'Despacito' and more famous songs that were once banned

It wasn't conservative radio programmers or grandstanding politicians who banned Billie Holiday’s harrowing lament of racist brutality, written by a Jewish schoolteacher and inspired by photographs of early 20th-century lynchings. It was America that banned “Strange Fruit”—it’s a song that much of the country has agreed not to hear. Even though Holiday’s original 1939 recording sold a million copies, it succeeded despite a lack of support from her label, no airplay, and hostility from some white audiences. The spare, graphic imagery and slow, sacramental melody of “Strange Fruit” revealed the full sorrow and grief of the black experience in America, and the shame of white complicity. 

The Sex Pistols’ second single was a venomous outburst of scorn for the monarchy and middle-class propriety—and the predictably overcooked response from British broadcasters, who refused to play the song, backfired, helping to ignite London’s punk revolution in 1977. There’s even a conspiracy theory that the BBC manipulated the singles chart to prevent “God Save the Queen” from reaching No. 1—it stalled at No. 2, sandwiched between Rod Stewart’s “I Don’t Want to Talk About It/The First Cut Is the Deepest” and Kenny Rogers’ “Lucille.”

“Like a Prayer” had all the elements that had made “Like a Virgin,” “Material Girl,” and “Papa Don’t Preach” mildly provocative and wildly successful cutting-edge pop—sexed-up religious imagery, R&B and disco influences, and overt sexual messaging. “Like a Prayer” was also the ultimate MTV song. The big-budget video premiere was a major event, complete with murder, cross-burnings, a fevered religious vision, and—to the shock of many viewers—an interracial kiss. A coalition of outraged religious groups promoted a boycott of Pepsi, the sponsor of a related ad campaign, and organized massive protests of Madonna’s Like a Prayer world concert tour.

Ice-T’s Los Angeles punk-rap-metal band Body Count released its debut album in the spring of 1992, just weeks before the Rodney King riots broke out. The album’s blunt political perspective and violent lyrics were bound to cause controversy; the fact that one of the tracks was “Cop Killer” sparked one of the decade’s most memorable pop-culture political showdowns. Under pressure from politicians, parents’ groups, law-enforcement agencies, and label shareholders, Ice-T agreed to pull the album from stores and reissue it, without the inflammatory song.

Ed Sullivan told the Rolling Stones, “Either the song goes, or you go,” when the band was set to perform “Let’s Spend the Night Together” on his show in 1967. (Mick Jagger changed the lyrics to “Let’s spend some time together.”) It’s a relatively anodyne Stones song—consider “Honky Tonk Women,” “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Stray Cat Blues,” “Brown Sugar,” or anything from "Exile on Main St."—but it still generates controversy. Here in the 21st century, the Stones have dropped it from their set in two separate tours of China, at the insistence of the Chinese government.

Kitty Wells was country music’s first female superstar—and its first feminist one, too. Her breakthrough single, 1952’s “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” was a pointed riposte to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life,” a best-selling weeper piled high with chauvinist assumptions that went unnoticed until Wells pointed them out. NBC and the Grand Ole Opry both prevented Wells from performing the song on the air, but “Honky Tonk Angels” still became the first No. 1 country single by a female solo artist. 

It took the astringent British art-pop band XTC more than 10 years to make an impact in the U.S.—and when they finally did in 1987, it was with a psychedelic folk song arguing against the existence of God. “Dear God” made it into heavy rotation on MTV and in many major markets, but radio stations in the heartland either refused to play it at all or pulled it when listeners objected to the unmistakably anti-religious lyrics (“The Father, Son and Holy Ghost/Is just somebody's unholy hoax”). "They've really socked it to us in the Bible Belt,” a Geffen executive told The Los Angeles Times. “If this wasn't such a religiously oriented song, we might've had a No. 1 record.”

N.W.A. didn’t need radio airplay to break out of the L.A. underground and bring gangsta rap into the mainstream. The groundbreaking hip-hop group’s debut album "Straight Outta Compton" and its most notorious song stirred conservative politicians and police groups into a frenzy—which helped sell albums, of course (including the clean version of Compton, which excluded “Fuck tha Police.”) N.W.A. might have taken creative license with the details of their indictment of the L.A.P.D., but a series of scandals, corruption trials, and investigations in the 1990s revealed that the song was a lot closer to the truth than many people realized at the time. 

The BBC refused to play Donna Summer’s sultry disco epic—the album track is more than 16 minutes long, and full of breathy sighs and moans captured by producer Giorgio Moroder. That wasn’t enough to prevent “Love to Love You Baby” from becoming a cornerstone of the disco revolution. Interestingly, Summer banned the song herself in the 1980s, after she became a born-again Christian. The Queen of Disco and First Lady of Love dropped her steamy signature hit from live performances for more than two decades. 

The first single from Tom Petty’s solo album "Wildflowers" seems like an exercise in pleasantly laid-back, vaguely twangy roots rock—a fitting musical frame for a low-key road song about turning up the radio and lighting one up. Times were different in 1994, though, and there were two different radio edits made to the now seemingly innocuous chorus—one excised “roll” from “Let’s get to the point and roll another joint,” the other played “joint” in reverse. There’s no telling how radio and MTV would have handled the B-side, “Girl on LSD.”

Some of Loretta Lynn’s hits from the late 1960s and ’70s weren’t exactly textbook feminism—“Fist City,” “Your Squaw’s on the Warpath,” and “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man)”—but, like “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” they presented traditional country cheating songs from the perspective of an independent, empowered woman. “The Pill,” from 1975, was different—a frank and unapologetic celebration of what at the time was called women’s lib. Perhaps predictably, country radio took exception, with many stations refusing to play it. Equally predictably, the industry’s conservative response brought even more attention to the song and contributed to Lynn’s breakthrough to national mainstream stardom. 

Fifty years later, it’s hard to imagine Irish singer-songwriter Van Morrison’s faux calypso ditty as anything more than a sweet elegy to teenage romance—it feels like juvenilia compared to the modern mysticism that would emerge on "Astral Weeks" and "Moondance." At the time, however, the line “making love in the green grass” was a significant enough source of consternation that radio stations replaced it with a repeat of “laughin’ and a-runnin’, hey hey” from a previous verse. (The song might run up against more contemporary standards of taste if Morrison had kept the original title, “Brown Skinned Girl.” Yikes!)

There are three different versions of this dark modern cheating drama, each suggesting higher stakes: the version on Brooks’ 1990 album "No Fences," about a man who’s caught cheating; the full version, which Brooks performs in concert and includes a third verse about the wife’s violent revenge; and the music video, which adds the detail that the cheater is also a domestic abuser (and ends with him being shot). It’s this last version that prompted the country-music video stations CMT and TNN to drop the video from rotation, even though anti-domestic violence organizations had praised it. 

It’s not the song—a cover of a minor hit by the Australian glam band the Skyhooks—that caused trouble for Iron Maiden. It was the cover to the 1980 single, which featured an illustration of Margaret Thatcher in military fatigues and holding a submachine gun, stalking the band’s zombie mascot Eddie. (That image was the follow-up to the even more controversial cover to Maiden’s “Sanctuary” single, which depicted Eddie holding a knife and crouching over Thatcher’s corpse.) The “Sanctuary” image was described as “horrific” by a London tabloid; the “Women in Uniform” one prompted a demonstration against the band outside one of its first major concerts. 

It’s not hard to see why the most outrageous band of the Sunset Strip’s outrageous ’80s metal scene chose this as their first single—a title like that guaranteed notoriety, a precious commodity in the era of the PMRC, the Satanic Panic, and the Moral Majority. Capitol Records cut “Animal” from Blackie Lawless and company’s debut album in 1984, but W.A.S.P. released it on an independent label that same year. The cover image—a close-up shot of a bloody codpiece with a buzz saw—confirmed that Capitol probably made the right decision. 

The Venice Beach skate-punk band’s first album was made up almost entirely of songs that could have been controversial, if more people had been aware of their existence. Rumor has it that “I Shot the Devil” was originally titled “I Shot Reagan,” until the FBI approached the label and requested an edit. The title on the album cover was changed, but it’s still “I Shot Reagan” on the lyrics sheet—Suicidal frontman Mike Muir sings about shooting not just Reagan but John Lennon and the pope, too. 

It’s one of the most immediately recognizable rock ’n’ roll hits. It’s also been the subject of some world-class silly speculation—perhaps only the conspiracy theory that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” contains a Satanic message rivals the three-year FBI investigation into the possibility that the lyrics of “Louie Louie” are pornographic. It got so bad that the governor of Indiana at the time banned the song from the entire state. 

The definitive Motor City madmen recorded their debut proto-punk album live in their hometown in 1968, a year after Detroit had been ravaged by the 12th Street riots. Introducing the title track, a call to radical political action, Rob Tyner exhorts the audience to “kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” Elektra abruptly dropped the band when a local department store refused to sell the record.

Proof that politics isn’t necessarily an even playing field in the United States—“Eve of Destruction,” a 1965 folk-rock plea to world leaders to please not blow the planet to smithereens, was considered too political for some radio programmers. At least one station claimed the song provided aid and comfort to the enemy.

One of the most profound protest songs of the Vietnam era, with David Crosby’s ringing guitar riff and the haunting harmony bridge (“Four dead in Ohio”), Neil Young’s campus anthem was released just weeks after the National Guard killed four students during a protest at Kent State University in 1970. The song also illustrated the stark cultural divides in the country at the time—the youth movement and the establishment, those for military escalation in Southeast Asia and those against it. Even radio frequencies were split—mainstream AM radio stations refused to play “Ohio,” but it was picked up by noncommercial FM stations and became a surprise hit single.