If you would like a “WTF were they thinking?” moment, read the lyrics for Daddy Should Have Stayed in High School by Cheap Trick. Ugh.
I hate to break it to folks but age of consent in the US is less than 18 years in all but 13 states. In the majority of states, the age of consent is 16. And that’s without parental authority, change that and it goes down to 13 years in a surprising number of states.
Yet still we don’t do songs about “my sexy teenage high school girlfriend” anymore, because most of us understand that the law hasn’t yet caught up with society.
I always thought that Ray Stevens’ “A-Hab the A-Rab” was kind of racist.
I hate hate hate that song. It’s a popular square dance singing call, and I find the lyrics offensive enough that it detracts from my enjoying the dance.
I don’t find the lyrics necessarily offensive. They’re in the tradition of magic words used in entertainment, like the Steve Miller Band’s Abracadabra. But combined with art on the album cover, it’s clear the publisher, if not the artist, was problematic.
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Doesn’t get much play these days, but then again, I’m not sure if I ever heard Ray Stevens on the radio at all. Had some decent songs, but was pretty niche for the mainstream.
Ugh indeed. I don’t know how I missed that one all these decades, but glad I did. (I don’t have their first album.)
Just looked up the lyrics to that song and OMG!, how was that ever OK? Horrible song!
And I like “murder ballads”, at least, some, like Delilah and Cher’s Dark Lady, and even a suicide ballad can be OK, but creepy stalker rapist torture budding-serial-killer ballads cross the line. Especially when they craft the singer as the good guy in his own mind. At least Tom and Cher knew they were murderers.
You forgot incestuous in that list.
head slap! And it’s right there in the title!
It’s hard to keep track of all the disgusting things in that song. Blows my mind that someone intentionally wrote that!
Cheap Trick’s first album is my favorite of theirs. Unlike the pop-ballad crap on their later albums, it is high-energy, balls-to-the-wall, rock. I’ve probably listened to it a thousand times. I like everything about that song (Daddy Should Have Stayed in High School), except for the super creepy lyrics. The song even starts with a bunch a young school kids making noises on a playground. 
WTF were they thinking? I’ve got to assume they stopped playing that song in concert a long time ago.
It’s OK in the same way that movies about rape, abduction, etc. are made, or that I Don’t Like Mondays was recorded. It’s not saying that the actions are OK, just that they are.
Sorry to interrupt, but I wanted to mention that a lot of Ray Stevens early material was stolen from Brother Dave Gardner, including a lot of the things referenced in that song.
Pretty heavily right wing now. Example.
Carry on.
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“Everything Is Beautiful”, one of his more serious songs, won a Grammy.
Now that you put it that way, I can see it. I like The Misfits and they have classic lyrics like:
Slayer and many others have outlandish lyrics. I guess it’s because you expect it from these types of bands that you don’t blink an eye at it. But when it comes from Cheap Trick, it becomes truly shocking. Plus, these particular lyrics really were a whole different level.
I don’t find it that shocking. This is the same band that wrote “Auf Wiedersehen” and “He’s a Whore”, after all.
I still put them in an entirely different class than the horror punk represented by the Misfits.