This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Digital Top Stories
Perfume Genius ad deemed “non family-safe” by YouTube
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 26 January 2012
A fifteen second advertisement created by Matador Records for ‘Put Your Back N 2 It’, the forthcoming second album from Seattle-based piano playing indie type Perfume Genius, aka Mike Hadreas, has been rejected by YouTube on the basis that it is “non family-safe”.
Both YouTube and its parent company Google declined to feature the clip, which shows a semi-clothed embrace between Hadreas and gay porn actor Arpad Miklos, issuing to Matador the following statement regarding their rules on ‘Adult Image/Video Content’: “Any ads that contain non family safe material are disapproved. I noted to the team that the people in the video are not entirely unclothed, but the overall feeling of the video is one of a more adult nature, including promoting mature sexual themes and what appears to be nude content. As such, the video is non family-safe. In order to have this video ad approved, you will need to bring it into compliance with our policy”.
Team Matador say they have contacted YouTube/Google asking what could be done to bring the video in line with policy regulations, but as yet have received no response. The label also raises the pertinent point that ‘All Waters’, the Perfume Genius song accompanying the advert, was inspired by Hadreas’s feelings on “internalised homophobia” and his “self-consciousness about gay public displays of affection”, making the web giant’s decision all the more ironic.
The clinch in question recalls a very similar one featured in this trailer for Lana Del Rey’s ‘Born To Die’, the full-length version of which, I seem to remember, featured pretty overt tones of sexual sadism, violence and suicide. All, naturally, were deemed family-safe themes by YouTube.
You can view the supposedly offensive Perfume Genius clip on Vimeo here:
