More precisely, DC-101 is a Classic Rock radio station owned by iHeart Media, the largest radio company in the U.S., which I’ve noticed is very skittish about “naughty words”. In my local market the Classic Rock station is also owned by iHeart, and on numerous occasions I’ve heard them remove words from songs like “Who Are You?” by The Who that other stations have been playing uncut for years.
I watched a documentary from 1974 about law enforcement in the American west that used the original lyrics.
The song “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” has the lines, “Life’s a piece of s**t / When you look at it”; this is how it is sung at the end of Monty Python’s Life of Brian. IIRC, Eric Idle sang the song at the closing ceremonies of the 2012 Summer Olympics, with the line intact, although NBC censored it.
The song also appears in the movie As Good As it Gets, but the line was changed to “Life’s a counterfeit.”
Their target audience wouldn’t be bothered. But the problem is there are people who look for things to get upset over. They would file a complaint with the FCC about how that radio station is broadcasting obscenities over the air where anybody - even children! - might hear them.
Mongo only pawn in game of life.
“Oh! Susannah” to say the least, but a great song nonetheless.
The movie Jesus Christ Superstar changed the lyric of What you have doe will be the saving of Isreal to What you have done will be the saving of everyone.
Which version of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” you are most familiar with probably depends on whether you hear it on the radio or not:
“I told you once, you son of a {bitch | gun}, I’m the best there’s ever been.”
“The Defense of Fort McHenry” is the poem by Francis Scott Key that contains the stanza that became the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner”. The poem is not the song. You say the third verse is “rarely” played, but that greatly overstates how often it is actually sung, which is never. I challenge you (or anyone for that matter) to demonstrate a single instance where anything other than the first verse of Key’s poem is sung (that is, as if it was a normal part of the song, rather than “what would it sound like if we sang all the verses”).
There’s also different interpretations of the controversial lines, but I’ll leave that alone, since it’s irrelevant to the fact that they are not part of the song.
Needless to say, I wouldn’t consider the national anthem to have been bowdlerized.
in the 60s in Substitute the Who changed
I look all white, but my dad was black to
I try walking forward but my feet walk back.
because of "racial tensions " in the USA
Wow, I’m exhausted after that five-second google search. Here’s one of many:
I'm also one of probably tens of thousands of people who sang it in elementary school as part of our music class.To be honest, I have never heard this version, nor do I remember anything other than the first verse of Key’s poem being taught as part of the song. Another previously-undone Google search also presented the entire poem as the lyrics, rather than only the 1st verse, so my assertions about what is and isn’t part of the song were clearly incorrect. Ignorance fought.
I would still argue that the Star-Spangled Banner isn’t “bowdlerized” in the sense that people are trying to hide the “racist” part, but rather simply shortened for time.
I can’t make out the backdoor man substitution either.
She also inexplicably changed the phone number from “Three six, two four, three six” (A nod to ideal female measurements) to “three sixty four, three five oh.”
Weird.
I remember someone posting in another thread that these past years they do an altered version of Brown Sugar. Quite right too:
:eek:
I have no idea what they substitute. I also have a memory of a story going round that Brown Sugar = heroin, and that was what the song was really about. I’d like to think (this is just supposition) that the heroin story was a distraction from the real lyric. That would nicely bookend the OP - one song altered so that it wasn’t about drugs, and another with a smokescreen suggesting that it was.
j
The rock stations I heard it on all played the “son of a bitch” line right from the outset, 1978 or 79? Language standards on radio had loosened up considerably by then. “Bitch” was no longer a big deal.
However, the CDB song Uneasy Rider, with the line “Well I had them all out there steppin’ an’ a fetchin’ like their heads were on fire and their asses was catchin’” had the word “asses” bleeped out.
When I was in grade school, I saw a very old music book with some lyrics to “Skip to My Lou”, and one verse was
“N*gger in the woodpile, skip to my lou”.
The song was originally written in 1844, but the songbook I found was probably from the 1920s.
We never sang the song, fortunately.
Regards,
Shodan
Some radio stations in the 90s would change a line in Tom Petty’s “You Don’t Know How It Feels”
“let’s roll another joint” became “let’s hit another joint”. The classic rock station in my area used the later while the station that played the hits used the former.
Well, if you don’t buy the racism reason, it’s also a matter of record that people dropped the third verse during WWI to avoid offending our British allies.
But since many people have a hard enough time remembering the words to just the first verse, I doubt there’s much demand for all four verses.
A classic bowdlerized song from the earliest days of rock n’ roll is “Work With Me Annie” by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, a song considered so dirty at the time that the FCC tried to get it banned from national airplay (it became highly popular anyway, probably due mostly to the attempt at suppression). It was followed by “Dance With Me Henry”, using the same melody but with squeaky-clean lyrics. Georgia Gibbs had a hit with that version.
Maybe in the far distant past, some Americans sang all verses of the Star-Spangled Banner, :dubious: but I’ve never heard of any public performances that included more than the first verse.*
*even given a possibly greater tolerance for boredom in the past, I can’t imagine a crowd awaiting the start of a baseball game tolerating more than the first verse without rioting.
Dean Friedman’s Ariel has a version for southern radio that skipped the fact that she was Jewish.