Bowdlerized songs

Cafe Society
1

Back in 1982, in a more innocent time, the band Musical Youth had a UK number one hit single with the song Pass The Dutchie. Musical Youth were, as the name suggests, a bunch of kids, and (as I remember) the parents of several of them were heavily involved in helping the kids put the record together. A Dutchie, by the way, is a Dutch Cooking Pot, so it’s a happy song about mealtimes. Except……

(Wiki page, and here’s that original song by the Mighty Diamonds.)

As I said, it was a more innocent time, a time when you couldn’t have fresh-faced kids singing about drugs, so the elements from Pass The Kouchie were bowdlerized for Musical Youth to use, presumably by their parents. Which got me thinking – how common is the bowdlerization of songs?

The other example that springs immediately to mind is The Fairy Tale Of New York, whose bowdlerization was discussed in this thread (with some splendidly offensive suggestions by dopers, BTW, to get around the problem word “Faggot”), but so far as I can tell there hasn’t been a general thread on the subject of bowdlerized songs. I feel there should be one, and I hope you agree. So…

What have you got?

j

2

Cole Porter’s “I Get a Kick Out of You” had the lyric “I get no kick from cocaine.” When they made a movie of Anything Goes, Porter changed the line to “Some like the perfumes in Spain.”

There also was a change in lyrics to remove a reference to Charles Lindbergh, but that’s not strictly a bowdlerization – after the kidnapping, Porter decided it was bad taste to mention him.

3

I’m given to understand that “Let’s Get It Started” by the Black-Eyed Peas was originally “Let’s Get Retarded.”

4

Airplay of “Money for Nothing” also tends to remove the “faggot” verse, which originally took the place of a different F-word.

5

Eddie Money’s Shakin’ started with the lines

“We started drinkin’, wasn’t thinkin’ too straight
She was doin’ 80 and she slammed on the brakes
Got so high we had to pull to the side
Her tits were shakin til the middle of the night”

Which quickly had the last line changed to

“We did some shakin til the middle of the night”

And later on, had the line before it changed to

“Music so loud we had to pull to the side”

6

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap by AC/DC is a fucking awesome downright nasty song. So it should have suited Joan Jett fine, but even she omitted the most evil parts in her cover:

Concrete shoes, cyanide, TNT
Done dirt cheap
Neckties, contracts, high voltage
Done dirt cheap

She also changes “backdoor man” in the line “For a fee, I’m happy to be your backdoor man” for something more harmless I can’t quite figure out.

7

I think the bowdlerization of Pass the Dutchie actually makes it a darker-sounding song. I (and many others) assumed a “dutchie” was a joint anyway, but the phrase “how does it feel when you got no food” was still understood as such. So the original was a happy song about getting high with your friends, and the bowdlerized version was supposed to ostensibly be an uplifting song about sharing food, but because that was only half-successful, it sounded like it was saying “sure, I’m starving, but at least I can keep my mind off of it for awhile by lighting up!”

8

In the 50s and 60s, both Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra onstage would occasionally go back to the “cocaine” line. I’m sure other singers did too, but I’ve heard actual recordings of these two hippie freaks.

By the 70s, I’m sure all nightclub singers were throwing cocaine around.

9

Robyn Adele Anderson has a YouTube channel where she sings cover versions of modern pop songs in an old-fashioned style.

One of the songs she covered was “Basket Case” by Green Day. But she openly said she had a problem with some of the lyrics and changed “lack of sex” to “lack of love” and then changed “I went to a whore” and “I went out to score”.

10

In the West Side Story movie, the line is “Pretty, and witty, and gay!”. In the play, often performed in schools, it is “Pretty, and witty, and bright!”
But, that’s not an example of censorship. The movie moved the scene with the song, and had to change the word being rhymed from “night” to “day”. The play has the original text.

11

A minor 1970 hit, *Timothy *by the Buoys, was the story of three men trapped in a mine long enough to feel a bit peckish. When the rescuers broke through, only two men were there, and Timothy was gone.

The original lyrics in the last verse were,
“Stomach as full as it could be
And nobody ever got around to find him, Timothy.”

Many stations played a version that went,
“Both of us fine as we could be
And nobody ever got around to find him, Timothy.”

12

They changed many of the lyrics to songs in West Side Story when they adapted the play to a movie, as we discussed here 15 years ago:

https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-336531.html

13

For the US market, the Kinks Lola changed “You drink champagne and it tastes just like Coca-Cola” to “cherry cola,” probably to avoid paying royalties.

Some radio stations used to beep the B-word in Elton John’s The Bitch is Back. Killed the chorus.

Re" West Side Story’s Officer Krupkie: Sondhemi wanted to end the song “Fuck You,” but the censors gave him a hard time because “stores won’t carry the record if it’s obscene” (A totally different time). He was agonizing over how he couls end the song when Leonard Bernstein suddenly sang “Gee Officer Krupkie. Krup You!”

Perfect!

14

Back in the day, we had a local classic rock station that played Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” in full. Then they switched to a version that cut out most of the second verse…

Candy came from out on the island,
In the backroom she was everybody’s darling,
But she never lost her head
Even when she was giving head

…and left blank silence over “colored” in the “…and the colored girls go doo doo doo…” parts. At which point you wondered why they were even bothering to play the song.

15

Actually, it was for the UK market. The BBC had a policy against product placement.

16

Along the same lines, Panic! at the Disco’s “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” has a line in the refrain that goes, “Haven’t you people ever heard of closing a goddamn door?”

The local station that plays it, bleeps the ‘goddamn’ throughout, and since it’s repeated six times in the course of the song, it really makes a mess of the song.

Note to DC-101: either play the goddamn song as intended, or don’t play it at all. You’re an alternative/rock station. Your target audience isn’t going to be bothered by hearing ‘goddamn,’ lo, not even unto the sixth time. So cut it out already.

17

Pink Floyd’s single from The Final Cut, “Not Now John” had to be made radio-friendly.

John Grant’s song “GMF” has a radio-friendly version, where the lyrics are changed to “Greatest Living Creature”. Which is especially amusing as it’s still called “GMF” which, you know, doesn’t stand for “Greatest Living Creature”.

I thought the Mike Posner hit “I took a plane to Ibiza” had odd lyrics - until I realised it was a cleaned up “I took a pill in Ibiza”.

18

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I learned that Steve Miller was not singing about the “funky kicks going down in the city”.

19

If Bowdlerization includes completely omitting a verse, then our national anthem qualifies.

I hate to sound like Trump here, but many people don’t realize that The Star Spangled Banner has four verses. In particular, the third verse is rarely played.

It goes:

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle’s confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash’d out their foul footstep’s pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

It’s certainly bellilgerant and vindictive, and almost certainly racist.

During the War of 1812, the British recruited escaped US slaves, promising their freedom in return for military service. As in other wars, black troops fought especially bravely, and Francis Scott Key happened to be a lieutenant with the US forces who faced British troops, including former US slaves, at the Battle of Bladensburg, one of the most ignominious defeats in American military history. The outcome was the US forces running for their lives, and the British forces capturing and temporarily occupying Washington DC, and burning the Capitol and Presidential Mansion (not yet called the White House).

As this occurred just three weeks before he wrote the anthem, there is little doubt that Key held a grudge against the black slaves who had fought for the British. Apologists have tried to argue that by “slaves” he was referring to US merchant sailors impressed into British service, but that makes no sense. Why would he desire hunting down and killing hapless victims of the British?

At any rate, the verse is seldom played, to the point where most Americans are unaware it exists. In fact, Isaac Asimov wrote a short story about a German spy who was exposed because he knew the words to the verse, and any “real American” would not.

20

The Rolling Stones had to change the lyric of their song from “Let’s spend the night together” to “Let’s spend some time together” to get it past the censors on the Ed Sullivan Show.

I’ve heard censored versions of “You make a dead man come,” but I don’t remember what the changed lyric was. They might just have left that part out.