Meaning released songs that had an “offensive” word edited out or replaced with an inoffensive word.
The earliest one I can think of is Money by Pink Floyd. Were there any earlier?
What other earlier songs had offensive words edited out?
Or songs that were “self-censoring” such as the “shut your mouth” in the Theme from Shaft?
How about local radio stations that censored songs? For example, a station I listened to edited out “damn”. For a while I thought Leroy Brown was “the baddest man in the whole town”.
Any related interesting facts or stories?
The first one that springs to mind is the AM radio version of the Steve Miller Band’s “Jet Airliner,” in which “funky shit goin’ down in the city” became “funky kicks goin’ down in the city.”
It was a decade after Money came out, but the one I always think of is Money For Nothing. There’s a handful of variations out there that remove the word faggot, but the original is probably played as often as any of the clean ones.
Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” (1967) had the line “making love in the green grass” replaced by copying a line from a previous verse, “laughin’ and a-runnin’, hey hey.”
Lots of television shows censored lyrics. Ed Sullivan was notorious for telling groups to change lyrics he didn’t like. The Doors were supposed to change “we couldn’t get any higher” in Light My Fire. They agreed but sang it anyway. Sullivan never had them back.
Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” had the word “crap” edited out, either by bleeping it, or by replacing it with “girls” from another verse. It was different on different stations: some just played it as recorded.
Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” bleeped out “son of a bitch.” That was probably the record company’s idea.
The Rolling Stones performed “Let’s Some Time Together” on Sullivan due to censors restrictions.
And I bet that was almost as damaging to their career as never appearing with Arthur Godfrey.
Interesting arc implied in this thread: Radio edits going from a non-issue because those words weren’t in popular music anyway, to radio edits being a cramp on the artists’ style because they wanted to remain relevant in the face of a mass media world which wasn’t changing quickly enough, to radio edits being a non-issue because you don’t have to edit a goddamn thing for Soundcloud or Spotify.
The radio version of A Boy Named Sue bleeped “I’m the son of a bitch that named you Sue.”
I worked in radio during the 1970s. You never knew what a boss was going to order cut. At one easy listening station I worked, the boss pulled Paul Anka’s sappy Having My Baby while at the same time somehow overlooking Gordon Lightfoot’s Sundown. At a country station, the boss (actually, his wife) decided Take This Job and Shove It was offensive. Some of our DJ’s were fine with Loretta Lynn’s ode to birth control The Pill, while others wouldn’t play it during their shifts. Over on the FM rock side Billy Joel’s Only the Good Die Young got whacked because it was offensive to Catholics (oddly enough, it wasn’t the Catholics who complained, but the Baptists.)
I personally cut the line “We’ve been up and down this highway/Haven’t seen a god-damn thing” out of the Eagles’ Life in the Fast Lane so as not to offend the Bible Belt sensibilities of our audience, who didn’t seem to object to the rest of the song being about cocaine. I also personally cut “who the fuck are you” out of Who Are You for more clear-cut concerns.
When, in a little tent show, I yelled for Hoyt Axton to sing GREENBACK DOLLAR, he left in the “damn”, whereas the Kingston Trio recording overlaid it with a guitar strum.
“Well, I don’t give a [strum] about a greenback dollar…”
Not quite edits, but careful wording, can be heard in Johnny Horton’s version of Jimmy Driftwood’s BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS, replacing “we really gave-em Hell” with “we really gave-em… well, now…” and in Homer & Jethro’s parody BATTLE OF CAMP CUCAMONGA, hinting at “nude” with “they were swimming in the… well, now…”
And in the first known euphemism for “motherfucker” in a top pop song, the Hollywood Argyles’ ALLEY OOP rendered “Well he’s a mean motorskooter…”
A little later, the MC5 live album KICK OUT THE JAMS had a clean DJ version issued where “brothers and sisters” replaced “motherfuckers”.