It’s a joke song. Still works in context like their ballad Lick My Love Pump.
What’s wrong with it?
It’s personal 
Still on YouTube. It is not that bad… I give a lot of comedy a pass.
But Achmed the Dead Terrorist is still a popular character.
fat bottomed girls
naughty nanny that made a bad boy out of me
That was the Boomtown Rats only real hit, wasn’t it? Too bad, Rats.
Patti Smith’s “Rock & Roll N_____” came up on my Amazon Music shuffle the other day. I gather that it’s fairly popular among her fans. My thoughts were “This song rocks, and I get what she was going for, but I should probably NEVER EVER tell anyone else that I’ve listened to it”.
“Hey, what’s in this drink?” was a stock joke at the time and the humor was derived, in part, because it was known there wasn’t really anything in the drink. This is what an audience in the 1940s would have understood.
This song is definitely not in the “no longer socially acceptable” category. I hear it all over the place, movies, TV, radio, etc.
Naw, that exalts them, not insults them.
Yep, as I said, one ignorant person heard that and jumped to a conclusion, wrote a blog or something,
It’s a Queen song. It wasn’t their only hit, obviously.
I’m not aware that the Rats ever recorded or performed it; it certainly wasn’t a hit for them. The Rats’ most successful single was I Don’t Like Mondays, no. 1 in 1979 and again when reissued in 1994. They also had a no. 1 with Rat Trap, as well as few other top 10 hits.
I’ve wondered why that part of the song doesn’t seem to raise more eyebrows than it does.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about Ross Bagdasarian’s (David Seville’s) Witch Doctor for a while now as an example of non-pc songs. One reason I’ve been thinking about it is that I stumbled across someone quoting the lyrics in a recent sf/fantasy story – the “OO-ee-ooh-ah-ah. Ting Tang. Walla walla bing bang” part. Which isn’t a problem in itself, except that it’s the speech on a non-english speaking ethnic, which seems to shift it back into non-pc territory.
Forgive me if this one has been cited already, but I didn’t see it when I looked through this thread:
The B-side was just the A-side played backwards:
Believe it or not, there were sequels and imitations, which you can find listed on the Wikipedia site
They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa! - Wikipedia!
It’s not surprising that this paean to the mental health industry doesn’t get much play today.
In country music, there’s Kawliga (Hank Williams) and Welfare Cadillac (Guy Drake). Although I’m not sure country audiences care.
No matter how cringeworthy the lyrics are (but let’s not forget that the song is 70 years old), I like the music so much that I just don’t care and enjoy it on every listen.
It ain’t Ahab the Arab, but I’m surprised that the cliche-fest that is Maria Muldaur’s Midnight at the Oasis was recorded even in 1973. It’s a song that made me go “WTF?” when it came out. I’m doubly surprised that it was covered multiple times, up through at least 2021.
Really?
And “Cactus is our friend”?
If you’re walking through the desert at midnight, cactus is certainly NOT your friend!
Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love” is still performed, but usually without the original opening lines:
Chinks do it, Japs do it,
up in Lapland little Laps* do it…
*The Sami people of Finland aren’t fond of being called Laps.
I had a classics professor in college (many years ago) make a surprisingly compelling and coherent argument that the song was actually about Antigone and Creon.