“I can see a cuss word — you know, from doing so many clean edits,” Mullis says. “I don’t even have to listen to them a lot of times, because I recognize what an ‘S-H’ looks like, what an ‘F’ looks like, in a waveform.”

Back in the early 2000s, Mullis was an engineer at The Zone, a popular recording studio in Atlanta. He worked with many of the big names in Southern rap at the time — Ludacris, David Banner, Young BloodZ and others. After recording the artists in the studio, Mullis was often responsible for going back into the mix and making a broadcast-friendly version of a track.

“For a long time, that basically meant going in and chopping out the cuss words,” Mullis says. “But one thing that I got known for was making the clean edits part of the song.”

He won major credibility in that regard after he tackled a Ying Yang Twins track called “Wait (The Whisper Song).” The song is incredibly raunchy, and to make it safe for airplay, Mullis had to work a lot of magic.

To make his edits sound natural, he replaced certain naughty words with ad-libs, sampled from other songs by the group (hence the clean version’s distinctive hook, “Wait till you see my … oh!“). Elsewhere, a woman’s moans, which Mullis pulled from a stock sound effects library, get the message across.

Mullis’ edit helped the song become a hit, but his version wasn’t safe enough for some outlets. He says that while there are certain specific words that broadcasters are prohibited from airing, there’s also a lot of gray area.

“MTV had things that they were more sensitive to, and then BET had things that they were more bothered by — and so we did all these different versions, brought them back into the studio, recorded alternate lyrics,” Mullis says.

Once a song ends up in the hands of a radio station, it can make even more changes. Power 106 in Los Angeles is one of the biggest hip-hop stations in the world, and its music director Emanuel Coquia, better known as DJ E-Man, takes clean edits seriously.

“You’ll hear a clean version that comes in and it could be partially cleaned — you won’t hear the full F-bomb edited out,” E-Man says. “We want to make sure that it is completely taken out, not leaving the ‘F’ or the ‘CK.'”

His rule is that before any song plays on Power 106, three sets of ears must screen it for profanity, sex and drug references. “We do it for every song, because you never know,” he stresses. “I heard the new Ariana Grande record — she said ‘s***.’ No one is gonna expect that from her.”

If they feel anything crosses the line, they edit it out with one of a few go-to techniques: A word can be reversed, slowed down so it’s unintelligible, or muted entirely. E-Man says muting is the safest option, but if you listen closely you’ll hear different types of tweaks on different stations.

There are networks that play it even safer. “The word ‘damn’ is something that comes up from time to time, and that is something that we do not allow,” says Phil Guerini, general manager of Radio Disney.

Though it’s now almost exclusively a satellite and streaming entity, Radio Disney still makes lots of edits because of its target audience, 8-to-16-year-olds. Guerini says Disney has a standards-and-practices department that pores over songs word by word — and then listens to how those words come across in context.

“When said in an up-tempo manner, it may not be an issue,” he explains. “But if it’s said suggestively — or, we talk about the tone in the voice: Is that sensual? What is that?” Radio Disney is big enough can go back to a label and say it wants songs cleaned even more. Artists often oblige so they can reach the tens of millions of teens, tweens and moms who tune in.

When I spoke with Guerini, he said almost half of the more than 50 songs on rotation at the time had been edited. That includes a tweaked version of Meghan Trainor’s “All About that Bass,” in which the line, “She says boys like the girls for the beauty they hold inside” stands in for the more explicitly booty-positive original. The goal, Guerini says, is that families can listen together and things won’t get weird.

Over at Power 106, DJ E-Man says things can get weird when stations clean up songs too much, too often. It can drive listeners to the competition — be it another station or an online streaming service.

“It’s tough. We can’t take away from the creativity or the freedom of speech in the music, and if it happens to be the audience’s favorite song, OK — this is what they wanna hear,” he says. “But let’s present it to where it’s appropriate for everyone to listen to.”

Besides, if a dirty version is what you’re after, it’s only a click away.

Priska Neely is a reporter at KPCC in Los Angeles, and a former producer for weekends on All Things Considered.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The band is filling up its calendar before Kelly splits town. The trio played its penultimate gig on Oct. 23 in College Park, and Oct. 29 marks its goodbye show, at Songbyrd Record Cafe in Adams Morgan. Oh, and there’s the album Teen Mom just released — its first, and most likely its last.

“It was a long time comin’,” Kelly says of the record, a 10-song collection called Groovy (stream it below).

Groovy, written between 2013 and 2014 and recorded at Persona Non Grata in Arlington, Virginia, is an independent release. The band considered working with a label, then opted against it in the interest of time. Yet time is the key ingredient on Groovy: It’s what makes Teen Mom sound recognizably like itself — fuzzy, jangly, heartbroken — but a touch more experienced.

“[The album is] more rockin’ in many ways,” says drummer Sean Dalby. “I think it’s a little more polished — and a little more versatile [than our first two EPs], too.”

While the band has sharpened, though, one thing that’s remained constant is the slight controversy over its name.

“We’ve received some criticism [for the moniker], and I respect people with that opinion,” Dalby says. He says some listeners may have misidentified the name’s target. It takes aim at a popular MTV reality show, not young mothers themselves.

“We thought it was funny to name it after [MTV’s Teen Mom series],” Dalby says. “We were going after MTV.”

Criticism aside, the local scene has treated Teen Mom well, says bassist Tom MacWright.

“D.C.’s music scene is great. It’s super, super supportive, and you hear in other cities that it’s really competitive between bands and really hard to book shows, but here it’s extremely easy to book shows,” MacWright says. “All the bands just kind of get along. They all root for each other.”

As for Kelly, his decision to move sounds personal; not necessarily to find greener pastures in another music scene. “I just want to change my life and move to a new city,” he says.

So, yeah — Thursday’s show may involve tears.

“I’m gonna be crying the whole time,” Dalby says, jokingly. “I think it will be a little intense but I think it will mostly be fun. We hope we have a lot of friends and family and support out there.”

Will this be a clean break for Teen Mom? It’s uncertain.

“I don’t know [if it’s the end]. I always think that who knows where we’ll all end up at some point?” says Kelly. “I’d like to play with these guys again, and hopefully our paths will cross at some point.”

MacWright says no matter what, none of them is dropping music for good. “I think all of us will continue to do music in one way or another.”

Plus, there’s a fringe benefit to Kelly moving westward, the bassist says. “Everyone’s very much looking forward to Chris’ mountain home recording.”

Teen Mom plays a farewell show Oct. 29 at Songbyrd Record Cafe.