Jeremy by Pearl Jam slips through without being censored a lot of the time.
I recall when I moved from Salt Lake City to Seattle noticing the differences in censorship in songs.
Wheetus - Teenage Dirtbag
SLC version “Her boyfriend’s a **** He brings a gun to school”
Seattle version “Her boyfriend’s a dick, he brings a *** to school”
Also I believe the SLC stations censored “shit” out of songs that Seattle played unedited.
I had just started high school when that song was released (and Keith Moon died shortly afterwards) and we would gather around the radio just to hear That Word on the radio. 
I’ve probably heard the “hell” version, but it’s usually the other one.
After “Timothy” By The Buoys started climbing the charts, the record company said Tim was a mule, not a miner, that was apparently eaten according to the lyrics. Some stations still quit playing it. Anyway, the world has been waiting for about 40 years for another hit song about cannibalism.
I don’t know if this ever got enough traction to be a “controversy,” but for sure the far right/Moral Majority types can find evil in any song they hear. For example, I remember reading accusations that “Bridge Over Troubled Water” was actually a love song to … heroin use.
The “proof” of this was the wording “sail on, silver girl.” The heroin needle was the “silver.” Get it?
Come to think of it, that would explain the inconsistent censoring in the song that I always wondered about.
“Ass” was bleeped in the line “blow it out your ass, motorcycle man” but was left alone in “Give me that paper, bet your ass I will sign”.
The pre-recorded syndicated show got censored pretty quickly, but the live local show on KMET got away with the minimal edits for about a year. Once the “Beepers and Beer” version became mandatory, the song dropped off the Top 10 pretty quickly.
What is there to censor? I can barely understand a single word in that song. Wasn’t there a classic SNL skit about this? Seems to me Adam Sandler was singing it and it was complete gibberish.
Clearly I remember
Pickin’ on the boy
Seemed a harmless little fuck
But we unleashed a lion
Gnashed his teeth
And bit the recess lady’s breast*
Sandler, among others, made fun of Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow” for having unintelligible lyrics. If you have a lot of trouble with “Jeremy” you might want to get your hearing checked, though. I wouldn’t call it a fine display of elocution or anything, but it never struck me as being any mumblier or more mush-mouthed than the average rock song.
“I Don’t Like Mondays” by the Boomtown Rats had issues. One local radio station was doing an “I Don’t Like Mondays” promotion. The day it wass supposed to begin, there was not a word about it. Evidently someone told them what the song was about (a school shooting).
Re Jesus Christ Superstar: My high school did the first North American production, six months before it opened on Broadway.
I recall an interview with Pat Benatar on MTV in the 80s where she mentioned that she caught some flak from feminist groups about “Sex as a Weapon.” Apparently they couldn’t be bothered to even listen to the chorus that includes the “Stop using” part.
Thank you. That’s definitely going into my collection. I like when they can’t figure out out, they label it gibberish. Yeah, cause otherwise it makes perfect sense.
Not so much. Godspell is a Christian rock musical for believers.
Pink Floyd’s changing Let’s Roll Another One into Candy and a Currant Bun is strange that it kept the blatant “fuck” in the lyrics.
I rememer the 2 Live Crew controversey from 1990. If I recall it was banned in Florida for being obscene and then the band got arrested for playing at a strip club.
And a couple years later there was the whole Ice-T/Body Count controversey over the Cop Killer song. Ice-T eventually pulled the song from the album. Funny that he now plays a cop on TV.
Not so odd at the time, but in 1974 lots of stations, including the one where I worked, wouldn’t play Elton John’s The Bitch is Back.
One of the other DJs got in big trouble when the general manager heard him play The Beatles’ I’ve Got a Feeling, with the line “Everybody had a wet dream. Everybody saw the sun shine.”
Madonna’s ‘Papa Don’t Preach’ had some of the weirder controversies. Both pro-life and pro-choice groups got involved in the fray on their respective sides, some praising her for choosing to keep the baby and some asking Maddona to state that, even though the woman in the song was keeping it, she had the right to terminate. It was nutty.
The Pope John Paul II himself encouraged people to avoid her shows as she’d dedicated it to him directly. Weird. That’s all there was to it. And another instance of Madonna playing the zeitgeist perfectly to get a PR multiplier going.
These days, I think radio stations usually cut out that verse.
Heh. Until they started bleeping it a couple of years ago, I didn’t realize there was a swear word in there. I always thought the line was, “Seemed a harmless little fun.”
Soooort of. In Glee, it was played for maximum awkwardness. Monteith sang it to the parents of his girlfriend as his way of announcing that she was unexpectedly pregnant. Joy was not the foremost emotion in the room.
As I recall Judas Priest said that, if they could influence their fans with backwards messages, the messages would be, “buy Judas Priest records.”