But censorship hasn’t just been the Big Brother of rock and roll lyrics. For many years, orchestras in Israel were forbidden to play the music of Beethoven and Wagner, because both were associated with the Nazi era, and Wagner was an outright anti-Semite. In the 1940s, George Formby’s “When I’m Cleaning Windows” was banned from BBC radio for “smutty” lyrics, which seem incredibly tame today: “The blushing bride, she looks divine/The bridegroom, he is doing fine/I’d rather have his job than mine/When I’m cleaning windows.”
Rock and roll and its lyrics, though, have kept censors the busiest. And censors have been particularly strict when it comes to rock and roll lyrics containing profanity. Some profane lyrics, though, have somehow found shortcuts around censors’ roadblocks, and ended up dropping f-bombs all over the radio. One of these expletives comes at the end of The Who’s “Who Are You,” when Roger Daltrey sings the lyrics, “Who the f*ck are you?” The word also took the airwaves by storm in Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know,” in her scathing lyrics to an ex-lover: “It was a slap in the face/How quickly I was replaced/Are you thinking of me when you f*ck her?” And for many years, Steve Miller’s 1977 classic, “Jet Airliner” has successfully taken flight from numerous radio station airwaves carrying its contraband lyrics, “I don’t want to get caught up in any of that/Funky sh*t goin’ down in the city.”
Then there are the lyrics with blatant sexual references, that somehow haven’t set off censors’ alarms. Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” openly addresses oral sex in the lyrics, “But she never lost her head/Even when she was giving head.” And Motley Crue’s lyrics from “She Goes Down,” “She goes down/Down, down, down,” charmingly accented with the sound of a zipper unzipping, aren’t exactly about a woman’s visit to Australia! While we’re on the subject of Motley Crue, these lyrics from “Girls, Girls, Girls” aren’t quite so innocent, innocent, innocent, either: “Ya know she did me/Well, then she broke my heart.” And for years, the Divinyls’ ode to self-satisfaction, “I Touch Myself,” and its explicit lyrics, “I don’t want anybody else/When I think about you/I touch myself” have been a radio station staple.
Rockers have always been rebels, and when they write lyrics that manage to sneak past the censors, we feel like we’re making mischief right along with them!
To find more uncensored lyrics check out Lyrics Bay and their newest lyrics that flew under the censors' radar.
