Meanwhile, the art of innuendo was alive and well, and some of the best examples can be found in reggae. But, perversely enough, other lines in the song made their record label nervous: the line about “giving head to Steve McQueen” nearly got cut before McQueen himself gave it the go-ahead, while the line “I bet you keep your p_y clean” still fell afoul of music censorship in the US, where it was covered up by a Jagger overdub that has since been removed from all CD versions. That same year, The Rolling Stones stomped all over the taboo in “Star Star.” While not the first rock song to include the F-word, it certainly featured it the most times.
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Then, of course, Carlin’s full routine hit vinyl in 1972. But within a year, the expletive in question appeared on a number of mainstream albums, including the Woodstock soundtrack, Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers and The Who’s Live At Leeds, where it was widely overlooked since Roger Daltrey’s bit of London slang on “Young Man’s Blues” was undetected by American ears. The word “f_k” never made vinyl until David Peel & The Lower East Side’s 1968 hippie classic “Up Against the Wall.” Not that an album called Have A Marijuana was going to get much airplay anyway. Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg’s ‘Je T’Aime… Moi Non Plus’ proved too hot for America in 1969, but The Chakachas ‘Jungle Fever’ broke the taboo just a year later, as did “Pillow Talk” by Sylvia Robinson, the same woman who’d make history as the founder and owner of Sugar Hill Records.įor the most part, the seven dirtiest words (the ones George Carlin claimed you couldn’t say on television) still weren’t allowed on disc until the end of the 60s. Songs with erotic noises are an art in themselves. A hit single about delaying sex till marriage to avoid pregnancy? Sure, if you could say it as artfully as The Supremes did in “Love Child.” An honest-to-God Top 20 hit about the sex and drug predilections of the Andy Warhol crowd? Thank you, Lou Reed, for “Walk On The Wild Side.” Music censorship relaxed a little bit in the 60s and 70s, as long as you didn’t say things too blatantly. The phallic reference is eyebrow-raising enough, but the second line practically admits that the girl was underage. The censors who kept Elvis from shaking his hips on television would have really flipped out if they knew their kids owned a record featuring the lyric “I’m like a one-eyed cat peepin’ in a seafood store/I can look at you till you ain’t no child no more”. But the filthiest double entendre to hit teenage ears in the early rock’n’roll era had to be the one in Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle And Roll,” covered by Bill Haley and then Elvis Presley. Sometimes those songs were playful, like Dave Bartholomew’s “My Ding-A-Ling,” the same song that Chuck Berry had a hit within 1972 (though Chuck always claimed he wrote it). It didn’t take Freud to figure out what John Lee Hooker’s “Crawlin’ King Snake” or Bessie Smith’s “I Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl” were all about. It didn’t stand a chance of getting released during an era when music censorship was at its height, but it does give you a taste of the kind of talk Morton heard while working in the Storyville brothels of New Orleans’ red-light district.Īs long as you didn’t say the words, you could sneak any number of double entendres onto a classic blues record. (Fortunately, someone had the foresight to roll tape so it could be issued on CD decades later.) Ditto a performance the likes of Jelly Roll Morton’s “Murder Ballad,” a tale so long and depraved that it takes up seven sides of an acetate. But nobody could put that on a record in the 30s.
Remember what that dead man did in The Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up”? Bogan says she’s the one that made him do it.