Rate Your Music score: 3.48 out of 5!
Remember this "dirty" song by the Cars bassist?
Seriously, our local intelligentsia - or rather, stupidsia - thought this song was the filthiest thing ever recorded. You'd think we would have had a lot of laughs at their expense over that, but they had lots of power, and it wasn't so funny.
I had a teacher in 8th grade who actually went on a big crusade against this song. One day, she was haranguing the class about something, when she mentioned that she had heard this record on the radio. She was shocked that any station would broadcast such porn.
This was a school that wouldn't even maintain order in class or in the hallways. I was even hit in the head with a rock someone threw at recess, and I was once hit in the head with a Liquid Paper bottle someone threw in another class. A student also once threatened me with a razor in class. Yet the school thought it could ban a song by the Cars bassist from local airwaves!
Don't laugh. Our major radio and TV stations were so conservative that they would agree to yank a song if pushed hard enough. This is the market where our ABC affiliate refused to air New Year's Rockin' Eve for several years.
Our school also crusaded against a video store that rented out (gasp!) R-rated movies.
All of this is like in the 1990s when some busybodies purchased the rights to some songs they thought were too suggestive - even though they were actually pretty tame - and relicensed them under SESAC so radio stations couldn't play them. Most stations paid only ASCAP and BMI fees, not SESAC. A radio station in Pittsburgh got in trouble for playing some of this music without realizing it was under SESAC.
What my school did was Taliban-level stuff. But now - in the 2020s - censorship like this is essentially the norm.
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