I remember a couple years back (Kanye West?) had that gold-digger song out. Since I’m not really into rap I only heard it played on the radio or on the MTV awards show. It was catchy but I always thought the lyrics were kind of stupid.
“Now I ain’t sayin she a gold-digger, but she ain’t messin with no broke-broke.”
Stupid. Oh well.
Then yesterday I’m watching the abismal Made of Honor movie, and they feature the song in it’s uncut version.
“Now I ain’t sayin she a gold-digger, but she ain’t messin with no broke nigger.”
Ah ha! Much better. It now makes sense and actually rhymes.
I also had to enlighten my teenage nieces that he song they heard on TV ads and liked by Groove Armada “I see you baby, shakin that thanggg.” was actaully “I see you baby, shakin that ass.” which they were unaware of and thought was a big improvement.
My husband lived in Spain during Franco’s regime. In hubby’s record collection is a 45rpm record of Don McLean’s “American Pie” which was bought in Barcelona in the early '70s. The song is quite normal up to the point where the lyrics say “The three men I admire most, the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, they caught the last train for the coast.” That entire passage is replaced by a long, steady beeeeeeeep tone. Ay, ay, ay. The lyrics were considered blasphemous, so they were zapped by the Spanish censors.
Maybe not exactly the same thing, but I’m pretty sure that most folks who sing along with En Vogue’s lyric “Free your mind and the rest will follow” have no clue it’s watered-down Funkadelic.
“Crap” was bad – some radio stations beeped in out when “Kodachrome” was released.
The song was also banned from the BBC, but not for the word “crap.” There was another word in it that upset the BBC censors much more: “Kodachrome.” They did not allow any trade names.
For the same reason, the single version of “Lola” runs:
“I met her in a club down in old Soho where they drink champaigne and it tastes just like cherry cola.”
While the original (album version) was:
“I met her in a club down in old Soho where they drink champaigne and it tastes just like Coca Cola.”
“Battle Flag” - Lo Fidelity All Stars. Pretty cool song that had the occasional computerized stutter inserted into various lines, like “get down on your n-n-n-n-n-knees”. I thought it was just a cool effect. A year or two later I hear a version with no stuttering and a whole lot of gratuitous and pointless "motherfucking"s scattered throughout. The censored version was better.
Big shock for me: The Doors have been a rock radio staple since I was born. I grew up listening to KMET’s Jim Ladd, who cannot go 30 minutes without playing either the Doors, Pink Floyd, or Led Zeppelin. As such, I heard a lot of Doors as a teenager, so much that I never felt the need to actually buy any of their albums, since I could mentally replay any tune I felt like (and as I got older I went from impressionable teenage “they’re so deep” to cynical middle-aged “they’re pretentious wankers”). Imagine my shock last month when “Break On Through” comes on the radio and for the first time in my 42 years instead of “she gets, she gets” I hear “she gets HIGH, she gets HIGH”.
“Who are You?” - The Who. Up until about 5 years ago, FM stations didn’t have a problem playing the album version with “ah, who the fuck are you” intact. But for some reason (Janet Jackson Super Bowl nipple hysteria??) stations switched to an edited version with the line completely missing. What I want to know is what ever happened to the 1978 Top-40 radio edit with “who the hell are you” replacing the offending line? I can’t convince people this version ever existed, but I remember it quite clearly.
Semi-charmed Life: Doin [record scratch] lift you up until you break.
It was only 3 years ago at karaoke that I found out it was crystal meth that was gonna lift you up until you break. Even after I found out the song was about meth.
Black Eyed Peas “Let’s Get It Started” is also “Let’s Get Retarded”. I didn’t know that until I rented Harold and Kumar a couple of years ago and finally heard the original.
Wow, this is one of those moments when I realize how out of touch I am with popular culture. I was sure this was a whoosh (I haven’t seen the Harold and Kumar movie, but have heard the “Started” version used in numerous commercials), but Wikipedia confirms that the original version was indeed “Let’s Get Retarded”: Let's Get It Started - Wikipedia.
I also learned this from that cite:
I’ve never heard this slang term in the United States (and I live here!). Is it really that common?
I feel old… or I’m going to the wrong parties. Or both.
i heard a couple of censored Charlie Daniels tunes on AM radio in the 70s. It was years before I heard them played in full.
“Uneasy Rider”: The part that goes “I had them all out there steppin and fetchin
Like their heads was on fire and their asses was catchin” had the word asses bleeped out.
And there is a censored 45 of “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” where the line from the album version, “I done told you once you son of a bitch, I’m the best there’s ever been” was replaced by “I done told you once you son of a gun.” Today, the album versions of both songs are much more commonly played without being censored.
This is the one I was going to post. The censoring was done seriously well. I didn’t mind the “motherfucking” usage so much but this was one of the few songs where I didn’t think the radio edit was worse than the original.
Oh, I forgot a humorous one. A year or two ago after a lot of the FCC hullabaloo, a local radio station (WXRT) had a bit on April 1 on their morning show, where the DJ solemnly talked about FCC requirements and fines for stations that violate them, and went on to play obnoxious bleep-type sounds over “bad words” in songs. Like Norah Jones’ song “Don’t Know Why”, where one of the chorus lines got turned into “Don’t know why I didn’t BOING” (“come”), and as the song went on, seemingly random words also got sound effects to blank them out.
I had the exact opposite problem. I had been listening to “Let’s Get Retarded” for months before I was at a bar and heard a strangely familiar song that went, “Let’s Get it Started.” I later saw the censored video on MTV. Pretty lame, I thought.
I had the same experience with Lil’ Wayne’s “Lollipop.” I had been listening to the regular version for about a month when somebody asked me about the censored version, which I didn’t know existed. I went to listen to it, and it doesn’t even sound like anything! Half the words are replaced by random noises.
That “uncensored” version didn’t exist until the Doors catalog was reissued in remixed form about a year ago. Many songs on the new CDs have very substantial differences, such as a whole new intro section added to “The Soft Parade” before the “seminary school” poem.
Intriguingly, when Cake did their cover of “I Will Survive” they made it *more * profane (“I should have changed my fucking lock, I should have thrown away the key…”).