likewise reprimanded by OfCom for airing the song earlier this year. A number three hit in the UK back in 1970, ‘Melting Pot’ ultimately promotes a message of racial harmony. But it does so while referring to “yellow Chinkies”, “red Indians” and “curly Latin kinkies”.
Black Diamond FM aired the track just days after OfCom ruled on Gold’s broadcast of the record. The community station admitted that its presenter was aware of that ruling when choosing to play the song without providing any context in his links. The station has now removed ‘Melting Pot’ from its music library and says its presenters are getting refresher training on broadcasting regulations.
In its ruling on this latest airing of the Blue Mink track, OfCom is keen to stress that it is not forcing anyone to ban the record. However, when playing tracks that contain racial slurs that may be considered much more offensive today than when the record was released, this context should be provided by the presenter.
This was all the more important for Black Diamond FM, OfCom then reckoned, because the community station targets a younger audience which, the regulator says, are less likely to be aware of the historical context behind a song like ‘Melting Pot’. It added: “We were concerned that no attempt had been made to provide sufficient context when the track was played on Black Diamond FM”.
Elsewhere in the latest round of OfCom rulings, another community station, this time Doncaster-based Sine FM, was reprimanded for playing a very sweary mix on an early evening radio show featuring unedited tracks by the likes of Kano, Donell Jones, Ol Dirty Bastard, Lenny Ducano, Mystikal, Lucy Pearl, Snoop Dogg, Kanye West, 50 Cent, Styles P and Missy Elliot.
Between them, the artists who appeared in the early-evening mixtape managed one hoe, one motherfucker, two dicks, two pussies, six bitches, six bullshits, eight shits, sixteen fucks and no less than 23 uses of the ‘n’ word.
Sine FM said that the presenter who aired the mix did so by mistake after being pulled away from his urban music show by an urgent family phone call. He left the mix playing without realising how sweary it would prove to be.
The broadcaster added that that presenter had voluntarily stepped down after the incident and that it had given training to all the other volunteers who work at the station on all those tedious broadcasting rules. And I should fucking think so too.
