{"id":1811,"date":"2008-11-21T09:45:11","date_gmt":"2008-11-21T14:45:11","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2009-10-06T15:11:48","modified_gmt":"2009-10-06T15:11:48","slug":"profanity-in-rock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/profanity-in-rock\/","title":{"rendered":"Profanity in Rock"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/gJ6SvpJd0CI?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><br \/>\nI&#8217;ll be polite with my quotes here, but in my never-ending research into the history of rock and roll, I&#8217;m trying to make sense of the history of profanity in lyrics (as opposed to spoken profanity on rock records&#8212;stuff like <strong>The MC5<\/strong>&#8216;s &#8220;Kick Out The Jams,&#8221; the Suzy Creamcheese obscenities on <em>Uncle Meat<\/em>, offhand stuff in the background like Lennon shouting &#8220;f*****g hell&#8221; in &#8220;Hey Jude,&#8221; The Last Poets, etc). <\/p>\n<p>For the moment, leaving out rather obscure or underground acts like The Fugs, Pearls Before Swine, Joy Unlimited (whose 1970 song &#8220;Rankness&#8221; is probably the most extreme song anyone would do until Marianne Faithfull&#8217;s &#8220;Why&#8217;d Ya Do It&#8221;), and so on, I think the earliest use I can find would be <strong>The Jefferson Airplane<\/strong> with &#8220;bulls**t&#8221; on <em>Crown of Creation<\/em> and two uses of the f-word on <em>Volunteers<\/em> (the lyric sheets censored all of them, making &#8220;fred&#8221; one of my favorite euphemisms). <strong>Al Stewart<\/strong> made a lot of waves in 1969 with the f-word on <em>Love Chronicles<\/em>, and I just wish I was old enough to have seen the world&#8217;s response to Lennon&#8217;s profanities on <em>Plastic Ono Band<\/em> (or did the earlier <em>Two Virgins<\/em> cover create a jaded public whom Lennon could no longer shock?).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, I have a couple of tacks I&#8217;d love to see people comment on.<\/p>\n<p><strong>1) Very major acts.<\/strong> All of the very most significant &#8217;60s-into-&#8217;70s artists let loose with some at some point.  The Stones first, on &#8220;Rocks Off&#8221; (1972), The Who on &#8220;Young Man Blues&#8221; on <em>Live at Leeds<\/em> (1970), Dylan on &#8220;Hurricane,&#8221; Lennon as mentioned above, Pink Floyd on <em>Animals<\/em>, etc&#8230; Oddly enough, <strong>Led Zeppelin<\/strong> and <strong>Black Sabbath<\/strong> are, as far as I can tell, wholly obscenity-free, lyrically. Most relatively major artists I can think of have at least something during their &#8217;70s output. Can anyone think of any who were 100% clean throughout?<\/p>\n<p><strong>2) Early usage<\/strong>&#8212;anything from, say, 1972 or before in rock or soul\/R&amp;B? I&#8217;m sure there are plenty I don&#8217;t know.<\/p>\n<p><strong>3) Radio edits and non-edits.<\/strong> Starting in the &#8217;90s, obscene lyrics were in tons of popular songs, blipped or wiped completely. But there were a few key ones in the &#8217;70s: Lou Reed&#8217;s &#8220;Walk On The Wild Side&#8221; and Jefferson Starship&#8217;s &#8220;Miracles&#8221; come to mind, where the radio verion was blipped. More interestingly, there are some where to this day classic rock still plays the uncut versions: Pink Floyd&#8217;s &#8220;Money,&#8221; The Who&#8217;s &#8220;Who Are You,&#8221; etc&#8230; I remember as a kid being shocked to note that not only did Dylan&#8217;s &#8220;Hurricane&#8221; have swears in it, but that the 45 left them in on both the A- and B-side of the split single. Anyone want to add to either of these lists?<\/p>\n<p>Would you believe that my interest in this topic was recently rekindled by my first listen to <strong>Gordon Lightfoot<\/strong>&#8216;s 1974 <em>Sundown<\/em> album, on which he says s**t on two different songs?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ll be polite with my quotes here, but in my never-ending research into the history of rock and roll, I&#8217;m trying to make sense of the history of profanity in lyrics (as opposed to spoken profanity on rock records&#8212;stuff like The MC5&#8216;s &#8220;Kick Out The Jams,&#8221; the Suzy Creamcheese obscenities on Uncle Meat, offhand stuff <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/profanity-in-rock\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":324,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[204],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1811"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/324"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1811"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1811\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1811"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1811"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1811"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}