Popular music is about, guess what, popular things, issues that matter to people. To slip past the powers that be, you need to speak in code, and if they’re not hip to the dots and dashes it’s just an awful racket. The illicit, the improper, the controversial and even the downright dirty sneaks in under the radar and before you know it everyone’s talking about rock’n’roll and swing as if they weren’t once slang expressions for sex. It’s an eternal game of cultural Whac-A-Mole; stamp it out here, it pops up there, middle finger raised, and as this playlist shows, despite the best efforts of The Man, aging busybodies and self-appointed censors, the music triumphs and endures.
The most common bans usually concern the most popular musical subject matter – the ancient art of the horizontal boogie. Back in the innocent days of 1960, , written by teenage newlyweds Carole King and Gerry Goffin and recorded by The Shirelles got itself banned for edgy lyrics like “Is this a lasting treasure, or just a moment’s pleasure?”. It might also have been the first record to turn notoriety into sales as the controversy made The Shirelles the first black all-female group to
