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Post by Kapitan on Aug 19, 2020 22:39:48 GMT
I started singing a 30-something year old song out of nowhere just a moment ago, and remembered how it was quite controversial in the late '80s. And thus a thread was born!
I'm very interested to hear your thoughts about songs, albums, and artists you recall who were controversial at some time. Not just a list: if that's all we needed, I'd have compiled one here before anyone had a chance to speak. Rather, I'm curious about your recollections of those controversies. Did you like the music? Agree with those opposing it? Why? Has your opinion changed?
A bunch of examples are on the tip of my tongue, but I want to hold off a while to see what others may have in mind. Whether it's Elvis shaking his hips or Cardi B shaking hers; Johnny Cash singing about killing someone or Ice-T doing the same; Red Arnall singing about drug use or 6ix9ine doing the same; I'm curious!
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Post by B.E. on Aug 19, 2020 23:09:18 GMT
I absentmindedly started singing along to John Lennon's "Woman Is The 'N' Of The World" today. Fortunately, I was alone in my car with the windows rolled up. I've always thought that was a very good song, and clearly well-meaning. But, it's also worthy of criticism, IMO. Musically, I enjoy it. The performances all-around are good, especially John's vocal. It's exciting. I absolutely love the "make her paint her face and dance" outro, I always look forward to that (and it's not a short song at over 5 minutes long). Lyrically, there's some good lines, too, but the N-word is just flat-out problematic then and now. He took a heck of a chance releasing it as the lead (and ultimately only) single from Some Time In New York City, and leading off the album with it. The song "New York City" would have been the safe bet on both fronts. I respect his willingness to take chances. I don't think he was just looking to shock people, I think he was behind the message. This also applies to other projects of his around that time. He really wanted to make people think. Well, I wasn't around, but the song and the album weren't well-received then and aren't well-regarded now. Though, they have their fans.
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Post by jk on Aug 20, 2020 9:13:33 GMT
Cool idea for a topic, Cap'n. I've always been highly amused by the fact that FGTH's "Relax" was banned by the BBC because of the line "when you wanna come" yet they blithely played Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side", even though that included the expression "giving head"! Did I like "Relax"? Yes -- and the follow-up, "Two Tribes". Oh, and "WOTWS"... I also liked the music of 2 Live Crew's "Me So Horny" -- the clean version, that is (the dirty version is pretty dirty!).
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Post by Sheriff John Stone on Aug 20, 2020 10:47:00 GMT
There are two "TV examples". There's the infamous story of The Doors on The Ed Sullivan Show and being asked to change the word "higher" in "Light My Fire", which, of course, Jim refused to do. Then there's Johnny Cash performing Kris Kristofferson's "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down" on his own TV show and being asked to NOT sing the word "stoned" in the phrase "I'm wishing, Lord, that I was stoned...", which Johnny refused to do.
"Puff, The Magic Dragon" has always been a controversial one. Leonard Lipton, who wrote the poem which the song is based on, and Peter Yarrow from Peter, Paul & Mary consistently denied that the poem/song was about marijuana, claiming it was about a child's loss of innocence. Listening to the words makes that claim hard to believe. Could it be about both innocence AND marijuana?
One other Doors' one. I wasn't aware of it at the time, I was too young, but apparently their 1967 single, "Love Me Two Times", was considered too risque for AM radio, and was banned by some stations.
In 1972, Chuck Berry released "My Ding-a-Ling" which was a silly, novelty song, but it's hard to believe that the song could make it's way to radio, whether it was 1972 or 2020.
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Post by Kapitan on Aug 20, 2020 11:49:42 GMT
I've always been highly amused by the fact that FGTH's "Relax" was banned by the BBC because of the line "when you wanna come" yet they blithely played Lou Reed's "Walk On The Wild Side", even though that included the expression "giving head"! I remember when my older sister told me "it was banned in England." (Subtleties of "by the BBC" versus "in England" were beyond us, I suppose.) I asked why. She said "listen to the words." So I did ... and still had no idea. I was eight. Nobody would tell me anything!
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Post by Kapitan on Aug 20, 2020 12:27:30 GMT
There were a few hard rock songs that gained some notoriety in the late '80s, not for the usual sexual topics or allegations of devil worship (both sure-fire ways to get attention in those days of the downright ridiculous American "satanic panic"), but for violent imagery.
The one that got a lot of attention was from Guns 'n' Roses' second album, the double-EP GnR Lies, which packaged the previously released EP Live Like a Suicide with four new acoustic-based songs. Therein lay the controversy.
One of those was "I Used to Love Her," in which that line was followed by "but I had to kill her." It continued "she bitched so much / it drove me nuts / and I can still hear her complain." Rose said it was a joke. Frankly, it has to be a joke: are you aware of Rose running around killing girlfriends who annoyed him? I'm not. Now, was it a good joke, a joke that warranted a song? That's fair debate. I would note that blues legend Mississippi John Hurt wrote a song called "Nobody's Dirty Business" in which he sang "one of these days I'm gonna wake up crazy / gonna grab my gun and kill old Daisy / nobody's business but mine." Violent imagery is not lacking in the blues or country (and thus rock) traditions.
That same album included "One in a Million," a "coming of age" song where the protagonist/narrator has some really ugly things to say about immigrants and gay people. That language has not aged well at all. Yet the song's reputation might be somewhat unfair. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic rejects the suggestion that Rose was singing from a character's perspective because "he wasn't playing a character on the rest of the album," and thus "there's little doubt he truly believes" this stuff and "this is from the heart as well." Really, Mr. Erlewine? These seem like huge and tremendously uncharitable leaps of logic to me, leaps made to ensure the reader knows the critic takes the brave stance of disapproving of racism and homophobia. What a hero he must be!
What got less attention (though I suspect it was written specifically to get attention) was from Motley Crue's 1987 album Girls, Girls, Girls, a ballad called "You're All I Need." Its infraction was also violence: the narrator is so in love with a woman that he kills her to keep her. Frankly, it didn't generate as much attention, possibly because it just wasn't that good a song. I actually recall Nikki Sixx complaining about it to some music magazine because the somewhat similar Aerosmith song "Janie's Got a Gun" was a big hit.
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Post by kds on Aug 20, 2020 12:53:01 GMT
Ah, the good old days when rock music was "dangerous." Nowadays, Ozzy Osbourne is a reality TV schlub, Guns and Roses are a mainstay on the nostalgia circuit who start every show on time, and Aerosmith are......hey, anyone heard from Aerosmith lately?
Funny story about Crue's "You're All I Need." One of my best friends told me that he slow danced to that song at some middle school dance. I guess the DJ didn't pay attention to the lyrics.
It wasn't really controversial at the time, but there's a certain lyric in Dire Strait's Money For Nothing that you'll never hear on the radio again. It includes a little something who's a millionaire.
It's funny that music doesn't seem to have the ability to shock anymore. A band like Ghost would've been on Tipper Gore's shit list in 1985, but in the 2010s, they were barely noticed by the mainstream. Of course, mainstream rock has pretty much been castrated is in incapable of doing anything that must cause controversy.
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Post by Kapitan on Aug 20, 2020 13:03:41 GMT
It's very strange, really: some things go entirely unnoticed--there is no end to, and not a word of comment about, the music released that brags about violence, misogyny and drug abuse--while others are simply unsayable (as you noted with the word from "Money For Nothing").
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Post by kds on Aug 20, 2020 13:41:56 GMT
One album that I'm surprised never became controversial is Pink Floyd's The Wall. He even opens many of his shows with "In the Flesh," which I'm surprised doesn't raise more eyebrows. Maybe it's because he's using those words in the form of a character, but people rarely look at that sort of context.
There are several songs on that album that use racial slurs, in fact much of Roger Waters's lyrics from The Wall to present contain a surprising about of casual racial and homophobic slurs.
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Post by jk on Aug 21, 2020 19:55:27 GMT
Surely the most obvious candidate for controversy back in 1970, whatever one's understanding of the lyrics, was "Lola".
I just read that it was banned all over the place but I didn't experience that at the time, when I remember it having plenty of airplay in the UK and no doubt elsewhere:
I'd lost interest in The Kinks by then but being friends with a trans woman has given me a renewed interest in this song.
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Post by Kapitan on Aug 22, 2020 13:47:03 GMT
You've got a habit of picking controversies that I totally missed as a kid! Obviously, born in 1976, I wasn't around for the release of "Lola." But when I heard it, honestly it never clicked that it was anything but kind of silly. I mostly wasn't hearing the words, but even when i understood "walked like a woman but talked like a man," I just giggled and thought it was silly. To my parents' credit, they never made any sort of issue out of it either (though they were very religious and conservative people).
Here's one that did cause a stir in my house: Ice-T's rock band Body Count, which released a song called "Cop Killer" in the early '90s. My dad was a cop; this message did not go over well. This was around the time of the Los Angeles riots after the Rodney King incident. In some ways it was reminiscent of recent months: everyone recognized the bad actions of certain police (individuals and departments), yet many who sympathized in principle couldn't get behind the rioting or violent rhetoric.
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Post by kds on Aug 22, 2020 14:10:35 GMT
I remember Body Count was on Warner. In the summer of 1992, I attended an Orioles game, and there were several protesters outside. Turns out, there were filming a scene from the upcoming Warner Bros movie Dave prior to the start of the game, so pretty much anything associated with Warner had a target.
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Post by B.E. on Aug 22, 2020 14:15:12 GMT
Ha! I remember Dave. Wait, they were protesting the filming of Dave?
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Post by kds on Aug 22, 2020 14:26:27 GMT
Ha! I remember Dave. Wait, they were protesting the filming of Dave? Yep, because it was a Warner production, and people were angry that Warner did not drop Body Count over the Cop Killer song. So, basically people were just as easy to offend or piss off 28 years ago as they are now, but without the internet and social media, there was less noise. For the record, I think Cop Killer was a terrible way to voice angst over perceived police brutality. But, I simply voiced my disapproval by not buying the album (not that I'd willfully pay for a rap album anyway).
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Post by Sheriff John Stone on Aug 22, 2020 14:38:34 GMT
There's another Johnny Cash song, "A Boy Named Sue" which was controversial. The phrase "son of a bitch" was bleeped on the radio at the time in 1969.
Interestingly, with all of Johnny Cash's great songs, "A Boy Named Sue" was his biggest hit, reaching No. 2 on the Billboard Singles Chart in 1969. And, with all of the iconic Chuck Berry singles, "My Ding-a-Ling" was Chuck's biggest hit, reaching No. 1 in 1972. And, "Kokomo"...
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