Happy Music Monday! Today Scott's collecting all those songs that maybe should have been too extreme for radio... but weren't! FYI all these songs are probably not at all work safe, and yet, you've probably played them at work a million times. Here's a great example of what we mean now. It's the Who!
Growing up, I heard this one on the radio over and over and over and always wondered... did they just say an F-Bomb? Isn't that against the rules? How can they do that? And yet, somehow, the power of The Who got it through for years and years. Possibly this song is now bleeped on some radio stations... but not all of them. Even though it probably breaks the law every time it's played, the Who keep on goin'. And nobody seems to think twice.
See? We got four more violating songs comin' right up.
The Rolling Stones - Honky Tonk Women
There was a time in America when divorce and sex out of wedlock was scandalous! That's the time when the Rolling Stones wrote this dedication to, well, divorce and sex out of wedlock. The story goes that the song was allllmost banned from radio play because of the line "laid a divorcee in New York City" but their sneaky manager convinced everyone the line was "played the divorcee in New York City." Never mind that this is kinda meaningless, all that matters is that it was decent, and therefore radio-friendly! And that mistake is why all of modern society has crumbled.
There's a lot of BS in prog rock, and this song is no exception. The Wall I MEANT TO SAY Dark Side Of The Moon has long been a classic rock staple, but for a long long time, it went relatively uncensored. Possibly it was the British accent, or maybe it's because Pink Floyd was eclipsed by punk and heavy metal around the time this song was starting up the charts. Either way, it wasn't really edited until around the late 1990s, and even today it might slip by unnoticed from time to time.
There's barely anything hidden in this one, which is kinda maybe why it did so well. But even for a radio double-entendre, it's still pretty over the top. The weirdest part is that Melanie herself says the song is to be taken 100% literally, and that she didn't mean it to be sexual at all! Which, if true, is kinda nuts. Did she really stumble into Lee Hazlewood territory completely by accident?
Of course, the Shamen didn't stumble into anything here. They created a character named Ebeneezer Goode to justify the drug-based chorus of "E's good" which is a shameless endorsement of the drug Ecstasy. The song is also full of rhyming slang for other drugs, and, like most metaphors, it's a great chance for "the kids" to assume they're getting away with something their parents can't possibly understand. Which, for kids 1990s England, was kinda crazy. Didn't they know their parents INVENTED drug culture?
Let us just remind you: some images come from the corresponding Wikipedia page and are here under fair use. See you next week.