The guitar solo is almost as good backwards as it is forward. (and: Here’s to my sweet satan!")
I remember when “fart” was considered so bad, not only were you not allowed to say it on the air, you couldn’t even allude to flatulence. As George Carlin noted, it was worse than “fuck” because you could use synonyms such as “making love,” “sleeping together,” or even “having sex.” But you couldn’t use more innocent-sounding phrases such as “breaking wind,” “passing gas,” “tooting,” or even the clinical word “flatuence”. I think things started to cut loose (heh) with regards to “fart” in the 90s.
My local CBS station did air the Seeger song but faded out the last verse. It was years before I finally heard the full version.
“Jeremy” was never pulled from MTV. When the video was released in 1992, fear of school shootings wasn’t that big of an issue. “Jeremy” remained in heavy rotation for a couple of years. I’d say it wasn’t until about 1997 (the year of the Pearl, MS and West Paducah, KY shootings) that there started to be a lot of public concern about school shootings, and by that time “Jeremy” was rarely played on MTV because it was old. It’s my recollection that it did continue to show up on “Biggest Videos of All Time” type specials on MTV even after the 1999 Columbine shooting.
It’s true that there was some controversy about the “Jeremy” video depicting a school shooting, which is funny because the only reason viewers thought that was because MTV had censored the original ending! The song is about a boy who commits suicide in front of his classmates, and was inspired by a newspaper article about the 1991 suicide of a boy named Jeremy Wade Delle. In the original cut of the video, which I don’t believe ever aired on MTV, the actor playing Jeremy is shown putting the gun in his mouth. In the edited version the image zooms in on Jeremy’s eyes so you can’t see what he’s doing with the gun. This change was presumably intended to make the video seem less violent and to avoid encouraging copycat suicides. But since the video ends with an image of Jeremy’s blood-splattered classmates, this change made it easy to interpret the video as a much more violent story about a boy who opened fire on his class.
The beginning of “Empty Spaces” on Pink Floyd’s The Wall. It actually says 'Congratulations you found the secret message…".
ETA: There’s that chick getting killed on “Love Rollercoaster”.
ELO’s “Fire on High,” from Face The Music has a backward bit that says The music is reversible, but time…turn back, turn back….
Indeed, there were a couple school rampages where the shooter claimed to have been inspired by the (edited) “Jeremy” video!
Judas Priest was famously sued by the parents of two suicidal teenagers who presumably were “encouraged” to kill themselves by a backwards message in the Priest song “Better By You, Better Than Me.” The band was acquitted primarily because it couldn’t be proven that they had intentionally inserted that message. :dubious:
There have been numerous other crazy claims about so-called backwards masking in rock music. One of them, in Styx’s “Snowblind” (which allegedly said “Satan is in our voices!” when played backwards) got the band so cheesed off that they deliberately inserted a backwards message in their next album, Kilroy Was Here – at the beginning of “Heavy Metal Poisoning”, James Young can be heard reciting the backwards phrase: “Annuit Cœptis, Novus Ordo Seclorum!” which probably confused the hell out of those devil-hating anti-music freaks.
The Christian band Petra had one song with a backward message: “Why are you looking for Satan when you should be looking for the Lord?”
Weird Al had one with the backward message “Wow, you must have an awful lot of free time on your hands.”
(and another one with “Satan eats Cheez Whiz!”.)
I remember a big brou-ha-ha over the Cure’s song “Killing an Arab”. Some groups thought it was anti-Arab. It was actually inspired by a pivotal scene in Camus’ book The Stranger. Robert Smith, the vocalist for the Cure, would sometimes sing the lyric as “killing an Englishman” to make a point.
Nothing specific, but one of the frothier fundamentalists I used to know once told that Steely Dan had “sold their souls to the devil”.
And I still think “for smooth jazz-rock?”
Not a problem on the radio version, but when singing Look Good in Blue live, Deborah Harry would sometimes have an extra-long pause after the word ‘head’ in the following:
Yes, i could give you some head
And shoulders to lie on.
Funny that “Only the Good Die Young” had some sort of controversy associated with it…a couple of years ago, some stations stopped playing Kesha’s “Die Young” after the Newtown school shootings.:rolleyes:
When the Butthole Surfers played a concert in Birmingham, AL in the 90’s the radio ads for the show referred to them as the “B-Hole Surfers”.
Only the ones who hadn’t bought into the New World Order [del]Jewish[/del] Illuminati [del]Jewish[/del] Zionist conspiracy theories that said the [del]Jewish[/del] Eastern Bankers were running the world into the ground so Satan could lead us all into One World Government FEMA Concentration Camps replete with disposable coffins and black helicopters. Alex Jones rants about it now, but it was definitely part of the pre-9/11 CT mindset that flared up in the 1990s, from much older precursors.
They would have found that to be right in line with their beliefs. Their Officially Not-Anti-Semitic beliefs.
Ca. 1990, there was a heavy metal band called the Reverb Motherfuckers. My brother was a college DJ at the time, and people could (and did) play literally anything between midnight and 6am. One of his DJs wanted to play a track from them and call them “Reverb MFs” but he said no, they couldn’t.
I do indeed remember. People forget that it wasn’t just Christians who objected. As with The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ, Jewish characters had a very prominent role in getting Jesus killed. You can’t get a more sympathetic portrayal of Pilate and more villianous of Caiaphas & Annas than in JCS.
I remember that. On top of the overall “it’s sacrilegious” nonsense, people complained about “the beat”. “Oh it’s awful. Did you hear that beat?” I still have no idea how a beat can be offensive.
It wasn’t even really rock. It was a Broadway Musical.
To this day Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al, et al. will take you up on Brown Sugar.
Similarly, the song “Jesse Don’t Like It” (1990), making fun of North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms’ efforts to defund the Robert Mapplethorpe photo exhibit, got a fair amount of airplay in much of the country, esp. in my hometown of Washington, DC. But friends of mine went down to North Carolina with a CD of it and the people they were visiting were dumbfounded; they had no idea such a song existed.
“The painting Jesse likes is the one of the clown/With a flower in his hand and a tear rolling down…”
One I remember here in the more prudish areas of the Midwest was Exile’s Kiss You All Over. Apparently the slightest hint of oral sex was enough for many radio stations to keep that off the air.
I was music director at a radio station in Iowa in the late 80s, and I added XTC’s Dear God to the rotation (yeah, I was waaay too out there for that gig, I know). After we’d played it for a week or so, one of the DJs pulled the actual record out of the studio and slid it under the station owner’s office door with a note decrying its blasphemous nature. Which means, of course, the guy didn’t actually listen to the lyrics … it’s far more anti-mankind’s-inhumanity than it is anti-God, but you have to pay attention to figure that out.
As mentioned elsewhere, the standard single/radio edit of Money for Nothing cuts that verse. You have to actually get the album version to play the whole thing.
At least around here, there’s a radio edit with “who the hell are you” substituted. So not always.