Arthur Brown’s “Fire” ( - YouTube )actually shocked quite a few people back in 1968 with its opening.
Well, howzabout Harry Nilsson’s You’re Breaking My Heart, released in 1972? Not a hit, really, although it was used as the title song on an 80’s teen comedy movie. I don’t think it got any radio play, but the Rolling Stone’s Some Girls, released in 1978, did.
'Course, there’s always Harry Roy’s My Girl’s Pussy, released in 1931. Took real stones to put that one out, considering Roy was a legitimate mainstream band leader.
This doesn’t really fit, but I have to mention it. In 1930 Hoagy Carmichael led a band in a novelty recording of Barnacle Bill the Sailor in which Joe Venuti can be heard singing the word “shitter” (many people hear “shithead,” but it sounds like “shitter” to me). It’s in the second chorus, at 1:33 and again at 1:37. This record was released to the public, although it was never a big seller.
It was recorded in 1935, but I believe the explicit version of Shave Em Dry wasn’t released until much later. The one published in 35 was the clean version, with nonsense lyrics about animals.
There are loads of early blues songs with raunchy lyrics, but not only were they not big hits, they usually used innuendo rather than explicit words, albeit very thinly veiled. Like Malienation’s Harry Roy example. Or Bo Carter: Please Warm My Weiner, My Pencil Won’t Write No More, etc.
How about the alleged f-bomb in The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”:
[QUOTE=Ray Davies]
"Halfway through the song it was time for Dave’s guitar solo. This moment had to be right. So I shouted across the studio to Dave, give him encouragement. But I seemed to spoil his concentration. He looked at me with a dazed expression. ‘Fuck off.’ If you doubt me, if you doubt what I’m saying, I challenge you to listen to the original Kinks recording of ‘You Really Got Me.’ Halfway through the song, after the second chorus, before the guitar solo, there’s a drum break. Boo ka, boo boo ka, boo ka, boo boo. And in the background you can hear ‘fuck off.’ You can, you can. When I did the vocal I tried to cover it up by going “Oh no”, but in the background you still hear it ‘fuck off.’ And it’s even clearer on CD, it’s really embarrassing.
[/QUOTE]
I can’t, I can’t.
Except the recording that was played on the radio didn’t use the word “damn.” The chorus went, “I don’t give a _____ about a greenback dollar,” with the word “damn” being replaced by a guitar strum. Censored version here. The commentary says, "Greenback Dollar E.P. Capitol Records, 1963, U.K. The single version contain an acoustic guitar strum overdub on the word “damn”. The “uncensored” version of Greenback Dollar was originally released in the Kingston Trio’s L.P. album, “New Frontier”. LP version is here.
The earliest I remember the word “hell” being used in a #1 song is 1961 on "Big Bad John by Jimmy Dean.
From wiki: “There are several known recordings of the song by Dean. Notably, there are two different versions of the inscription on the marble stand in front of the mine. The original, “At the bottom of this mine lies one hell of a man—Big John”, was deemed too controversial, so in the version that was most often heard on the radio, one could hear “At the bottom of this mine lies a big, big man—Big John” instead. (However, a verse earlier in the song, “Through the smoke and the dust of this man-made hell …” remains intact in both versions, with no apparent controversy.)”
I never heard the version which said “one hell of a man” on the radio. “Big Bad John” was the first record (a 45) I ever bought with my own money. I was 10 at the time. My 45 had “big, big, man” as the last line.
1964: “Dang Me”
1974 - The Bitch is Back - Elton John.
Wikipedia: ““The Bitch Is Back” is a rock song by Elton John, written with Bernie Taupin. It was the second single released from his 1974 album Caribou, and reached number 1 in Canada (his sixth in that country),[1] number 4 in the United States and number 15 in the United Kingdom.[2] The song has been identified as is one of Elton John’s best hard rock cuts. In the U.S., it was certified Gold on 13 September 1995 by the RIAA.[3]”
Not quite top 40, but John Lennon’s Working Class Hero, released in '71 (US) got air play that resulted in controversy. I recall it raised my mother’s eyebrows at the time; “those Beatles used to be such nice lads.”
Missed the edit window. Just for context: my mother was a WWII English war bride who used to brag about “her” Beatles to all the yanks…up until the album, Sergeant Pepper, when they “got a little weird”. She died last Saturday, age 91, and is greatly missed.
Ahem! The Stones used that word, as a complete song title (and in the lyrics), out in 1971, admittedly as a B side, but to a number one single (Brown Sugar) and on a number one album.
This just proves the unreliability of Wikipedia. The words “Elton John” and “hard rock” do not belong in the same sentence.
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The Who did not actually say “fuck off” in “My Generation” (1965), but they certainly made it sound as though they were going to.
“Why don’t you all f- f- fade away?”
I grew up in the US Northeast in the 70s and I remember how AM Top 40 stations would play the “…son of a gun” version of Charlie Daniels’ Devil Went Down to Georgia while the FM ones would play (what I assumed was the original) “…son of a bitch” version.
I too remember a time in the early 90s when stations briefly started censoring *Money *and Who Are You. It was around when Howard Stern started getting hugely popular (and hugely fined!) I blamed the conservative backlash against the burgeoning Clinton-era liberalizing social mores. But to this day, ever since the infamous ‘wardrobe malfunction’ all the radio stations I listen to ***still ***continue to bleep them!
Some of these words considered bleepable or editable are risibly tame by (most) modern standards - “bitch”, “damn” and “hell” are not thought of as “curse words” by most anybody I know - though I do read about religiously conservative people who object to “damn” and “hell”, often the same people who object to exclaiming “Oh my God” or “Jesus Christ” as an exclamation of surprise. Impolite, yes, but hearing people object to their use (in general, as opposed to directed at them) would raise eyebrows, or calling for them to be banned from airplay.
But The F-bomb and the S-word are incontrovertibly “curse words” that nevertheless routinely appear in pop songs nowadays, and while bleeped or silenced on the radio, the unedited versions are easily accessible and widely disseminated in digital form. One is not constrained by things like “you can only buy the clean version at Wal-Mart” anymore.
The earliest Top 40 song that, on the album cut at least, used the S-word has been covered by a few responses already. I think the earliest cited one so far is Pink Floyd’s “Money”, from 1973. Was Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” ever a Top 40 hit? I didn’t think so. Meanwhile The Steve Miller Band’s song “Jet Airliner” has the lyrics “I don’t want to get caught up in any of that funky shit going down in the city”, but that’s from 1977, and The Who’s “Who Are You” is from 1978.
As for the F-word? I remember being somewhat surprised/shocked at Nine Inch Nails’ song “Closer” in 1994 (“I wanna fuck you like an animal, I want to feel you from the inside… You get me closer to God”). Many highly popular gangster rap songs were cursing away by then too, of course, but until some time in the mid to late 1990s they were not considered “Top 40” but on separate “rap/hip-hop” charts and format playlists. You wouldn’t hear Snoop Dogg played by Casey Kasem…
There were graphically raunchy rap songs in the Top 40 already by 1994, but they avoided actually using the F-word, opting for more interesting allegories. The most graphic lyrics I can think of there would be 1990’s “Humpty Dance” by The Digital Underground that reached #11 (“In the 69 my humpty nose will tickle your rear”), 1991’s “O.P.P.” by Naughty by Nature that reached #6 (“Let’s say the last P, hmm, stands for property”), or Sir Mix-A-Lot’s #1 hit from 1992 “Baby Got Back” (“I’m long, and I’m strong, and I’m down to get the friction on”).
If you record for a Christian label, the d-word is a censorable offense.
The Christian/alternative/roots rock/alt-country/etc. supergroup Lost Dogs’s 2001 album Real Men Cry was supposed to include the song “Lovely Man,” but because it included the line “Right by damn, I’m a lovely (doggone) man,” the record company removed the song from the CD, then tacked a censored version with the “damn” edited out as an unlisted track on the end of the CD. (The original, uncensored version of the song was included on the CD sampler that came with the premiere issue of Paste magazine, which may be the thing that originally drew my attention to that fine publication. Someone has posted the song to YouTube here, if you want to hear it in all its offensive glory.)
I actually heard this song uncensored on the local classic rock station just a couple of days ago.
Re: Whether one can hear a “fuck off” in the background of “You Really Got Me”:
I tried several times after hearing Ray Davies tell this story on his “Storyteller” tour, but the “fuck” has never been audible to me. I can hear what sounds like the “off”, though.
One of us (possibly me) is confused here, but the unedited version of “Who Are You” does not contain the word “shit” but does contain the line “Who the fuck are you?” This was 16 years before NIN’s “Closer”. Wikipedia tells me that “Closer” just barely failed to make the US Top 40, but “Who Are You” went to #14.
No, I meant the F-word, I must have put it in the wrong paragraph when I thought of it. “Who the shit are you?” doesn’t really work in English. 
The Beatles sneaked tit tit tit tit into “Girl” back in '65.
I recall a letter Lennon wrote to Rolling Stone at the time, complaining that stations wouldn’t play that song for the word “fuck,” or “I Found Out” because it used the word “cock”; likewise, they wouldn’t air “Well Well Well” because of the line “She looked so beautiful, I could eat her.” [Quoting here from memory] “Cock and fuck I can understand,” John mused, “but even the Pope might say ‘Good enough to eat’!”