So I was in a store yesterday afternoon, and "Late in the Evening" came on the sound system. That's a nice song, I thought. Haven't heard it in ages.
So I'm enjoying myself, and he gets to the third verse: I learned to play some lead guitar/and I'uz underage in this funky bar/and I...
And I what? The next line, of course, is "stepped outside to smoke myself a J." And I was lightly singing along, and I started singing those words, but lo and behold, they were cut. It skipped to: and I turned my amp up loud and I began to play. They used the "And I" from the line about smoking the doob, but then very obviously spliced it over to the line about turning up the amp.
What the hell? Is that really so offensive to today's sensibilities, the idea that a musician would step outside and smoke a little pot? Who makes such a cut? On whose authority? Did Paul Simon sign off on this?
Anyone heard any other examples of this kind of thing? I haven't, that I remember, but there must be dozens or hundreds of them if they did it to that basically harmless and happy little song.
Actually, contra my headline, this isn't censorship like the old days. In those days, if the BBC didn't want you to hear John Lennon say "I'd love to turn you on," they didn't cut the line, they just banned the song. That was their right, one supposes, reactionary as it was. But cutting actual lines out of songs. That's way worse.
I see liberalism and conservatism sharing the blame here. Conservatism because the strident evangelicalism so rampantly afoot in today's America can't abide a lyric like that under any circumstances. Liberalism because it's "difficult" for parents to have to explain such matters to their eight-year-olds, who aren't "ready" for them.
If eight years from now, when Margot has attained that age, if you see me writing anywhere that I think it's right that they destroyed a song like that in the interest of the children, please come shoot me.
