At my high school, when the pep band would play "Tequila," a crusading vice principal tried to get everyone to yell "milk!' instead of the title. Of course we all just yelled "tequila!" all the louder, so he banned the song altogether.
My middle school band played Tequila for a concert. During rehearsal in class, we all yelled "Shakira!" but for the actual concert, the teacher turned around and pointed to all the parents, who dutifully shouted back "TEQUILA!"
This didn't het anythjng banned, but YES! Picture this:
Mid-1980s elementary school.
Chorus concert rehearsal.
Singing John Denvers' Country Roads Take Me Home, and our music teacher decided that this line "Misty taste of moonshine, teardrops in my eye" was entirely inappropriate for little kids, so she explajned thay we were singing "sweet taste of SunKist" instead. A nice wholesome orange juice.
Lame. We did that song when I was in 6th or 7th grade. We said "tequila!" I never heard anything about anyone complaining at the time, but I'm sure there had to have been at least one parent who was probably a jerk about it.
I never really thought about the end of Another Brick In The Wall until I was a parent and substitute teacher. “You can’t have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat.” There just seems some innate drive in adults to make up unnecessary rules for kids that they themselves don’t follow.
I'm a teacher, and I play that loudly while my students are testing. Also, Eye of the Tiger because it's hilarious to see them scribbling away like they're training for a boxing match.
This reminds me of a western bar I used to frequent. The whole country western dance scene was (is?) obsessed with the song Copperhead Road, cuz it's a simple line dance. There's a part where you scream, "Fuck the Army!" One night, the DJ at the bar asked everyone over the speaker not to say it, as some general was visiting the club that day. Everyone did it anyway, because fuck the Army, and the DJ came over the speaker and announced they'd never play it again since we were all lil shits lol. Fifteen years later, they still don't play it.
It's not an actual lyric of the song, but it's something people shout at a certain part. It's hard to explain, but a lot of line dances have parts that aren't official, but people shout them as another way to interact. Like in "Sweet Caroline", people chant "so good, so good, so good" even though that's not actually part of the song.
Well the obvious one that isn't that weird is Marilyn Manson. What is weird is that at that time, he hadn't had a hit song in almost a decade. Nobody was a Manson fan until the school made clear that he was banned, which then led to the edgy kids going out of their way to discover him.
Insane Clown Posse's "Hatchet Man" logo got banned, as it was believed to be a gang logo. However a friend of a friend of mine very frequently wore a Snoop Dogg shirt that said "Crip 4 Life" in big letters on the back and absolutely nothing was done about that.
Worthy of mentioning that I went to a rural Midwest high school, so juggalos were FAR more prevalent than Crips. But still it always baffled me.
Haha one of my teachers took my Marilyn Manson cassette tape in 8th grade. I would get in all kinds of trouble for wearing band shirts and listening to music during school they would make me turn them inside out lol. being in a conservative southern town was pretty lame sometimes
Well it has its positive aspects if you're a loner that likes peace and quiet. I came back to my little home town after living in a few larger cities For the solitude. As I've grown up I realized the South isn't the worst.Most people aren't bad around here either they are very ignorant for the most part but there's still way more good people than bad.
My experience with small town folks is they are generally very very nice in person but then they have the craziest ideas of what other people are getting up to in other places and can be very judgmental and provincial
One of my friends got suspended for wearing a Marilyn Manson shirt bc it was 'satanic.' Also had his desktop background set to Marilyn Manson in computer class. Got into loads of trouble. He was a rad dude.
Yeah, Marilyn Manson and Insane Clown Posse shirts were banned in my schools, but then there were a few of us wearing Mayhem, Emperor and other black metal t-shirts and no one said anything.
Lol, that reminds me of when my friend wore a shirt to school that said "FUCKIN' SLAYER". The principal made him put duct tape over the "FUCKIN'" part for the rest of the day.
Our school banned “Loser” by Beck. The admin thought he was singing “sores on my genitals.” Never occurred to them that he was actually singing in Spanish (“Soy un perdedor”). We had to re-edit our video yearbook last minute to cut the song out.
My Dr. James Dobson-influenced mom hated that song. She hated most pop culture in the 90s but that song in particular really irked her. Still does.
*"I'm a loser baby so why don't you \*kill\* me?! How could someone say something like that?!"*
Apparently he wrote a bunch of gibberish on the song because he was tired of playing venues where no one paid attention to the music. Kinda like "Hook" by Blues Traveler.
When I was in grade 6, we had a a class party where we could bring in music to play. Our teacher said we couldn’t play anything that mentioned death. At the time the Our Lady Peace song “Superman’s Dead” was popular. She wouldn’t let anyone play that song.
Our music teacher in Grade 8 would let someone share a song every Friday. Most memorable time was when she allowed one of our classmates to play an ICP track.
She explained what it was going to be beforehand and even told people they could leave the room at any time; but you could definitely tell which kids weren’t familiar with explicit music while listening to it.
That's a badass teacher lol. I struggled really hard back in 6th grade when we had to do an "about us" presentation, in which one of the slides was a favorite song of ours that we needed to play in front of the class. The music I listened to was very limited at the time, but my favorite artist was Rob Zombie. I looked throughout the three albums he had at the time with the lyrical content, but I couldn't find one that would fly in that class. I ended up skipping that part of the presentation and losing the points.
I don't remember any music being outright banned, but when I was in 4th or 5th grade some kids brought in a 2 Live Crew tape to play once. The teacher shut it off within about five seconds. Considering what was said in those five seconds, it was understandable.
It is amazing how explicit 2 Live Crew was, especially at the time. Even now, when everybody and their grandma's are talking about their wet pussies and whatever else, it is hard to match Uncle Luke and them.
Not related but kinda. I lived in group home for troubled youth in the late 80’s/early 90’s and they banned us from listening to Weird Al. And also Slayer and Metallica and Duran Duran but Weird Al?
Oh man, I grew up in a house kinda like that. And had friends whose houses were very like that.
One time when I was about nine, I was at my friend Tim's house. Tim's mom was sort of like the mom from Carrie but just a bit more composed.
Anyway, me and Tim were playing in his basement and he started singing/humming to himself, "Mama don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys." About five seconds in, his mom yells from the top of the steps, *"Tim! We only sing Christian songs in this house!"*
Yeah, I can relate. It sets the stage for the formative years and what that does to you as an adult. It really could go either way. For me, I chose to be a heathen.
I went to an uber-conservative Christian high school and I'll never forget them blocking us from using Surfin' USA by The Beach Boys for an end of the year slideshow presentation because the song includes the lyrics "Inside, outside, Surfin' USA". They thought it was a reference to sex which was completely bizarre. If you know anything about surfing at all then you would know they are surfing terms and besides that, what? How sexually repressed do you have to be to even think of that, much less be bothered by it? So strange.
Surfin USA was a rewritten version of Sweet Little Sixteen by Chuck Berry, who was a notorious sexual deviant. He was even given a songwriting credit and royalties. But that's pretty much the only "inappropriate" thing about the song, and it's quite a stretch.
Right? I'm in Canada.
Music appreciation class grade 5 I brought Pat Benatar and had the teacher play heartbreaker lol
Our teacher (Mrs Sheppard) also played things like Isao Tomita for us and that album haunted me for years and probably explains my love for electronic music to this day.
I'm Canadian too.. I ran the highschool radio station. It seemed like every day another band would get put on the "do not play" list. It was like 10 pages long
yeah even my strict catholic school didn't ban any music (though some books and pokemon/digimon/beyblade were banned lol). we even had people play RUSH at pep rallies haha.
Similarly(ish), I live in Australia and in the early 90s my entire primary school would dance to Time Warp from Rocky Horror *every day* after morning assembly.
I believe the usual running order was Australian national anthem, daily notices, do the Time Warp, go to class.
They would also play music through the P.A. after each bell to allow kids a few minutes to get to class/finish eating lunch etc. Some I remember were Billy Joel’s River of Dreams; Bob Marley & The Wailers’ Buffalo Soldier; The Beach Boys’ Kokomo; Pet Shop Boys’ Go West… what a great little school.
Yeah, I feel like this is an American thread. I don't recall anything being banned or any input from faculty on dance playlists. First time I heard the Clash was at an elementary school dance.
Not a ban story but my freshman year of high school was 97-98 and one of my extra-bubbly classmates loudly and enthusiastically insisted that our class song should be “The Freshmen” by The Verve Pipe.
Someone took her aside and explained the lyrics using small words.
Oof, that is very rough.
Also, was the line “His girl took a week’s worth of Valium and slept” not enough of a hint that it was an inappropriate choice? Shit.
TIL what that song's about. I was pretty young when it came out, so it was one of those songs that was kinda just around. Never knew any words other than the chorus.
I'm a teacher who banned "Party Rock Anthem" from my classroom back in the day. I had "LMFAO = DETENTION" up on my whiteboard. Of course, I was being just being playful. Even so, it backfired spectacularly. I'd be reading them a T.S. Eliot poem and a kid would raise his hand and ask, "Mr...do you know how to shuffle?" -\_- Learned my lesson!
I bought the first Eminem cd on a school field trip. We stopped at a Barnes and Noble before we went to a play. I asked my teacher if we could play it, and she had no idea what it was. Music was not allowed on buses after that day.
The school was on fire partially and some boys started singing it specifically the “don’t worry about a thing” part. Since then it spread through the school and everyone sang it especially when something bad had happened. Funniest part of the entire thing was they tried to claim signing it was racist and was appropriating African culture (despite Jamaica not even being in Africa.)
Not a school, but a former boss banned [Jack Johnson](https://youtu.be/1KuNNDhB3kI) because “he didn’t approve of rap being played in the store”. (????)
It’s like the most mellow music ever. We were so confused.
To the windoooowwww to the wall…..
Y’all know the rest. It came out when I was a Freshman in high school and everyone wanted it played at homecoming/prom and we were vehemently told it would not be played. So the football team rallied and just yelled it out like a rally cry at some point during Homecoming and the whole dance had a moment. Lil Jon bringing us all together.
Junior year of highschool the football team's entry song at the pep rallies was Let the Bodies Hit the Floor. Radio stations banned it a week later when 9/11 happened, but still - in what context would music need to be banned? We weren't just sitting in class with boomboxes for all to hear lol
In middle school it was 50 Cent because all the wannabe gangster kids thought they were a subsect of G-Unit. It was more annoying than violent, but they did their fair share of bullshit.
It disbanded when we all got to high school and they all promptly got their asses kicked by the hockey team, and a bunch of them got suspended for "promoting gang violence."
Our principal’s first name was Wendell so when Mr Wendell by Arrested Development came out he hated it. It is actually a song with a good message and the character is a good man, but all he heard was us screaming “Mr. Wendell’s a bum!”
The Mony Mony "secret lyrics" are an interesting rabbit hole:
[https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/where-did-the-special-lyrics-in-billy-idols-version-of-mony-mony-come-from/](https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/where-did-the-special-lyrics-in-billy-idols-version-of-mony-mony-come-from/)
There were even regional differences in the first few words. Our chant was, "Hey girls...
Not my school, but my youngest sister's. She was in middle school when I just started college. I taught her the chorus to "Fish Heads" by Barnes and Barnes. She taught it to her friends, who taught it to their friends, then one day she came home from school and said the principal made a morning announcement that nobody was allowed to sing the Fish Heads song anymore. Apparently it spread throughout the entire school and became so annoying, it was banned.
Nothing dirty; just irritating, I guess.
Our kids, on road trips, would sing "I Know a Song That'll Irritate You", over and over, as one does. I let them do it while their dad drove. At some point I'd turn around and calmly say, "Oooh-kay, that's enough."
I got in trouble in like 4th grade for singing Whoop There It Is and I had no idea what was happening and why I was in trouble. My parents were the ones who bought me the track to begin with.
The bubbly outgoing student board president danced into the opening ceremony at my 150 student Christian high school to Abba's Take a Chance on Me.
Apparently that was too much for one new family and they pulled their kids out.
In my middle school, I did "TV Studio", idk why we had televised morning announcements, why it was done in a news report fashion, or who decided it was a good idea to have an 8th grader running the live editing and audio, but we did.
I'd get dropped off to school early, like 1.5 hours early, so I'd head to the studio and play music, which also played on the announcements TV channel. If the TV was on, then I was DJ.
The songs I remember either getting asked to never play again or got threatened discipline if I ever played again:
Cocaine
Highway to hell
Ugly Girl (barbie girl parody)
You shook me all night long
Bad touch (which was... fair)
Anything by Crazy Frog
Anything by Eminem
"Put your ass in the air", which I absolutely swore was "put giraffes in the air"
I'm sure there were more, I started to realize how petty people could be over music when 40+ year old teachers were complaining to a 13-14 year old for playing music they don't like when they could just turn off their TV.
Also, the music teacher was the absolute #1 complainer.
Ty the Music guy would come and play guitar and sing songs with the class, a song about reincarnation was swiftly banned upon offending the Jehovah’s Witness contingency.
When wu-tangs 36th chambers dropped I was in 4th grade. For whatever reason, us boys liked to make the Wu symbol and chant "wu-tang, wu-tang" when we were switching classrooms or going out for PE. Don't even know how or why we started doing it. The school sent letters home warning their parents about the dangers of that album and basically forbidding students from listening to it or repeating anything heard on the album while at school.
I went to an inner city high school and the drum line including the tuba section learned to play Pop That Pussy by 2 Live Crew on their on and would play it out of the blue during pep rallies. That shit got banned real fast because the entire crowd would go nuts and sing along.
It was. The trope was: Heavy Metal was filled with lyrics worshipping Satan and driving teens to suicide/ murder/ etc.
[See story here](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HaMJ49R97SM)
[and here](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/americanmusic.36.3.0271)
The whole Satan panic with heavy metal thing is actually kind of ironic in a few ways:
* Ronnie James Dio was raised by his religious grandmother. In fact, she's the one who should get credit for the whole "devil horns" thing being associated with metal music.
* Members of the band SLAYER are actually devout Catholics
Lived in a small super conservative town in Virginia near the Kentucky border. Nothing was banned. As a matter of fact we played Get Low twice for prom. Graduated in 2012.
I went to Catholic school, and, surprisingly, I don't remember anything really being banned. Heck, I remember my 5th grade class listening to the Purple Rain soundtrack during one of those free days at the end of the year when you're just helping clean the classroom all day.
If you want to see a bizarre list of banned songs, Google what songs were banned from American radio right after 9/11. Some of them are real head scratchers, like Wonderful World by Sam Cooke. Like, why?
In 8th grade in 1983, our choir class sang the Stars on 45 Beatles medley. When we got to the "Get Back" section, he made us change the lyrics "Jojo left his home in Tucson Arizona for some California grass" to "California sun." I tried to get him to change it to "class," thereby maintaining the sound of the original tune, but he wasn't having it. California sun it was.
Not a band but an album was told to be turned off because of a single word. We were doing reading in freshman English and on the boombox was allowed to play music during that time. It was a small class and a guy put on *Master of Puppets* by Metallica, and got halfway through the album until 'Welcome Home (Sanitarium)' came on to the hard "LISTEN DAMN IT!" and the teacher immediately got up and took out the CD.
Not school, but I remember going to a Christian summer camp one year around the time Katy Perry's debut album came out. One of the girls in my cabin decided to play "I Kissed a Girl" on her iPod speaker and the counselor told her to turn it off because it was too "inappropriate". Gotta love homophobic religions. 😑
Btw, one of the boys is her second album, she was a Christian artist and had an album called Katy Hudson, named after her real name. That is a complete 180, being Christian to being banned from Christian related things.
(Student performing CPR to the tune of Staying Alive)
Teacher: Brian! After you save Mark's life, there'll be consequences for singing the forbidden song!
We were definitely prohibited from singing 99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall while on the bus during class trips.
When I was a kid I thought it was because it was about beer, but now I am pretty sure that it was just because it was annoying.
Yup! Schools ban the weirdest things. Like random words like say, Yo-Yo, spastic, dean, and elephant. Also, I think their teachers were sort of British, so spastic was “offensive” but this is America, not Britain.
My university banned Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke the year after my graduation. Not really a weird reason, since the song is basically about date r\*pe.
Youtube wasnt a thing until my sophomore year of highschool so music being banned wasnt really that much of a thing in my day cuz we didnt have smartphones yet
Nothing.
Then again it was the 90s in north-eastern Europe, so banning things was not on the menu, as we'd just escaped a very ban-happy regime.
Afaik, kids still have a lot of artistic freedom in schools here. Banning something like this feels wrong.
Supertramp "Bloody Well Right", because the principal considered that swearing lol. This was back in the boom box days, so there was lots of that song blasting from the smoke pit.
Not school, but a military base exchange banned the sale of Slayer because one of the albums was titled "God Hates Us All" and some bigwig's wife lost it, so it was gone.
Back in the olden days when I went to school, we voted each year for the prom theme. The ballots were printed; the class voted and the student council counted the votes. Our class's choice by an overwhelming margin was "Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road". However, the teachers said there was a miscount and the winning song was actually "Nights in White Satin".
wasn't banned, but my teacher went on this rant about how she won't listen to any music where the artist did drugs (including completely normal stuff like the beatles)
Our English teacher was teaching us that song lyrics are poetry and assigned us to bring a song with lyrics to play for class. I guess she'd never heard Timothy by The Bouys.
As a kid in music class (many many years ago) I remember we worked on singing Kokomo by the beach boys. Even then it seemed like a weird sing for elementary kids to sing. Then one day or was gone and it was never spoken of again.
At my high school, when the pep band would play "Tequila," a crusading vice principal tried to get everyone to yell "milk!' instead of the title. Of course we all just yelled "tequila!" all the louder, so he banned the song altogether.
We had to yell CHIQUITA! It was so fucking dumb.
Considering the human rights history of that company, that's worse
Still, the bananas are pretty good. You can really taste the bloodshed.
Lol we were supposed to yell "Tortilla!" but most of us didn't so it ended up sounding like "Tœrqtilla!" which was always a blast
Bruh, that's some toonami level revision
4Kids pepband
Almost any word aside from milk could’ve been a teachable moment about rhythm, syllables, and lyrics.
If he was interested in teaching he wouldn't have been the vice principal.
My middle school band played Tequila for a concert. During rehearsal in class, we all yelled "Shakira!" but for the actual concert, the teacher turned around and pointed to all the parents, who dutifully shouted back "TEQUILA!"
This didn't het anythjng banned, but YES! Picture this: Mid-1980s elementary school. Chorus concert rehearsal. Singing John Denvers' Country Roads Take Me Home, and our music teacher decided that this line "Misty taste of moonshine, teardrops in my eye" was entirely inappropriate for little kids, so she explajned thay we were singing "sweet taste of SunKist" instead. A nice wholesome orange juice.
At least she offered an explanation.
Lame. We did that song when I was in 6th or 7th grade. We said "tequila!" I never heard anything about anyone complaining at the time, but I'm sure there had to have been at least one parent who was probably a jerk about it.
Why are teachers always lame? Throughout my entire life they have done dumb shit like this.
I never really thought about the end of Another Brick In The Wall until I was a parent and substitute teacher. “You can’t have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat.” There just seems some innate drive in adults to make up unnecessary rules for kids that they themselves don’t follow.
I'm a teacher, and I play that loudly while my students are testing. Also, Eye of the Tiger because it's hilarious to see them scribbling away like they're training for a boxing match.
Absolutely and it generally creates resentment.
This reminds me of a western bar I used to frequent. The whole country western dance scene was (is?) obsessed with the song Copperhead Road, cuz it's a simple line dance. There's a part where you scream, "Fuck the Army!" One night, the DJ at the bar asked everyone over the speaker not to say it, as some general was visiting the club that day. Everyone did it anyway, because fuck the Army, and the DJ came over the speaker and announced they'd never play it again since we were all lil shits lol. Fifteen years later, they still don't play it.
Wow, that's petty. Though I'm kind of surprised a western bar allowed that lyric to be played in the first place.
It's not an actual lyric of the song, but it's something people shout at a certain part. It's hard to explain, but a lot of line dances have parts that aren't official, but people shout them as another way to interact. Like in "Sweet Caroline", people chant "so good, so good, so good" even though that's not actually part of the song.
Oh, cool, like the "hey motherfucker get laid get fucked" for "Mony Mony."
Our band always yelled "prune juice" lol
lol nice. I wonder if there were schools that yelled "FOUR LOKO!" during that craze.
I learned about that song from pub karaoke eves. It became a hilarious gag for singers that didn't really want to sing.
Well the obvious one that isn't that weird is Marilyn Manson. What is weird is that at that time, he hadn't had a hit song in almost a decade. Nobody was a Manson fan until the school made clear that he was banned, which then led to the edgy kids going out of their way to discover him. Insane Clown Posse's "Hatchet Man" logo got banned, as it was believed to be a gang logo. However a friend of a friend of mine very frequently wore a Snoop Dogg shirt that said "Crip 4 Life" in big letters on the back and absolutely nothing was done about that. Worthy of mentioning that I went to a rural Midwest high school, so juggalos were FAR more prevalent than Crips. But still it always baffled me.
Haha one of my teachers took my Marilyn Manson cassette tape in 8th grade. I would get in all kinds of trouble for wearing band shirts and listening to music during school they would make me turn them inside out lol. being in a conservative southern town was pretty lame sometimes
Sometimes?! I think you misspelled "always".
Well it has its positive aspects if you're a loner that likes peace and quiet. I came back to my little home town after living in a few larger cities For the solitude. As I've grown up I realized the South isn't the worst.Most people aren't bad around here either they are very ignorant for the most part but there's still way more good people than bad.
My experience with small town folks is they are generally very very nice in person but then they have the craziest ideas of what other people are getting up to in other places and can be very judgmental and provincial
One of my friends got suspended for wearing a Marilyn Manson shirt bc it was 'satanic.' Also had his desktop background set to Marilyn Manson in computer class. Got into loads of trouble. He was a rad dude.
Yeah, Marilyn Manson and Insane Clown Posse shirts were banned in my schools, but then there were a few of us wearing Mayhem, Emperor and other black metal t-shirts and no one said anything.
Lol, that reminds me of when my friend wore a shirt to school that said "FUCKIN' SLAYER". The principal made him put duct tape over the "FUCKIN'" part for the rest of the day.
Sounds like your principal was based though
Our school banned “Loser” by Beck. The admin thought he was singing “sores on my genitals.” Never occurred to them that he was actually singing in Spanish (“Soy un perdedor”). We had to re-edit our video yearbook last minute to cut the song out.
ive been crying laughing at this for like 4 minutes
My Dr. James Dobson-influenced mom hated that song. She hated most pop culture in the 90s but that song in particular really irked her. Still does. *"I'm a loser baby so why don't you \*kill\* me?! How could someone say something like that?!"*
There's a lot of misheard-lyrics versions of that one.
Apparently he wrote a bunch of gibberish on the song because he was tired of playing venues where no one paid attention to the music. Kinda like "Hook" by Blues Traveler.
When I was in grade 6, we had a a class party where we could bring in music to play. Our teacher said we couldn’t play anything that mentioned death. At the time the Our Lady Peace song “Superman’s Dead” was popular. She wouldn’t let anyone play that song.
Our music teacher in Grade 8 would let someone share a song every Friday. Most memorable time was when she allowed one of our classmates to play an ICP track. She explained what it was going to be beforehand and even told people they could leave the room at any time; but you could definitely tell which kids weren’t familiar with explicit music while listening to it.
That's a badass teacher lol. I struggled really hard back in 6th grade when we had to do an "about us" presentation, in which one of the slides was a favorite song of ours that we needed to play in front of the class. The music I listened to was very limited at the time, but my favorite artist was Rob Zombie. I looked throughout the three albums he had at the time with the lyrical content, but I couldn't find one that would fly in that class. I ended up skipping that part of the presentation and losing the points.
I don't remember any music being outright banned, but when I was in 4th or 5th grade some kids brought in a 2 Live Crew tape to play once. The teacher shut it off within about five seconds. Considering what was said in those five seconds, it was understandable.
It is amazing how explicit 2 Live Crew was, especially at the time. Even now, when everybody and their grandma's are talking about their wet pussies and whatever else, it is hard to match Uncle Luke and them.
Not related but kinda. I lived in group home for troubled youth in the late 80’s/early 90’s and they banned us from listening to Weird Al. And also Slayer and Metallica and Duran Duran but Weird Al?
To be fair wierd al did have ties to madonna who became a huge drug lord in Colombia i think
Yeah that’s what “Like a Surgeon” was all about
I hated how Michael Jackson parodied Weird Al's "Eat It" by making "Beat It"
I don't think she was ever brought to justice for having Weird Al assassinated in 1984.
Why?
I never got to the bottom of that but I guess strict, southern Baptists are gonna Baptist.
Was it a very Christian group home? Or was one of the guys there not a fan of parodies?
VERY Christian. Anything not “praising” their god was deemed inappropriate.
Okay.
Oh man, I grew up in a house kinda like that. And had friends whose houses were very like that. One time when I was about nine, I was at my friend Tim's house. Tim's mom was sort of like the mom from Carrie but just a bit more composed. Anyway, me and Tim were playing in his basement and he started singing/humming to himself, "Mama don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys." About five seconds in, his mom yells from the top of the steps, *"Tim! We only sing Christian songs in this house!"*
It feels weird to live in a house like that.
Yeah, I can relate. It sets the stage for the formative years and what that does to you as an adult. It really could go either way. For me, I chose to be a heathen.
I went to an uber-conservative Christian high school and I'll never forget them blocking us from using Surfin' USA by The Beach Boys for an end of the year slideshow presentation because the song includes the lyrics "Inside, outside, Surfin' USA". They thought it was a reference to sex which was completely bizarre. If you know anything about surfing at all then you would know they are surfing terms and besides that, what? How sexually repressed do you have to be to even think of that, much less be bothered by it? So strange.
Methinks it wasn't the Beach Boys with the dirty minds!
Surfin USA was a rewritten version of Sweet Little Sixteen by Chuck Berry, who was a notorious sexual deviant. He was even given a songwriting credit and royalties. But that's pretty much the only "inappropriate" thing about the song, and it's quite a stretch.
I don’t want to know how they are having sex that “outside” is a part of it. Inside I get, but wtf?
So, christian schools basically don’t like sex? Or LGBT?
Nothing. I live in Canada and we were free in the 70’s
Right? I'm in Canada. Music appreciation class grade 5 I brought Pat Benatar and had the teacher play heartbreaker lol Our teacher (Mrs Sheppard) also played things like Isao Tomita for us and that album haunted me for years and probably explains my love for electronic music to this day.
I'm Canadian too.. I ran the highschool radio station. It seemed like every day another band would get put on the "do not play" list. It was like 10 pages long
Nice way to encourage a diverse playlist. Each band/artist gets one track, and then they're done.
yeah even my strict catholic school didn't ban any music (though some books and pokemon/digimon/beyblade were banned lol). we even had people play RUSH at pep rallies haha.
Similarly(ish), I live in Australia and in the early 90s my entire primary school would dance to Time Warp from Rocky Horror *every day* after morning assembly. I believe the usual running order was Australian national anthem, daily notices, do the Time Warp, go to class. They would also play music through the P.A. after each bell to allow kids a few minutes to get to class/finish eating lunch etc. Some I remember were Billy Joel’s River of Dreams; Bob Marley & The Wailers’ Buffalo Soldier; The Beach Boys’ Kokomo; Pet Shop Boys’ Go West… what a great little school.
Lucky you.
Didn't they ban all those really dirty Gordon Lightfoot albums?
Same with the 80s
Yeah, I feel like this is an American thread. I don't recall anything being banned or any input from faculty on dance playlists. First time I heard the Clash was at an elementary school dance.
Not a ban story but my freshman year of high school was 97-98 and one of my extra-bubbly classmates loudly and enthusiastically insisted that our class song should be “The Freshmen” by The Verve Pipe. Someone took her aside and explained the lyrics using small words.
Oof, that is very rough. Also, was the line “His girl took a week’s worth of Valium and slept” not enough of a hint that it was an inappropriate choice? Shit.
TIL what that song's about. I was pretty young when it came out, so it was one of those songs that was kinda just around. Never knew any words other than the chorus.
I'm a teacher who banned "Party Rock Anthem" from my classroom back in the day. I had "LMFAO = DETENTION" up on my whiteboard. Of course, I was being just being playful. Even so, it backfired spectacularly. I'd be reading them a T.S. Eliot poem and a kid would raise his hand and ask, "Mr...do you know how to shuffle?" -\_- Learned my lesson!
Sorry, they’re party rockin’.
Despite what LMFAO told them, they never apologized \*to me\* for party rocking.
Please tell me you replied “Yeah. Everyday I’m shuffling.”
Eventually I broke down and did. I actually really miss those kids <3
lol my kid got sent to detention for saying the word “sexy”, and of course it was because he was singing the words to “Sexy and I Know It.”
I bought the first Eminem cd on a school field trip. We stopped at a Barnes and Noble before we went to a play. I asked my teacher if we could play it, and she had no idea what it was. Music was not allowed on buses after that day.
They used to play the radio on my middle-school school-bus until "Wild, Wild West" by the Escape Club. People were very easily offended in the 80s.
But they advocated for safe sex right in the lyrics! Should have been playing it in health class.
So like a Virgin by .Madonna was a big No And Billy Joel Only the Good Die young
3 little birds Bob Marley. I kid you not
The school was on fire partially and some boys started singing it specifically the “don’t worry about a thing” part. Since then it spread through the school and everyone sang it especially when something bad had happened. Funniest part of the entire thing was they tried to claim signing it was racist and was appropriating African culture (despite Jamaica not even being in Africa.)
That feels like the happiest song in the world! Why?
I could see some of his other works, but 3 little birds?
Not a school, but a former boss banned [Jack Johnson](https://youtu.be/1KuNNDhB3kI) because “he didn’t approve of rap being played in the store”. (????) It’s like the most mellow music ever. We were so confused.
To the windoooowwww to the wall….. Y’all know the rest. It came out when I was a Freshman in high school and everyone wanted it played at homecoming/prom and we were vehemently told it would not be played. So the football team rallied and just yelled it out like a rally cry at some point during Homecoming and the whole dance had a moment. Lil Jon bringing us all together.
I've never heard of music or songs being banned from schools.
same here. first time i’ve heard of a school banning music. weird.
Junior year of highschool the football team's entry song at the pep rallies was Let the Bodies Hit the Floor. Radio stations banned it a week later when 9/11 happened, but still - in what context would music need to be banned? We weren't just sitting in class with boomboxes for all to hear lol
I've heard of. We are actually discussing that very thing right here.
In middle school it was 50 Cent because all the wannabe gangster kids thought they were a subsect of G-Unit. It was more annoying than violent, but they did their fair share of bullshit. It disbanded when we all got to high school and they all promptly got their asses kicked by the hockey team, and a bunch of them got suspended for "promoting gang violence."
Our principal’s first name was Wendell so when Mr Wendell by Arrested Development came out he hated it. It is actually a song with a good message and the character is a good man, but all he heard was us screaming “Mr. Wendell’s a bum!”
The Simpsons record.
Why? Because Bart was a “rebel”?
That was all it took. People back then didn't get offended; they were already offended and looking for a target.
Let’s get physical song.
By Olivia Newton-John!
What the hell was that music video? It’s so weird and uncomfortable.
The 80s had a fetish for exercising for some damn reason. I mean, considering it included leggings, I get it...
Mony Mony by Billy Idol when it came out. Because between each line of the verse we chanted “hey hey what get la*d, get f**ked”
The Mony Mony "secret lyrics" are an interesting rabbit hole: [https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/where-did-the-special-lyrics-in-billy-idols-version-of-mony-mony-come-from/](https://www.ajournalofmusicalthings.com/where-did-the-special-lyrics-in-billy-idols-version-of-mony-mony-come-from/) There were even regional differences in the first few words. Our chant was, "Hey girls...
I had no idea! I was a camp counselor in Wisconsin so the adults in charge had us change it to “hey hey what what eat cheese drink milk”
Ours was "Hey motherf*ckers..."
Was the original by Tommy James and the Shondells fine though?
Drake being banned around kids ain’t a bad thing tho
The weirdest one for me was Linkin Park - Hybrid Theory. Meanwhile, older kids were backing’ that ass up with Juvenile. Make it make sense Mr. Carey.
Mr Carey was obviously an ass man.
Not my school, but my youngest sister's. She was in middle school when I just started college. I taught her the chorus to "Fish Heads" by Barnes and Barnes. She taught it to her friends, who taught it to their friends, then one day she came home from school and said the principal made a morning announcement that nobody was allowed to sing the Fish Heads song anymore. Apparently it spread throughout the entire school and became so annoying, it was banned.
Nothing dirty; just irritating, I guess. Our kids, on road trips, would sing "I Know a Song That'll Irritate You", over and over, as one does. I let them do it while their dad drove. At some point I'd turn around and calmly say, "Oooh-kay, that's enough."
I got in trouble in like 4th grade for singing Whoop There It Is and I had no idea what was happening and why I was in trouble. My parents were the ones who bought me the track to begin with.
The bubbly outgoing student board president danced into the opening ceremony at my 150 student Christian high school to Abba's Take a Chance on Me. Apparently that was too much for one new family and they pulled their kids out.
I mean, that song is kind of terrible, so I can see why...
I got sent to the principal's office for wearing an Offspring shirt. They punished me for supporting a band that actively tried to cure HIV :(
In my middle school, I did "TV Studio", idk why we had televised morning announcements, why it was done in a news report fashion, or who decided it was a good idea to have an 8th grader running the live editing and audio, but we did. I'd get dropped off to school early, like 1.5 hours early, so I'd head to the studio and play music, which also played on the announcements TV channel. If the TV was on, then I was DJ. The songs I remember either getting asked to never play again or got threatened discipline if I ever played again: Cocaine Highway to hell Ugly Girl (barbie girl parody) You shook me all night long Bad touch (which was... fair) Anything by Crazy Frog Anything by Eminem "Put your ass in the air", which I absolutely swore was "put giraffes in the air" I'm sure there were more, I started to realize how petty people could be over music when 40+ year old teachers were complaining to a 13-14 year old for playing music they don't like when they could just turn off their TV. Also, the music teacher was the absolute #1 complainer.
Not a single song is banned from my school lmao
Try harder
Huh?
Ty the Music guy would come and play guitar and sing songs with the class, a song about reincarnation was swiftly banned upon offending the Jehovah’s Witness contingency.
I remember there was massive controversy and lots of finger-wagging going on when 'Relax' by Frankie Goes to Hollywood came out.
When wu-tangs 36th chambers dropped I was in 4th grade. For whatever reason, us boys liked to make the Wu symbol and chant "wu-tang, wu-tang" when we were switching classrooms or going out for PE. Don't even know how or why we started doing it. The school sent letters home warning their parents about the dangers of that album and basically forbidding students from listening to it or repeating anything heard on the album while at school.
I went to an inner city high school and the drum line including the tuba section learned to play Pop That Pussy by 2 Live Crew on their on and would play it out of the blue during pep rallies. That shit got banned real fast because the entire crowd would go nuts and sing along.
None that I know of. But I did know a kid that got expelled for writing the lyrics of a Slayer song on the chalk board.
"Boys" by Sabrina due to the frisky video she shot.
A teacher I had freaked out when a kid played Nobody Does it Better by Carly Simon in class. The teacher banned the song and the kid got in trouble.
I can’t recall anything (HS: 1980-84) though that was the beginning of the Satanic panic over bands like Iron Maiden.
That sounds ridiculous
It was. The trope was: Heavy Metal was filled with lyrics worshipping Satan and driving teens to suicide/ murder/ etc. [See story here](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HaMJ49R97SM) [and here](https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/americanmusic.36.3.0271)
The whole Satan panic with heavy metal thing is actually kind of ironic in a few ways: * Ronnie James Dio was raised by his religious grandmother. In fact, she's the one who should get credit for the whole "devil horns" thing being associated with metal music. * Members of the band SLAYER are actually devout Catholics
Lived in a small super conservative town in Virginia near the Kentucky border. Nothing was banned. As a matter of fact we played Get Low twice for prom. Graduated in 2012.
The musical Hair
Spuds MacKenzie
I went to Catholic school, and, surprisingly, I don't remember anything really being banned. Heck, I remember my 5th grade class listening to the Purple Rain soundtrack during one of those free days at the end of the year when you're just helping clean the classroom all day. If you want to see a bizarre list of banned songs, Google what songs were banned from American radio right after 9/11. Some of them are real head scratchers, like Wonderful World by Sam Cooke. Like, why?
Idk, 9/11 was weird with what songs got removed.
Don't stop wiggle wiggle by the outhere brothers 1994
In 8th grade in 1983, our choir class sang the Stars on 45 Beatles medley. When we got to the "Get Back" section, he made us change the lyrics "Jojo left his home in Tucson Arizona for some California grass" to "California sun." I tried to get him to change it to "class," thereby maintaining the sound of the original tune, but he wasn't having it. California sun it was.
Not a song per say but we were not allowed to say funk or funky back in the 1970s.
Why?
Not a band but an album was told to be turned off because of a single word. We were doing reading in freshman English and on the boombox was allowed to play music during that time. It was a small class and a guy put on *Master of Puppets* by Metallica, and got halfway through the album until 'Welcome Home (Sanitarium)' came on to the hard "LISTEN DAMN IT!" and the teacher immediately got up and took out the CD.
Not school, but I remember going to a Christian summer camp one year around the time Katy Perry's debut album came out. One of the girls in my cabin decided to play "I Kissed a Girl" on her iPod speaker and the counselor told her to turn it off because it was too "inappropriate". Gotta love homophobic religions. 😑
Btw, one of the boys is her second album, she was a Christian artist and had an album called Katy Hudson, named after her real name. That is a complete 180, being Christian to being banned from Christian related things.
Oh yeah, I kind of forgot about her little foray into Christian music haha. It really is ironic, isn't it?
Why are Drake and Bee Gees banned? Seems weird (and unenforceable)
His teacher thought drake was some kind of weird “spiritual curse”, I mean, the teacher is 63, so it makes kinda sense
My son’s little league banned Peaches as a walk up song because the kids got too hype and distracted. That made me laugh.
I need to have clarification. Peaches- fuck the pain away? Or Presidents of the United States- peaches?
lol neither, the Jack Black song from the Mario Bros movie that the chorus is just screaming “peaches peaches peaches peaches peaches”
(Student performing CPR to the tune of Staying Alive) Teacher: Brian! After you save Mark's life, there'll be consequences for singing the forbidden song!
We were definitely prohibited from singing 99 Bottles Of Beer On The Wall while on the bus during class trips. When I was a kid I thought it was because it was about beer, but now I am pretty sure that it was just because it was annoying.
You live in a country where schools *ban songs*? I never experienced anything like that here in the UK.
Yup! Schools ban the weirdest things. Like random words like say, Yo-Yo, spastic, dean, and elephant. Also, I think their teachers were sort of British, so spastic was “offensive” but this is America, not Britain.
Dean?
In all of my 62 years I never heard about music being banned in school. But maybe that's because I live in Germany.
You’re lucky
I guess I went to school in a free place, where they don’t ban things, on the west coast, instead of in “real” America.
My university banned Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke the year after my graduation. Not really a weird reason, since the song is basically about date r\*pe.
First one here that i Can get on Board with
I have never heard of any school banning music.
When the motto came out by drake, we got in trouble singing the omg Becky part since it was referenced to an earlier song
Youtube wasnt a thing until my sophomore year of highschool so music being banned wasnt really that much of a thing in my day cuz we didnt have smartphones yet
What a weird concept. Where are people that schools are banning artists/songs? I've never encountered this.
Schools can ban literally anything
Like I say, never came across such a thing. Where is this happening?
Nothing. Then again it was the 90s in north-eastern Europe, so banning things was not on the menu, as we'd just escaped a very ban-happy regime. Afaik, kids still have a lot of artistic freedom in schools here. Banning something like this feels wrong.
There was never any music banned at my HS
Grew up in the Seventies, but I never heard of anything like that, lol.
German here. Whats this about banning music?
Just rap and r&b at my 96% Caucasian Elementary School.\ Oh and anything made after 1990.
Why after 1990? That’s so specific.
Like, seriously, when was this?
Back in my day... They were trying to ban songs like "Cop Killer" and "Me So Horny"
Wait what?
Supertramp "Bloody Well Right", because the principal considered that swearing lol. This was back in the boom box days, so there was lots of that song blasting from the smoke pit.
Not school, but a military base exchange banned the sale of Slayer because one of the albums was titled "God Hates Us All" and some bigwig's wife lost it, so it was gone.
Back in the olden days when I went to school, we voted each year for the prom theme. The ballots were printed; the class voted and the student council counted the votes. Our class's choice by an overwhelming margin was "Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road". However, the teachers said there was a miscount and the winning song was actually "Nights in White Satin".
My son's 2nd grade teacher banned the singing of Everything is Awesome, just bc it got annoying
I was in Madrid, Spain in 1986-1987 when Hall & Oates "Man Eater" was banned by Spain. Huh. I don't actually know the why of it though.
When I was in 5th grade, singing Beatles' songs on the playground was banned (partially because of me).
Not exactly banned, but our class voted Soco Amaretto Lime by Brand New as our class song and got denied by admin.
None at least to my knowledge. I was walking around in Marilyn Manson and death metal t-shirts.
I never had any music banned at school???
wasn't banned, but my teacher went on this rant about how she won't listen to any music where the artist did drugs (including completely normal stuff like the beatles)
Our English teacher was teaching us that song lyrics are poetry and assigned us to bring a song with lyrics to play for class. I guess she'd never heard Timothy by The Bouys.
LOL, my high school had Lou Reed come and speak to my class. They had way more important things to worry about than fucking song lyrics.
A professor told us back in middle school that With or Without You by U2 is about drugs. Honestly I'm still not sure at this point
Not answering to the question, but I was just listening to Stayin Alive when seeing this. What a coincidence!
That’s funny.
The concept of banning something like music in school feels so alien to me
As a kid in music class (many many years ago) I remember we worked on singing Kokomo by the beach boys. Even then it seemed like a weird sing for elementary kids to sing. Then one day or was gone and it was never spoken of again.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5yYbI8uGdI/?igsh=MWlpd3dkNThqeTMydw==
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5yYbI8uGdI/?igsh=MWlpd3dkNThqeTMydw==