I'm a big fan of iTunes. I use it every day to download podcasts and almost every day to listen to music. Once in a while I buy songs or albums, and I've even purchased a video, but I rarely look at the list of "Today's Top Songs."

This morning I was taken there automatically as part of a registration process, and what I saw surprised me. And that surprised me even more.

What jumped out was not the title of the number one song (How To Save A Life, by The Fray), it was all those little red boxes with the word "explicit" inside them.

Sixteen of the top 100 -- for those of you who are math-challenged that's 16% -- were marked explicit. The online Merriam-Webster says that means: 1 a : fully revealed or expressed without vagueness, implication, or ambiguity : leaving no question as to meaning or intent <explicit instructions> b : open in the depiction of nudity or sexuality <explicit books and films>.

Interestingly, there were only six songs marked "clean," a designation that indicates an explicit version is available somewhere. All of those clean songs were lower on the list than their explicit counterparts except for one.

Knowing that most of the people who buy music on iTunes are teenagers, I wasn't surprised that the explicit versions were more popular. I know what those years are like, what the attitudes are, how the rebellion and exploration and peer pressure and insecurity and hormones and desires all kick in at once and explode your brain into tiny fragments. Teenagers aren't stupid people, they're just teenagers. Sometimes they feel almost human, and most of the time they are.

And knowing that the goal of the record industry is to sell units, I wasn't surprised that so many explicit songs were available. If the record industry understands anything at all, it is how to exploit -- I mean reach -- their market. The big record companies aren't evil, they are in business to make money, and they are far more interested in protecting their turf (e.g., downloads) than they are in protecting society. Social responsibility is not their job, social mining is, and they are good at it.

So here I sit, surprised at my surprise, because none of this should surprise me.

At the same time, I refuse to accept it as "just the way things are" and not make some effort to make a difference. After all, I know the damage that too much exploration as a teenager can have on a still growing mind. I know the chaos that can happen in a life with no boundaries. I know the scars that take too long to heal from failing to discriminate between what is good and what is not and simply acting on impulse or at the will of the so called crowd.

Somehow I survived all those things, and so will most of the people who buy those explicit songs and fill their minds with negative energy, salacious thoughts, and a vocabulary that will hold them back in ways they can't even imagine at the moment.

The way to counter all this, I think, is not by rallying the troops to take all the explicit music off the market. This stuff has been around almost as long as dirt, and it will not and cannot be eradicated.

No, the way to fight it is to replace it with good music. Not just a clean version of the same song, although that is a positive step, but songs that are good in intent, content and quality. And when I say quality, I mean we'd better make sure that the production values, the musicianship, the writing, and the performance of those songs is every bit as good as it can be. Anyone who counts on the positive nature of a song to carry it alone is in for a shock. Very few people want to listen to a bad song with a good message.

And what about those big record companies? The indies are taking care of that.