Ethically Iffy, Morally Questionable, Politically Incorrect and/or Roundly Objectionable Songs by Your Favorite Artists

There's also the Squeeze song 'It's So Dirty', and the language used towards women in that song is outrageous and even Chris Difford thinks so these days - but for him that song was taking the general language used by the people he was hanging out with in pubs and documenting it in song. You may not like how women are referred to in that song - and I certainly fucking don't - but it happened and that's why the song was written.

I personally like the fact that some of the more awful attitudes of past eras have been written about like this, because not only does that mean that - from a historical perspective - we have a fairer reflection of those eras, but also it makes me realise just how much people and attitudes have moved on.

(As an aside: 'It's Not You' and 'Object' surely must be two of the worst set of lyrics Robert Smith ever came up with.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFIAYai7J4E

I think the point where I realised Adam Curtis is ever so slightly full of shit was a sequence in one of his films that had a montage of Patti Smith and 70s New York artists, and it posited in a grandiose voiceover that were was something highly important about them or something. There is nothing important or significant about annoying hippy pseuds making very bad music, pal!

Wasn't that actually his (perhaps half-baked) point? That as these artists reached the apparent cusp of their political relevance and power they just kinda folded for various reasons in order to preserve their individuality as artists rather than becoming actual catalysts of revolution as members within a larger group? It wasn't that their art was bad it was a question of its true power to affect change under the circumstances (the balance of power shifting from government to corporate industry).

Yeah the other day I listened to Cool For Cats beyond the four singles everyone knows and loves, and was kind of shocked by the stuff they were hiding on the album tracks. I mean, I live in SE London so I shouldn't have been

xp
I have a strong feeling that way too much significance is being heaped on - what to my perception is - a bunch of music biz scenesters being music biz scenesters. Looking at history through the evolution of the music biz seems so hackneyed and myopic. I don't think that narrative there is much of an insight.

That Exene had an actual paranoid meltdown makes the paranoid meltdown of "Los Angeles" hard to listen to as satire anymore.

― Mungolian Jerryset (bendy), Saturday, 7 October 2017 04:40 (nine hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

aiui this song is about a specific person on the fringes of her social circle at the time, rather than satire per se. it's vaguely plausible in hindsight that she was using the lyrics as a proxy for her own bigotry but not especially likely I don't think

"I Knew a Jew Named Frankenstein" by Sun City Girls.

So much early punk and later hip-hop, I couldn't begin to list it all. And the Fugs. And the Rolling Stones. And Chuck Berry. Basically, every musical artist I ever liked was a bad person. Except for Simon & Garfunkel. Simon, anyway--I'm not so sure about Garfunkel.

Sorry Imago. Sometimes those sorts of subtleties are hard to detect in texts. Point taken, my friend.

"I just don't get involved in politics," she said. "What I see now is that race relations are worse than they've been since the sixties. Crime is out of control in the Democratically-controlled inner cities. All people in power have an agenda. They're pretending to favour immigrants, or whatever. But what they really favour is votes."

Better get out, Exene!

ATCQ - Georgie Porgie

super bummed about all the exene stuff. didn't know

Brown Sugar - Rolling Stones
Custard Pie - Led Zeppelin
Elton John - Jamaican Jerk Off
Kiss - It's a tie between Christine Sixteen & Plaster Caster
Sweet - Wig Wam Bam (musically it's such a jam but...jeez)

Only Women Bleed - Alice Cooper -- I know this is sincere and actually a nice ballad but the title/chorus just nopes me right out of the song every. single. time.

Hey! Little Child - Alex Chilton

Garfunkel killed my parents. Just to watch them die.

I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned 'Run For Your Life' or 'You Can't Do That' by The Beatles yet, although it's good to see that ILM hasn't quite gone down the route of the retirement home yet.

Prince's vault track "Extraloveable" is a really great tight funk song that's totally ruined for me when he threatens to rape the object of his affection near the end of the song. He later released a different, more censored version but it was slower and lacked that punch and vitality that was the hallmark of his early years.

marianne faithfull - why d'ya do it

There's also the Squeeze song 'It's So Dirty', and the language used towards women in that song is outrageous and even Chris Difford thinks so these days - but for him that song was taking the general language used by the people he was hanging out with in pubs and documenting it in song. You may not like how women are referred to in that song - and I certainly fucking don't - but it happened and that's why the song was written.

I personally like the fact that some of the more awful attitudes of past eras have been written about like this, because not only does that mean that - from a historical perspective - we have a fairer reflection of those eras, but also it makes me realise just how much people and attitudes have moved on.

― more Allegro-like (Turrican), Saturday, October 7, 2017 12:01 PM (ten hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Talking of Squeeze, there's that one bit in Cool For Cats that always makes me wince:

I kiss her for the first time
And then I take her home
I'm invited in for coffee
And I give the dog a bone

i heard that song dozens of times as a kid and only now aged 30 do i realise that it wasn't actually a real dog

it was so a real dog

Sometimes hard to delineate "singer speaking as an invented character" from "lyricist speaking his or her own truest feelings."

I suspect Lennon stans will come down on the side of "Run for Your Life" as being from the point of view of an imagined monster; clues from his actual conduct may or may not change that opinion.

No one listens to "Psycho" and concludes that Elvis Costello killed a little girl with a wrench.

As in a lot of things, the middle cases are harder!

Levon Helm was not actually in the Civil War btw

I believe Neil Young has taken a lot of flak for "A Man Needs a Maid" over the years. Even John Mendelsohn, who liked the song, made mention of its "brazen(ness)" (read political incorrectness, before it had a name) in his 1972 Rolling Stone review:

"Only 'A Man Needs a Maid,' in which Neil treats his favorite theme--his inability to find and keep a lover--in a novel and arrestingly brazen (in term's of our society's accelerating consciousness of women's rights) manner, is particularly interesting..."

dunno, find Young's vulnerability in that song at odds with the subject - but get the flak

welcome back alex!

Alice in Chains - "Queen of the Rodeo"

agnostic front - public assistance

slayer - satan doesn't like it when you jack off on the seat

TSOL - Code Blue

Type O Negative - Der Untermensch

Speaking of X, Johnny Hit and Run Pauline is a tough listen even if it's meant as a sicko character study.

Foo Fighters - Big Me (we know u got a big dick Grohl don't gotta rub it in)

Aphex Twin - Windowlicker
Devo - Mongoloid

Not a Lemmon stan, whatever that is, but am sure that Run For Your Life is less about an imagined girlfriend-murdering character and more about a (quite juvenile) black humour based around some of the more questionable tropes of rock & roll - dry clowning without really questioning the underlying issue. Obvious that Lennon would feel embarrassed about it later, most people feel this way about their juvenile humour, especially when it has that personal connection to his physical violence.

hi alex in nyc!!

my first answers are "shake ya ass" and "bitch please II" but there are so many

the the : violence of truth.

i never did get a response as to why matt felt the need to use the n word.

Lots of Death in June.

If Death In June is your favourite artist you can hardly be surprised at their / his questionable ethics.

He's not my favourite artist by any means, but I still have a lot of time for the early stuff when he was part of the Current 93/Coil/NWW crew.

Not a Lemmon stan, whatever that is, but am sure that Run For Your Life is less about an imagined girlfriend-murdering character and more about a (quite juvenile) black humour based around some of the more questionable tropes of rock & roll - dry clowning without really questioning the underlying issue. Obvious that Lennon would feel embarrassed about it later, most people feel this way about their juvenile humour, especially when it has that personal connection to his physical violence.

― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length)

"run for your life" is the work of the lennon who, in his youth, delighted in doing physical caricatures of cripples, and was only dissuaded from same slowly and at great length.

Yes, that's what I mean, a cruel, juvenile sense of humour, which he later grew out of (not saying he was a wonderful person later on, but he stopped *this* bullshit at least, eventually.) Think RFYL is degrees more interesting than those horrible impressions though.

the older i get the more credit i'm willing to give lennon for, like, actual personal growth, which was not a necessity for him after about 1963. lennon thought mocking cripples was hilarious, eventually grew out of it and became embarassed by it... and then you have people who mock cripples when they're fucking 70 years old and get elected president anyway. lennon wasn't a wonderful person, but these days i'm not honestly convinced that humanity has much better to offer.

More early Squeeze:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqkb-UAjebg
Thankfully they grew out of this kind of thing

<i>Devo - Mongoloid</i>

Ah, good one. Totally forgot that one. Also, "Pink Pussycat" is vaguely disquieting in that capacity (though still an excellent track, to my mind).

The point upthread about the Stranglers going well out of their way to be provocative in that era is completely spot-on, but that does't necessarily absolve them, so to speak.

Oops, i've forgotten how to properly format here. It's been that long.

I can think of a few but black metal is low-hanging fruit.

Also: what's so morally objectionable about 'Windowlicker'? The French lyric 'j'aime faire des croquettes au chien', i.e. 'I like to make biscuits out of dog meat'? The video? Its prelude, perhaps, but that assumes the song is inseparable from its visual component.

'Windowlicker' is offensive UK slang for someone with Down's syndrome or a similar disability

Ah, I had no idea. My French-inflected mind automatically associated it with 'faire du lèche-vitrine, i.e. 'window-shopping'.