MUSIC INDUSTRY'S EXPLICIT VIOLATION? : `CLEAN' CDS NOT ALWAYS OBSCENITY-FREE.

Byline: Neil Strauss The New York Times

Are some record companies pulling a fast one on Wal-Mart, Kmart and other retail chains?

These large stores, which account for as much as 40 percent of a mainstream album's sale, have a policy of not selling compact discs that carry parental-advisory labels, the music industry's standard indicator of explicit lyrics. To get Wal-Mart or Kmart to carry an album, record companies will frequently modify the lyrics, providing an edited version with the label removed.

Unlike the motion picture industry, however, the record business has no standardized method for determining what is explicit and what isn't. What's more, use of the labels is voluntary, and few chains have the manpower to screen every album.

A result is that some records that normally carry a sticker are making their way into the discount chains with stickers removed - but not all the obscenities.

The unlabeled version of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony's No. 1 album, ``E. 1999 Eternal,'' for example, is littered with obscenities. An obscenity will often be muted in one song yet completely audible in another. Elsewhere, obscenities are altered so little that the word is still completely audible.

A spokeswoman for Ruthless, this band's label, said executives were moving their offices. They did not return telephone calls.

Critics of the Recording Industry Association of America's 7-year-old warning label system note that it was instituted as a way of alerting parents to possibly objectionable content and was not intended to guide store policy. They complain that there is no rule defining explicit content, that record companies often use the labels as a marketing tool to advertise dirty lyrics and that rap records tend to get labeled more often than rock albums that are every bit as explicit.

Albums with obscenities and graphic imagery by rock acts such as Pearl Jam, Live, Smashing Pumpkins, Alanis Morissette and Green Day, for instance, are unstickered and thus available from most discount chains (as well as retailers who don't sell labeled albums to minors). Almost every rap album with an obscenity carries a sticker.

Even when record companies modify their albums for these chains, they often only mask the obscenities. The explicit content remains, except on the few albums that remove entire songs (like Coolio's ``Gangsta's Paradise,'' which has three songs missing in its edited version).

On the unstickered version of Nas' top-selling album, ``It Was Written,'' there are scores of places where obscenities have been deleted, but explicit lyrics about sex, drugs and violence remain: ``Shootouts,'' for example, remains a clear, celebratory song about murdering a police officer who is having sex.

The RIAA says its labels are meant to warn not only of obscenities but of explicit lyrics and themes as well.

Two years ago, six major record companies requested a review of the parental advisory system. The RIAA responded by opening a campaign to increase public awareness of the labels.

Sales executives at several record companies said a rigorous screening process was in place. When a chain like Wal-Mart or Kmart asks their music distributor to request a ``clean'' copy of a album or single, the distributor approaches the company that released it. If the company chooses to modify the record, it hires a studio technician to make the corrections (covering up offensive words with sound effects or playing them backward to mask them) and submits the record, along with a transcription of the lyrics, to the distribution company.

Often an album goes back and forth for several weeks before a clean copy is agreed upon.

Several sales executives said it was not in their best interest to try to bypass the policies of a discount chain, since a shipment of records returned by a dissatisfied retailer as large as Wal-Mart can be a tremendous financial liability.

Tim Sites, the vice president of the RIAA, said that since use of the stickers was voluntary, he did not ``feel confident'' about commenting on whether record labels were abusing the honor system.

Others, however, said that not labeling an album with explicit content undermined the efficacy of not just the warning labels but also the family-standards stocking policies of Wal-Mart, Kmart and other retailers.

``These chains are not really doing the job they say they're doing if they're letting these albums into their stores,'' said Nina Crowley of the Massachusetts Music Industry Coalition, which has been campaigning for record companies and musicians to take a stand against the influence of so-called family chains over album content. ``They're doing a disservice to the teen-agers they're supposedly protecting. The fact is, you can't trust anybody but yourself to raise your children for you.''

Dale Ingram, spokesman for Wal-Mart, said the chain would try to take a closer look at so-called clean albums. ``We know it's not a perfect system,'' he said. ``But we're working on it.''

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Photo: The ``clean'' version of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony's ``E. 1999 Eternal'' album lacks the parental-advisory label but is still littered with obscenities.