< Getting Crap Past the Radar

Getting Crap Past the Radar/Music

You might notice many of those songs fit Intercourse with You.

  • Several songs contain bits of profanity that no one notices:
    • Prior to the songs by Cee-Lo Green and Pink, several songs containing the word "bitch" in the title have made the top 5 of the Hot 100, most notably Elton John's "The Bitch is Back" in 1974, and Meredith Brooks' "Bitch" in 1998. One of the earliest songs that contained an uncensored "bitch" to reach No. 1 on the Hot 100 was Hall & Oates' "Rich Girl" ("You can rely on the old man honey/it's a bitch girl, ..." and "You're a Rich Bitch, girl"), while Jimmy Buffett's 1977 single "Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes" contains the lyric "... Good times and riches and son of a bitches ... ."
    • The Charlie Daniels Band has gotten away with several "ass" and "son of a bitch" instances in the lyrics of their songs ("asses" along with "fags" in 1973's "Uneasy Rider," and "son of a bitch" in 1979's "The Devil Went Down to Georia").
    • In "Big Bad John," the concluding lyric in the offical release was "At the bottom of this mine lies one hell of a man ... Big John!" In 1961, even the mild profanity "hell," outside religious contexts, was considered a no-no by some conservative groups, so a second release was issued, containing the milder "At the bottom of this mine lies a big, big man ... Big John!" However, earlier in the song, there is the lyric "Through the dust and the smoke of this man-made hell ... ," which apparently did not raise any objections. As for the song, "Big Bad John" topped the Billboard Hot 100 (five weeks), Easy Listening Singles (nine weeks) and Hot C&W Sides charts (two weeks) at the end of 1961, marking one of the earliest No. 1 songs to contain (mild) profanity.
      • Christians don't object to the use of the word "hell," per se; they object to people using it in vain (that is, in a context other than the eschatological one). Similarly, "bitch" is okay if the female being described is a female dog.
  • A surprisingly subtle example in Taylor Swift's "Tim McGraw", in which she claims her boyfriend had "a tendency of getting stuck on backroads at night".
    • When Taylor ducks behind her book in the video for "The Story of Us", she can clearly be seen mouthing "Shit!" at the sight of her ex.
    • "Sparks Fly" managed to get rather suggestive lines past the Moral Guardians (see the song's entry on Intercourse with You).
  • Rock and metal bands in the People's Republic of China tend to do this with their lyrics. At larger music festivals, all the lyrics have to be approved by the Communist censors, but many musicians still manage to get veiled insults past the radar.
  • An example from NewBoyz: the supposed lyrics to "Back Seat" hide the fact that they drop the F-bomb twice. While many radio stations realize that they are actually saying "She just trying to fuck comfortably" instead of "She just trying to fit comfortably", they managed to hoodwink YouTube, as it is not censored. Again the line "you're function with the man girl" gets by in their music video, however it is actually "you're fuxing with the man girl", which makes a lot more sense grammatically (which should be an obvious clue but maybe YouTube censors are illiterate).
  • The new Dev song "In the Dark" practically had no radar. I mean:

On my waist, through my hair. Think about it when you touch me there. Dancing in the Dark. Open my body up and do some surgery. I wanna taste it, taste it, feel it, feel it, shove it in there, oh yeah."

    • Not to mention that the video had a naked Dev, but her breasts were covered up by human hands.
  • Also, LMFAO flung its name past the radar. "Laugh my fucking ass off". Yes.
    • And its' songs are just doing whatever they could to have them fling it off- I'm in Miami Bitch, I am Just a Whore, Sexy and I Know It.
      • Sexy and I Know It just got everything past the radar! "Wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle yeah...oh yeah wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle wiggle yeah, oh yeah." And also "Girl look at that bodies, girl look at the bodies. Girl look at the bodies, I work out. That's sexy and I know it, sexy and I know it, ooh sexy and I know it, sexy-sexy-sexy-sexy and I know it!"
        • What about "Yes"? "Foo, your royal penis is clean." It may not sound that bad, but his "royal" penis is huge, and it has to be clean after an ejaculation. Also, "Two naked models with suds on their boobies", and "Call your bitches, a big party".
  • The Police's hit song "Rehumanize Yourself" features the line "he's got his hand in the air with the other cunts" which never seems to be censored on classic rock radio, most likely because censoring would make more people notice it.
  • Lady Gaga's "Poker Face" is even confirmed by Word of God as being about the singer's bisexuality/mixed feelings in the bedroom with her boyfriend (hence the chorus), though this is easily passed up by listeners as the song is initially wrapped up in Double Entendre-laden Texas Hold 'Em metaphors. She also has a habit of singing Mondegreens that are a wee bit naughtier than the official lyrics and getting away with it. Lady Gaga also confirms that muffin meant exactly what you thought it meant.
    • Also in Gaga's 'Bad Romance', part of the lyrics go "I want your psycho, your vertigo schtick-- want you in my rear window, baby you're sick." This is kind of a subverted example because more people find it dirty before they realize it doubles as a Shout-Out to Alfred Hitchcock (Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window)
  • Lady Gaga's album Born This Way as a whole is good at this, not in the way of sexual content(there is plenty but not enough for a Tipper sticker), but for language sneaking. The mild swears hell and damn are sung clearly in some parts, but give it another listen and you will know that they aren't the worst words on the album, Scheiße is German for shit, but the song actually contains a couple uses of 'bullshit' in English, but somewhat twist so you can't hear it too clear. The opening to Bad Kids also has the word shit, but it sounds more like "She OUWT". Then after the first line is "I'm a bitch", but 'bitch' is swirled around and you can hardly make it out at all. Heavy Metal Lover actually contains the F word, and you can actually kind of make it out, yet the album got away without a Tipper Sticker.
  • Bowling for Soup's "My Wena"

"Her skin is so soft, I can't keep my hands off ever since the day I found her"

  • "Wolf Moon" by Type O Negative isn't about werewolves. It uses werewolves as a metaphor. It's about the narrator going down on his girlfriend while she's on her period.
  • The song "Blubberboy" by Regurgitator reached #1 in Australia. It has the line "Rub me on your cunt I'll come back again". Since that worked so well, they tried to be more blatant and also charted with the song titled "I sucked a lot of cock to get where I am".
  • Faith No More's "Epic" contains the following lyrics "So you lay down on it and you do it some more" after Mike Patton was adviced to remove the f-word from the song. In concert the line is "and you fuck it some more". This is weird because there are other Faith No More songs which contain swearing.
  • "Boys Light Up" by Australian Crawl is considered to be a classic Aussie rock song. But if you listen closely it's all about sex with air hostesses and also about a wife using sexual aids when her husbands away. It is really a really, really dirty song.
  • "Addicted" by Simple Plan- according to Pierre Bouvier, the point of the song was to be the first band to get the word "dick" on to Much Music. "I'm a addic-dic-dic-dic-dicted to you."
    • He actually does say "dick" in the song. In the bridge, Pierre sings "I'm a dick. I'm addicted to you." Most people who aren't familiar with the song assume he said "I'm addict," even though that doesn't make grammatical sense. That's why the song got past Much Music's sensors.
    • However, the song was edited for Karaoke Revolution.
  • The Blue Oyster Cult's rendition of the Michael Moorcock-penned Black Blade fades out on the metallic voice of the sword boasting about how evil it is... singer Eric Bloom slips in a final line

You poor fucking humans!

right at the very end, on the very brink of hearing.

  • Dominance and Submission is apparently about a ten year old boy invited on a New Year's Eve car drive by an older friend and her brother. Listen closely and join the dots as to what really appears to happen to him in the seamy underbelly of squeaky-clean 1964 America...
  • Maroon 5 pulled this off with "If I Never See Your Face Again" which is blatantly about a pair of sex buddies.

It makes you burn to learn I'm with another man.
I wonder if he's half the lover that I am.

    • Maroon 5 tend to do this a lot; for instance in "Harder To Breathe":

Clutching your pillow and writhing in a naked sweat,
Hoping somebody someday'll do you like I did!

    • I'm thinkin' a lot of Maroon 5's music is about sex...take a second listen. 'Member "This Love"?

My pressure on your hips
Sinking my fingertips
Into every inch of you...

    • Or, from the same song:

I tried my best to feed her appetite
Keep her coming every night
So hard to keep her satisfied

      • Neither of these made it past MTV's radar, though, which only served to point out the dirtier meaning to anyone who had heard the song elsewhere uncensored.
    • Wake Up Call.

Wake up call, caught you in the morning
With another man in my bed.
Don't you care about me anymore? I don't think so?
Shot him dead, won't come around here anymore.

    • Honestly, it's unusual to hear a Maroon 5 song that ISN'T somehow about sex.
    • Maroon 5 videos are also extremely suggestive. Parents at the Kohl's department store this Troper worked at complained about the video for "If I Never See Your Face Again" playing in the juniors department without sound. The video includes Rhianna suggestively grabbing Adam's guitar. What can be expected with the Fetish Fuelirrific Rhianna teams up with the overly sexed Maroon 5, though?
  • The song "Real Mother For Ya" by Johnny "Guitar" Watson uses repetition. Over the course of the song, it's pronounced "Real Motha Fo' Ya", and at the end of the song, is repeated several times, But at the end he actually says "Real Motherfucker" Most radio stations cut out that last part in its entirety, although it sometimes slips by.
    • Compare John Mellencamp's "Lovin' Mutha Fo' Ya," where he never comes right out and says "motherfucker," but the way it's phrased makes it obvious. Ironically, a member of his band clearly says, "Hey, what the fuck?" on the intro.
  • The Who's "Who Are You?" is almost never censored on radio stations that normally censor, despite Daltrey ad-libbing "aw, who the fuck are you?" in the chorus towards the end of the song.
    • And what about the line "I only feel right on my knees"?
  • Another Who song, "Squeeze Box" is about a wife tiring her husband out and keeping the neighbours up all night with her rampant accordion playing. What else could it mean?

She goes in and out and in and out and in and out and in and out,
 And she's playing all night, and the music's all right,
Momma's got a squeeze box, Daddy never sleeps at night.

  • The best example from the Who, in my opinion, is "Pictures of Lily" which is sung from the position of a kid whose dad gave him porn to masturbate to in order to help him fall asleep. This is one of their signature early hits. Another one from around the same time that got decent airplay was "Mary Anne With the Shaky Hands" which features the line: "What she done to a man with those shaky hands" in the chorus. Quite a few other Who songs pulled this sort of thing off quite well, too!
  • They slipped one past the BBC radio censors in 1966 hit single Substitute. Allegedly hacked off with Beatles-style fangirls coming to their concerts to screamm hysterically and ignore the music, there is a point in the song where thry play with words and clearly sing "Prostitute..."
  • And a later hit single, Who are You?, slips in a "Who the fuck are you?" towards the end of the song as broadcast on radio..
  • The T. Rex song "Twentieth Century Boy" has the refrain "twentieth century toy, I want to be your boy." A casual listener probably wouldn't notice that in the last two iterations, this becomes "twentieth century toy, I want to be your toy," the song ending with "twentieth century boy, I want to be your toy."
  • "Oliver's Army" by Elvis Costello features the phrase "white nigger" which is never censored on the radio...
    • Although "nigger" was bleeped out of the video when it aired on "The Midnight Special."
    • Oh, Elvis' lyrics are absolutely loaded with references to violence, racism, and misogyny--not because he was a racist, misogynist, or violent, but because he took on the voices of those people in order to satire them. In this case, the later line "If you're out of luck or out of work/we can send you to Johannesburg" gives the game away--the titular "army" is some kind of white supremacist organization, and a "white nigger" in their estimation would either be a 'race-traitor', or a member of a "lesser" white ethnic group (the term has been applied to Irish people, among others.)
  • "Fairy Tale of New York" by The Pogues has the line "ya cheap lousy faggot" which always gets past Radio and MTV censors.
    • While the implication is probably clear, you can still get away with it in the UK, being as a 'faggot' over here is a type of offal meatball. 'Fags' are cigarettes, by the way.
    • If you're going to quote it, quote it all: "You're a bum, you're a punk / You're an old slut on junk, lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed / You scumbag, you maggot / You cheap lousy faggot / Happy Christmas your ass / I thank God it's our last". Surely the greatest Christmas song of all time, it never fails to fill me with a warm glow. Not so much "getting crap past the radar" as "flying crap straight over the radar at top speed and launching heatseekers after anyone who wants to argue about it".
    • The movie PS I Love You lampshaded it. The song was played at the funeral under the pretense that it was the main character's husband's favorite song. At the "You're a faggot" line the pastor started singing along.
  • Approximately 2.56 into "Hey Jude" by The Beatles (band), John Lennon's swearing, "Oh!... Fucking hell" was not removed from the released version of the song When the band's music is remastered and put made available for digital download (surely can't be long now...) I can't help but wonder if it'll be edited out...
    • There's tons of this in Beatles songs. In the "she's the kind of girl..." section of Girl, the background vocals are "Tit tit tit tit tit..." The "Eggman" in I am The Walrus refers to Eric Burdon of the Animals, called such because he liked to cover naked girls in egg yolk, Maxwell's Silver Hammer mentions Joan and her "late nights all alone with a test tube," Penny Lane mentions "fish and finger pie" (a modification of a Scouser term for "heavy petting"). And of course, "Why Don't We Do It In the Road?".
    • "Come together...Right now...Over me" I can't be the only one who thinks its describing bukkake...
    • "Baby you're a rich man too", released at the time of a rift with gay Jewish manager Brian Epstein, contains Lennons's acid take on the lyric "Baby you're a rich fag Jew".
    • The word "fuck" also makes an appearance in "Revolution 9," around the five-minute mark: "I joined the fucking navy and went to sea - BLOCK THAT KICK, BLOCK THAT KICK!"
  • Who would have guessed that the upbeat, catchy song "Semi-Charmed Life" was a song about sexual addictions and crystal meth usage? Don't believe me? Google the lyrics.
  • Not as much gotten past the radar, but let right through with the Red Carpet treatment, Queen Latifah's "U.N.I.T.Y." often ran on radio stations with the lines "Bitch" and "Ho" uncensored. Most likely because the lyrics made it impossible to take the use of the words as offensive.
  • Method Man's "All I Need" often got away with the oft-repeated line "I swear to God I hope we fuckin' die together" by stashing it in the instrument line and covering it with the more recognizable chorus.
  • Sheryl Crow's song "A Change Would Do You Good" contains the line "Jack off, Jimmy, everybody wants more". No one else seems to have remarked about this one...
  • "Yummy Yummy Yummy" written by Arthur Resnick and recorded by the Ohio Express. What sort of "love" can one have in one's "tummy," I wonder?
    • First time I heard that song, a friend was singing it at lunch. He's gay, and he substituted love for... something else.
  • There is a techno track by DJ Aligator called The Whistle Song or Blow My Whistle Baby. It is a thinly veiled depiction of fellatio. Oddly, enough, there was absolutely no warnings on it. Blow My Whistle Baby
    • The "unclean version" has the lyrics "blow my whistle bitch" in a considerably more misogynistic tone.
    • And of course, with title edited to match the lyrics, it was in the E-rated DDR Max 2
  • "Making love in the afternoon with Cecilia, up in my bedroom / I got up to wash my face, when I came back to bed someone had taken my place" Now, what kind of lovin' would cause a guy to go wash his face after making it with a girl, hmmm?
    • Oy. Kids today and their filthy, filthy minds, combined with their lack of historical knowledge. The song came out in 1970, when most homes weren't air-conditioned. "In the afternoon," the second floor of a house ("up in my bedroom") that doesn't have A/C can turn into an oven pretty quickly, even if it's not that hot outside. Try it sometime.
      • Perhaps, but my grandma still banned her kids from singing it for being "too smutty." Although she ALSO had a dirty mind.
      • Nice try. What kind of A/C only works on the body, and leaves the face sweaty? And for that matter, what kind of lovemaking leaves the body not needing a shower, especially in those conditions?
  • Swedish drag act After Dark's entry in Melodifestivalen 2007 (the annual national song competition), (Åh) När Ni Tar Saken I Egna Händer, which is three minutes' worth of thinly-veiled masturbation jokes, disguised as verses about TV personalities doing domestic chores. Read the Wiki entry for details.
    • For those that don't speak Swedish, "Åh, när ni tar saken i egna händer" roughly means "Oh, when you take matters into your own hands" but literally translates to "Oh, when you take the thing into your own hands". Also, the singers appear to be making a conscious effort to be pronouncing "Åh, när ni" as "Onani", which is the Swedish word for "masturbation".
      • "Onanii" is also a Japanese word for "masturbation" (one of thousands of loanwords, although they actually got it from German in this case), so Japanese YouTube and Nico Nico Douga users got the joke immediately.
  • "La Macarena"... just "La Macarena"...
    • Of particular note is the part where she talks about the threesome she had while her boyfriend was out of town.
  • Warrant's "Cherry Pie' is all this trope, from the very title to the immortal lyrics "Swingin' in there/Cause she wanted me to feed her/So I mixed up the batter/And she licked the beater"
    • Ah, Cherry Pie, the song that removes all doubt about exactly what the singer is referring to Exactly seven lines into the first Verse. Swingin' to the Left/Swingin' to the right/Think about baseball/swing all night
  • An old Dixie Chicks song called "Goodbye Earl" had a sly line at the end stating that the female protagonists of the song sell "Tennessee Ham and strawberry jam". If anybody's ever seen the video, at the Tennessee Ham part all three girls do a sort of hip thrust toward the camera and slap themselves on the ass, which is followed by a shot of one of the girls doing a rather suggestive taste test on the aforementioned strawberry jam. Turns out that selling Tennessee ham is a euphemism used in connection with prostitution...
    • Wait, so prostitution might be arguably better than staying with a violently abusive spouse, but-- but-- the other one was... eek!
  • "Son of A Preacher Man" anyone? About a girl being deflowered by the local preacher's son? With the line "Looking to see how much we've grown?"
    • Considering Dusty Springfield's original version is by far the most famous, it's not hard to mentally insert "No, really, the only boy. Ever. And even then I was checking out his sister."
  • "Afternoon Delight". "This is a song about afternoon lovemaking."
    • This becomes a plot point in the eponymously-titled episode of Arrested Development.
    • In the episode "Sexy", on Glee, Emma picks this song for the Celibacy Club to sing, under the impression the song was about a dessert. The costumes and faces made during that scene are hilarious...
  • Rihanna's "Shut Up and Drive" is just a big Double Entendre.
  • "Knockin' at Your Back Door" by Deep Purple. Think about the possible meanings of the title... yeah, it's about anal.
    • Can't be much radar involved with a song that contains the line "common cunning linguist".
  • The song "Kitchen Man" by Bessie Smith was loaded with sexual double entendre, and it was recorded in 1929. Sample lyrics: "When I eat his doughnut / All I leave is the hole / Any time he wants to / Why, he can use my sugar bowl"
    • Early blues singers got away with a lot of really blatant innuendo. Smith, for example, recorded another tune called "I Need A Little Sugar In My Bowl"; lyrics include "I need a little hot dog 'tween my rolls" and "Hard papa, come on and drop something in my bowl"
    • From the same time period, Dixieland-era songwriter "Jelly Roll" Morton was big on innuendo. Starting with his name.
  • Britney Spears managed to release a single entitled "If U Seek Amy", where the chorus makes little sense as read ("All boys and all the girls are begging to, If You Seek Amy"). However, when heard, it's clear that the intended meaning is F-U-C-K me. Moral Guardians did figure it out. unfortunately.
    • Lampshaded in the music video.
    • The Script pulled the same trick with their song "If You See Kay."
  • Metallica released a DVD entitled Cunning Stunts; much earlier, this was also the title of a Caravan album.
  • It seems like whenever Pink Floyd's "Money" is played on air, they never censor the line "Money, it's a hit/Don't give me that do-goody-good bullshit."
    • The early Pink Floyd single "Candy And A Currant Bun" was originally written as "Let's Roll Another One"; The BBC objected to the obvious drug reference of the title (as well as lyrics like "I'm high, don't try to spoil my fun"). The recorded version changed these lyrics, but somehow also slipped in "Ooh don't talk with me / please just fuck with me".
  • Early R n' B is full of this trope: examples include Billy Ward & The Dominoes' 1951 hit Sixty Minute Man: 'There'll be fifteen minutes of kissing, then you'll holler 'please don't stop', fifteen minutes of teasing, fifteen minutes of squeezing, and fifteen minutes blowing my top'.
    • Not to mention Dinah Washington's 'Big Long Slidin' Thing' from 1954 (it's a trombone). 'He said 'I blow through here, then I work my fingers and thumb.
    • And (bisexual) Ma Rainey releasing "Prove it on me blues" -- "I went out last night with a crowd of my friends, it must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men".
  • Steely Dan has a lot of songs that push various amounts of crap past the radar, but two jump out:
    1. "The Fez" is not about a hat. Even the usually evasive Word of God says it's a condom.
    2. "Show Biz Kids" retained its Precision F-Strike as a single.
    • Not to mention the fact that the band's name come from the name of a gigantic metallic dildo used to sodomise young teenage men engaging in autoerotic asphyxiation in William S. Burrough's Naked Lunch.
    • Becker and Fagen Lampshaded this when they thanked Eminem at the Grammys, which they won for an album discussing psychological torture, adultery, incest, teenage prostitutes, really awesome drug addiction, professional dominas... hope I didn't forget anything.
  • ACDC has made this an artform in and of itself. At least half their songs are sexual innuendo, more or less thinly veiled (more often less then more). "Girls Got Rhythm", "Giving the Dog a Bone", "Big Balls" (which is about high-end social events. Really.), "You Shook Me All Night Long", "Hard as a Rock"... The list goes on and on and on and...
    • The list goes on all "Night of the Long Knives".
    • And "Let Me Put My Love Into You", which isn't even an innuendo, and made the PMRC's "Filthy Fifteen" list.
    • "At least half" is a bit of an understatement.
  • Death in Vegas's song "Dirt" uses a number of samples from Woodstock, including Joe Mac Donald's FISH cheer: "What's that spell?" to which one hundred thousand hippies chant, "Fuck!" over and over again. Since the, "Gimme an F! Gimme a U!..." part was left out, it's a bit hard to figure out just what the crowd is screaming unless you know the reference.
  • The Violent Femmes did this a lot. From "36-24-36", which spoke of a woman being the perfect measurements and them wanting to bang her, to "Gimme The Car", which was about getting a girl drunk, high and then banging her, to the "Country Death Song", which involved the voice of it pushing his youngest daughter into a bottomless pit and then hanging himself in shame... I don't know how they weren't banned from radio.
  • Sugarland's song "It Happens" sticks a "ssssh" before the title.
  • The Primus song "Winona's Big Brown Beaver." I mean just look at the title.
  • Stupify by Disturbed prominently features the singer screaming FUCK at the top of his lungs in nearly every verse. Despite this, most radio stations and day-time TV running the video have decided that the shrill squaking of the words was just incomprehensible enough to go uncensored (ironically, "Shit out of LUCK" still managed to be blanked out of the radio-edit). The song even made it as a Rock Band dowloadable by passing the lyric off as Simlish, making Disturbed the only band in the game to manage full-on cussing (Green Day would be a close second for Longview's drawn-out "Shiiiii~", mentioned below).
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic is generally thought of as being family-friendly, but he occasionally slips one past the radar. Like this brilliant euphemism in "One More Minute", for instance:

I guess I might seem kinda bitter
You got me feeling down in the dumps
'Cause I'm stranded all alone in the gas station of love
And I have to use the self-service pumps

    • An even better one? in "Don't Download this Song" If you listen closely, at the end he says cheap bastard. Wow.
    • In "Hardware Store," he mentions automatic circumcisers among the other things in the store.
    • In "eBay", Al literally gets "crap" past the radar with the lyrics, "My house/Is filled with/This crap/Shows up in/Bubble wrap..."
    • From his video for "I Lost On Jeopardy": "This German Baroness could suck the chrome off a fender."
  • Bowling For Soup had a very odd case with Almost. There's one censored version out there where the words "drunk" and "14" get censored in the first line, but the word "slut" is left uncensored in the very next line. To make it worse, the second verse mentions that the narrator almost got arrested for beating up a guy who stole some drugs that the narrator was addicted to. This is left completly uncensored. Proof.
  • From World War I, a soldiers' song to the tune of "John Brown's Body" with the chorus "They were only playing leapfrog, they were only playing leapfrog, they were only playing leapfrog, when one staff-officer jumped right over the other staff-officer's back".
  • The Smiths song "A Rush And A Push And The Land Is Ours" contains the line "you're still a young man/so phone me, phone me, phone me", but Morrissey enunciates it so that it sounds like "fuck me."
  • The Clash, "Should I Stay or Should I Go?"

It's always tease, tease, tease
You're happy when I'm on my knees
...
Come on and let me know
Should I cool it or should I blow?

    • Debatable, "blow" is slang for "split", "leave", "vacate". And "on my knees" is a common expression for being in a vulnerable or desperate position. Um, not necessarily the way being implied.
  • There are three versions of Avril Lavigne's Girlfriend: The censored version (which blanks out the second half of "mother-fucking"), The edited version (It gets replaced with "One and only", and the uncensored version (which plays out the full word).
    • Avril also did the "add more words" version of Last-Second Word Swap twice in the chorus of "Things I'll Never Say" in order to get highly sexual lines off:

If I could say what I want to say
I'd say I wanna blow you...
...Away, be with you every night
Am I squeezing you too tight
If I could say what I want to see
I want to see you go down
On one knee, marry me today
Guess, I’m wishing my life away
With these things I’ll never say

  • "Poison Ivy" by The Coasters seems to be about a promiscuous, psychotic woman who gives men a sexually transmitted disease. Ah, those innocent 50s!
    • Although, thanks to the Weird Al Effect, most kids today will probably assume it's about the Batman character. The 1997 movie Batman and Robin did nothing to dispel this myth, since they outright used an instrumental version of the song when Uma Thurman is introduced.
  • In Office Supply Orders Genesis's song Robbery, assault and battery, they use the line the bastard's gone away. Yet, I've never heard anyone ever call the censors.
    • "Bastard" can be said on the radio, not that one can ever hear that particular song on the radio.
  • Sometime back in the early 1980's, the band April Wine released a single called "If You See Kay," which repeated the title in every chorus. Maybe nobody thought this out...
    • So Britney Spears' "If U Seek Amy" wasn't original after all...
    • It wasn't as though it was subtle, as the video had numerous instances of the band holding up signs with the phrase. The only throw-off is the Lyrical Dissonance, as the sweet, dreamy chorus makes the song sound like it's about a crush.
  • Tori Amos' albums never have an Explicit Lyrics label on them, even though she sometimes curses in her songs. For example, "Professional Widow" from Boys for Pele has lines such as "slag shit", "starfucker just like my daddy", and "peace, love, and a hard cock". However, radio stations did refuse to play "Big Wheel", since she chants "I am a M-I-L-F" in it.
  • The version where one gets the censors to focus on one thing in order to let another through was pulled off beautifully, though inadvertently, by The Kinks with Lola. The BBC was so busy getting them to change the mention of Coca-Cola (something about not being allowed to advertise) that they completely missed the fact that the song was about a transvestite.
  • Ladies and gentlemen, raise your hands if you honestly believe that "The Fast Food Song" is about, well, fast food. And if it is, it has to be the most sexual depiction of fast food ever.
    • That song is Older Than They Think - the basic lyrics have been a staple of long, painful bus journeys in the UK for decades. The Fast Food Rockers version goes a little crazy with it.
  • Considering it came out in the fifties, Mr. Sandman is about a guy begging for a wet dream.
    • No. First of all, the band was an all-girl group called the Chordettes, and, second of all, the lyrics specifically say "make him the cutest I've ever seen." So if the song is about asking for a wet dream, it's about a girl, not a guy, asking for a wet dream. Also, in this case, if you read the lyrics closely, what's flying under the radar is that she, the singer that is, isn't just asking for a wet dream; she's asking for a flesh-and-blood man with whom she's planning to have sex.
  • Pearl Jam. The name of a band with plenty of MTV coverage, big hits and mainstream exposure, HAS A NAME THAT IS A EUPHEMISM FOR SEMEN.
  • Aerosmith may have inadvertently pulled off a very difficult version of this. The beginning of the fourth verse of "Sweet Emotion" is (roughly, another troper can clarify) "Standin' in the front, just shakin' your ---". Yes, an innocent example, but WHERE this went is amazing ... when the Disney company licensed the music for Rock 'n' Roller Coaster, they just happened to pick this line ... uncensored... That's right, even though it's on an attraction not meant for kids, you can clearly hear this word on the ride. The best part? It's a RE-RECORDED VERSION.
    • There's also "Mama Kin", which goes uncensored on the radio despite having "shit" in the lyrics (possibly because it's pronounced "she-it" so it rhymes with "see it").
      • It also has that line in the chorus, that alternates between "sleeping late and smoking tea" and "sleeping late and sucking me". Either way, Aerosmith 1, radar 0.
    • "Pandora's Box" still receives airplay, with its "city slicker/slitty licker" line.
    • Amusingly, they lampshade it with the title track of the album, "Just Push Play", where the chorus says, "Just push play, *beep*ing A! Just push play, they're gonna beep it anyway." Except for the last chorus, when they actually change it to "Fucking A! Just push play, they're gonna *beep* it anyway."
  • While it's pretty bluntly sexual to begin with, Sublime's "Caress Me Down" has a couple of lines that would probably have to be edited out for radio were they not among the song's several bursts of gratuitous Spanish: "Pero la cosa que me gusta mas es panochita", which translates to "but the thing I like the most is pussy", and "con un chingo de dinero" which translates to "with a fuckload of money".
    • Also, in April 29, 1992 (Miami), while the singer is listing off places, he says the f-word, which I have never heard censored on the radio. This is likely because it is mainly in the background of the song, and is easy to miss.
  • Martha and the Vandellas' song "Quicksand" places a lot of vocal emphasis on the phrase "deeper and deeper." Because it's about quicksand, you see...
  • Back in The Seventies when homosexuals were very much Acceptable Targets and a favorite bogeyman of the Moral Guardians, Judas Priest released a song called "Raw Deal", whose lyrics (written by homosexual singer Rob Halford) contained (very thinly) veiled references to a gay bar and the struggle for gay rights. The themes were so blatant it's a wonder how, especially after Rob Halford's later adoption of Leather Man attire, how anyone could have been surprised when he came out in the late nineties.
    • "Eat Me Alive", although it wasn't entirely successful.
    • It just wasn't common to see gays in metal at the time, so it wasn't something one would expect, and he sold it so well that he was able to go onstage in bondage gear while making a lot of fisting motions, and nobody thought twice. He also was very publicly dating Penthouse Pet Cheryl Rixon around the time of British Steel, so yay, publicists.
  • Goldfinger's "Here In Your Bedroom" has the singer saying, "One, Two" quickly before the bridge. At the end of the song, he says "Fuck you!" in the same manner, quickly enough to be mistaken for a simple count, and was never edited on radio. Although the modern rock station that used to play the song in my area was never strict in its editing.
  • System of a Down's "Chop Suey!" is somewhat of an example. The original song title was "Suicide", but they changed it, presumably due to the 9/11 suicides (they have said it wasn't due to record company discouragement). However, the song begins with three drumstick taps and the words "We're rolling 'Suicide'", which would have been extremely controversial in a time when suicides had just skyrocketed in number. (Also, the chorus is as follows: "I don't think you trust in my self-righteous suicide / I cry when angels deserve to die." Many people are surprised that SOAD managed to get away with this.)'
  • Little Richard's career is about this trope. While "Tutti Frutti" was originally "Tutti frutti, good booty," much of the song was left intact. "She rocks to the east, she rocks to the west" was not about geography. And why was "Long Tall Sally" bald-headed? Maybe because she was really a transvestite? "She's got everything that Uncle John needs." Then there's "Lucille": "You won't do your sister's will." And "I woke up this morning, Lucille was not in sight/I asked my friends about her, but all they did was cry, "Lucille!" What were all his friends doing in his bedroom?
    • Oh, for heaven's sake: his name is a euphemism for small man's bits.
    • This was cleaned up just enough to meet broadcast regulations, but it didn't fool anybody, and they were mad.
  • Kylie Minogue's song "Shocked" was a significant hit in the UK back in 1991. It's something of an urban myth that at least one point in the song sees Minogue replacing the word "Shocked" with a certain other, more "colourful" word (ie, "Fucked"). This wasn't picked up on by radio playlisters at all, seeing as any controversy at the time revolved around the song's more sexually suggestive video. Minogue's fans could read this shift into mild controversy as coming in tandem with her significant image-change from wholesome girl-next-door to scantily-clad sex siren - coupled with the fact she was dating famously decadent INXS frontman Michael Hutchence at the time.
  • Nowadays known primarily as an actress and due to her starring role as Rose in Doctor Who, Billie Piper's previous job as a run-of the mill kiddie-pop singer saw her attempt an image change by releasing a sexually suggestive song called "Honey To The Bee." One notable line in the song sees her singing "C'mon and buzz me!" which sounded to many more-perverted listeners as being much closer to "C'mon and fuck me!" Which didn't stop it being regularly played on the radio. At all.
    • Her final top-ten hit in the UK was called "Something Deep Inside." Piper herself has admitted in hindsight that this might not have been a particularly appropriate title to give a song, considering her music had previously been marketed at a very young demographic.
  • Leftfield's 1999 hit "Afrika Shox" was heavily playlisted on UK radio. The song featured guest vocals by Afrika Bambaataa, and repeated repetition of the word "funk." Which as readers might have guessed, often tends to sound a little like another rather more obscene word. Hence the song seems to contain Bambaataa repeatedly chanting 'I wanna FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!' quite a lot. The song's highly suspect nature didn't seem to trouble the radio stations that played it at all hours of the day.
  • Comedic italian group "Elio e le Storie Tese" managed to do it in the title of their first record thanks to Bilingual Bonus: it's called "Elio Samaga Hukapan Kariyana Turu", which in Tamil means "let's happily fart and come with Elio". Unsurprisingly, they got even better at it by mixing silly music with Black Comedy.
  • The lyric sheet for Garbage's psycho breakup song "Vow" (possibly one of the most brutal, vengeance-soaked, unhinged breakup songs ever written) includes the phrase "I came to knock you up, I came to break you down" in the chorus. If you listen to the actual track, however, it doesn't quite sound like that, especially as the song makes a lot more sense with "fuck" in the first clause. (Though Shirley Manson (aka The Creepiest Woman In Rock)'s delivery ratchets the nastiness up to 11 all by itself...)
    • Happens in the chorus of the second verse. That word in that particular spot is different in every chorus repetition, which makes it especially sneaky.
  • "Rock DJ" by Robbie Williams features the lines "I've got the gift/Gonna stick it in the goal" and "Give no head/No backstage passes", and is quite frequently heard uncensored on radio.
  • ...I told the Witch Doctor I was in love with you. I told the Witch Doctor I was in love with you. And then the Witch Doctor, he told me what to do, he told me Ooh Eeh Ooh Ah Ah Ting Tang Walla Walla Bing Bang...
  • Long-forgotten 80s funk-rock band Extreme had a minor UK hit with 'Get the Funk Out'. Nobody, but nobody, realises that is the title when they hear it on the radio. The chorus "If you don't like/ what you see here/ get the funk out (oh getthefunkout, getthefunkout) we won't try to/ force-feed you/ get the FUNK out" doesn't even make sense, other than as a means of getting Radio 2 to play it.
    • Funk isn't about making sense, funk is about partying. And getting crap past the radar.
  • Alizee-Moi lolita. So laden with references in lyrics and videoclip,the singer confessed it was about the title subject, and its being played in supermarkets and the like. Shows how few people know the term lolita, or what a lolita complex is.
  • Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo is really a song just about sexual innuendos.
    • "Put the you-know-what in the you-know-where, put the you-know-what in the you-know-where."
  • Electric Light Orchestra's "Oh No Not Susan" managed to get past BBC policies and had their song played on the air, with "fucking" uncensored.
  • How "Relax" by Frankie Goes To Hollywood ever got on the radio is a mystery. It's not even innuendo: there's not even the smallest attempt at hiding the fact that it's about sex.
    • Especially with the music video...
  • The Killers' "Mr Brightside" makes the following lyrical dodge: "Now they're going to bed, and my stomach is sick, and it's all in my head, but she's touching his....chest now"
  • Whether it's intentional or not, The Jonas Brothers have gotten away with this quite a few times, the most prominent being from their song Live To Party:

I drove her home and then she whispered in my ear/"the party doesn't have to end, we can dance here."

    • Another surprising example from Poison Ivy, where the narrator describes a poisonous relationship/girl:

Everybody gets the itch, everybody hates that *guitar riff*

  • The Guns 'N' Roses song "Welcome to the Jungle" could be seen as a metaphor for sex. The singer talks to a "very sexy girl/ That's very hard to please" then he goes on to say "Feel my, my, my serpentine / I, I wanna hear you scream".
    • It's also interesting that an old word for orgasm is die. So when the singer says "You're in the jungle baby /You're gonna die" he means ...
    • Brings a whole new meaning to the song "(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight".
      • That's exactly the meaning the singer/writer intended. The title came to him (geddit?) while having sex with his girlfriend.
  • "The Art of the Ground Round" by PDQ Bach has a movement which sounds innocuous when sung by one person, but when combined in a round becomes:

Singer 1: ...... Look ... her ..... face could launch...
Singer 2: She's ..... up ... dress-ing, she'll...

    • This type of song is known as a "diagonal catch", and has been popular since the Renaissance, at least.
  • The Rolling Stones' Start Me Up... after singing "you make a grown man cry" a couple of times, the last line of the song is "You make a dead man come".
    • "Brown Sugar" is even worse. The song is reportedly about some guy having his way with one of his slave girls, yet, somehow, the song topped the U.S. charts.
  • No one mentioned Stroker Ace by Lovage? It gets weird. "It looks like you both can use a pet" "Stroking is a start, only for the wild at heart" and they cover it as if they're talking about cats, hahaha. (Not mention the whispering of 'Pussy' every other line.) "I'd like to watch if you don't mind..."
  • Cat. Scratch. Fever.
    • Better example: Little Miss Danger-Ass (which is how he pronounces it every time, throughout the song).
      • How is that a better example than "make a pussy burn with a stroke of my hand"? The only crap that song gets past the radar is putting Ted's daughter on the album cover as the titular Miss Dangerous.
  • Fanny (whose name is not an example, at least intentionally, since they didn't know what that word means in the UK until after the fact) slip the whispered line "So fucking hard..." into "Rock Bottom Blues".
  • Brazilian singer/songwriter Chico Buarque's song "Apesar de você" snuck past the Brazilian military dictatorship's censors by using Subtext to hide its true message ("we're really angry at you for being so evil and I'm going to be celebrate the inevitable day comes that the people destroy you") as the love song of a jilted man. The censors only picked up on it after the release, and ever after they paid extra-close attention to the guy's songs, rejecting perfectly innocent songs of his for imagined reasons.
  • Led Zeppelin is quite good at this. Several songs, such as "Trampled Underfoot" get significant radio airplay despite consisting almost entirely of innuendo.
  • Surprised to see no mention of Dire Straits' "Money For Nothing." The played-on-radio single version is unedited, so the second verse is

That little faggot with the earring and the make-up
Yeah buddy, that's his own hair
That little faggot got his own jet airplane
That little faggot, he's a millionaire

    • 25 years after its release, Canadian authorities have finally gotten around to banning it from the airwaves! Your tax dollars at work.
  • Possibly 'Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover' by Sophie B. Hawkins, when she says 'I'd rock you till the daylights come' which sounds an awful lot like fuck in the first verse.
  • The song "Wolves" by Chasing Victory mentions a "girl in a short skirt showing off her assets". Pretty tame by normal standards, but this is a Christian Rock band.
  • The entirety of 'Meet your Master' by Nine Inch Nails seems to be about gay BDSM. They probably couldn't be much more blatant about it if they tried...
  • Queen's "Radio Ga Ga" is a literal example of Getting crap caca past the radar: Although originally intended as a lament to TV taking over good ol' radio, it was conceived by writer Roger Taylor as "Radio Caca"—consequently doubling as a criticism of the same good ol' radio. If Taylor is to be believed, however, the band never changed the wording, and it remains "radio caca" in the recording, in spite of its title (no thanks to Media Watchdogs.
  • Katy Perry's "Hot n Cold" featured the lyric "You PMS like a bitch I would know". Radio edits of the song were produced to rectify that—one replacing "bitch" with "chick" and "girl".
  • The Madonna songs "4 Minutes" and "Like a Prayer". "4 Minutes" is obviously about sex, and "Like a Prayer" is about going down on a man for the first time.

4 Minutes: "If you want it, you already got it/If you thought it, it better be what you want/If you feel it, it must be real/Just say the word and I will give you what you want", "I want somebody to speed it up for me/Then take it down slow, there's enough room for both/Girl, I can handle that, you just gotta show me where it's at/Are you ready to go? Are you ready to go?", "Time is waiting, we only got 4 minutes to save the world/No hesitating, grab a boy, grab a girl/Time is waiting, we only got 4 minutes to save the world/No hesitating, we only got 4 minutes, 4 minutes", and
Like a Prayer: "When you call my name it's like a little prayer/I'm down on my knees, I wanna take you there/In the midnight hour I can feel your power/Just like a prayer you know I'll take you there" and "I hear your voice, it's like an angel sighing/I have no choice, I hear your voice/Feels like flying/I close my eyes, Oh God I think I'm falling/Out of the sky, I close my eyes/Heaven help me".

  • Busted is made of this trope. When Jonas Brothers covered their song "What I Go To School For", they had to change a good 70% of the lyrics. The song is about a student who wants to sleep with the teacher.

"And I fought my way to front of class To get the best view of her ass I dropped a pencil on the floor She bends down and shows me more."
"Everyone that you teach all day But you're looking at me in a different way I guess, that's why My marks are getting so high."

    • That's nothing. Air Hostess is the god of this. "The cabin pressure's rising. My coke has got no ice in there." "I messed my pants When we flew over France." "Will I see you soon In my hotel room?", And THIS is a band that was England's version of Jonas Brothers back in 2000.
  • Special mention should be paid to Green Sleaves, a folk song from late 16th century England. Though now ubiquitously associated with the general festivities of the Christmas holidays, the original song was a ballad about a character referred to as Lady Green Sleaves. According to The Other Wiki (where Viewers Are Geniuses), the common interpretation is that her epithet "Green Sleaves" may have implied that she was a...certain kind of woman. At the time of the song's composition, "green" had erotic connotations, and "green gown" in particular referred to a woman whose dress sleaves would accumulate green grass stains. From lying on the grass. On her back. This would have given the song a very racy meaning, in a cultural context long since forgotten in everyday life. Even today, one could imagine the Moral Guardians blushing if they knew about this.
  • The Kingsmen's garbled, unintelligible version of "Louie Louie" ignited controversy in the McCarthy-era United States, to the point where an official federal coalition was formed to determine the exact lyrics of the song and whether or not they were obscene (The verses were rumored to contain references to getting busy in a drive-in movie). What said coalition seems to have missed was the point in the song (about 54 seconds in) when the band's drummer broke his stick and clearly yelled "FUCK" loud enough to register on the vocal mic.
  • Several novelty songs of Lito Camo from the The Philippines which he claims to have been derived from children's songs. This may be true but when they are taken out of context, sung by an all-girls sexy group and their steps re-choreographed...results are different.

Sasara ang bulaklak, bubuka ang bulaklak, dadaan ang reyna ang saya-saya! (The flower will close, the flower will open and the Queen will pass through, it's so fun!)

  • Ke$ha's new song 'C U Next Tuesday' uses the phrase perfectly innocently, but look at the capitalized letters in the title. This has no relation to the song as far as I can tell but seems to be there just to see if she can get away with it.
    • Let's not forget "Grow A Pear."
  • The Bomfunk M.C.s managed to slip a reference to a porn movie AND a F-word past the censors on "Freestyler" in the verse before the second chorus:

"We deliver anything from acappellas
To propellers, suckers get jealous
But their soft like marshmallows
You know they can't handle us
Like Debbie Does Dallas
Yeah, we come scandalous,
So who the fuck is Alice
Is she from Buckingham Palace?

  • Captain Sensible of The Damned recorded a cover version of "Happy Talk" from South Pacific in 1982 - but changed the lyric "Golly baby, I'm a lucky cause" to "Golly baby, I'm a lucky cunt". The vocal take on the single was recorded after a day spent down the pub and kept in as a joke. The word itself is drawn out enough to make it sound enough like "cause" "cuss" not to be censored or banned from airplay. The Captain confirmed which word he sang on the record in a 2005 book published to commemorate 1000 #1 singles in the UK charts - "Happy Talk" being one of them!
  • Iron Maiden has two: "Tailgunner", from No Prayer For The Dying, is about an aerial battle. Then using an airplane name as a replacement for a cuss word ("Nail that fokker, kill that son") fits well. And "El Dorado", from The Final Frontier, has a Stealth Pun on a British offense - "I'm a clever banker's face, with just a letter out of place".
  • The radio edit of Missy Elliot's "Work It" alters the line "Let's get drunk, this gon' bring us closer!" But the word substituted for "drunk" is "crunk", a portmanteau for "crazy drunk"
  • The Ramones were forced to pull "Carbona Not Glue" off their 1977 album Leave Home due to potential law suit - the makers of the cleaning solvent Carbona probably would not be thrilled with it being endorsed as an inhalant. The track would eventually be restored to reissues of the album, but well before then the band managed to slip in an unlisted live version on 1991's Loco Live.
    • "53rd and 3rd" is also about a gay prostitute.
  • The single and album versions of The Bobby Fuller Four's "I Fought The Law" were different takes of the song. On the single version, Bobby sings, "I miss my baby and HER GOOD FUN." On the album version, Bobby sings, "I miss my baby and A GOOD FUCK." Oldies radio seems to be blissfully unaware of the difference in lyrics, since it's almost always the album version that gets airplay in the modern era.

(HINT: The more innocuous single version was mono-only. If it's stereo, it's the naughtier album version.)

  • It can be VERY safely said that all music played these days (such as Lady Gaga, Usher, Britney Spears, Katy Perry, and several other countless pop and rap names) is DEDICATED to this trope.
  • The French Song by Joan Jett. The chorus describes a threesome - in French.
  • In the song Bottoms Up by Trey Songz and Nicki Minaj, Nicki clearly says

"If a bitch try to get cute/ I'mma stomp her/ Throw a lotta money at her then yell/ Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her / then yell fuck her "

    • This goes completely uncensored on the radio, but references to a 380 pistol are promptly censored.
  • According to Word of God from Bryan Adams, the 69 in the song "Summer of 69" doesn't refer to the year. Enforcing this is the fact that as the song fades out at the end, you can hear him sing "Me and my baby in 69". Strangely, Jim Vallance, who co-wrote the song with Bryan Adams, denied this, but Bryan basically confirmed it, so it just depends on who you believe. (By the way, Vallance was 17 at the summer of 1969, but Adams was only 9.)
  • "Pretty Vacant" by Sex Pistols features a rather... unusual enunciation of the title lyric.
  • Prince has invoked this trope more than once.
    • The album Dirty Mind.
    • Controversy: "Jack U Off" - self-explanatory.
    • 1999: "Little Red Corvette" is seemingly a song about a famous American car, but really refers to a woman's downstairs.
    • Purple Rain: "Darling Nikki" single-handedly led to the formation of the infamous PMRC.
  • In Van Halen's "Everybody Wants Some," David Lee Roth ad-libs "Where'd you get that shit?" and "Look, I'll pay you for it, what the fuck...". These profanities are never censored whenever the song is played on the radio.
  • The French song "Les Sucettes" even got past the radar of its own singer. It was written by Serge Gainsbourg for pop idol France Gall and is ostensibly about a girl who enjoys lollipops, but it was obvious to the public, once it was released, that it was actually about oral sex. Gall, just eighteen when the song was recorded (and this was 1966) had no idea until she saw the public's reaction. She felt hurt and betrayed by Gainsbourg and ended their professional relationship. "Sucette" is also a notorious porn cartoon about the sexual adventures of a young French girl.
  • Let's all remember that "rock 'n' roll" was, in its day, a euphemism for sex.
  • Sabaton's Metal Machine has "Come touch my metal machine!" repeated several times. It sounds innocent until you get to the end where the singer shouts "Come hold my metal machine!" and then finishes off with "Come suck my metal machine!" Hmm, now what "metal machine" can you touch, hold and suck?
  • The back cover of Sweet's Give Us a Wink depicts a wall with graffiti that would only make sense if "wink" were changed to "wank".
  • George Formby was very much known for this in The Thirties, in particular phallic references such as "With My Little Ukulele In My Hand". He didn't quite manage it with When I'm Cleaning Windows, probably his best known hit, which was banned by The BBC. Unsurprising given lyrics like those below...

The blushing bride, she looks divine,
The bridegroom, he is doing fine,
I'd rather have his job than mine,
When I'm cleaning windows!

  • The song "Jet Airliner" by the Steve Miller Band features the line "funky shit going down in the city". Some stations use the radio edit, which replaces the word with "kicks". Other stations use the original...
  • Jars of Clay's song "Heaven" may very well be the only song about sex to ever become a Christian radio single.
  • The chorus of the song "Right Round" by Flo-Rida goes, "You spin my head right round, right round/When you go down, when you go down down." The song makes it pretty clear that he's with a stripper, but he's not talking about the head that you think.
  • There exists an almost universally rejected subgenre of metal named "National Socialist Black Metal," according to That Other Wiki. Most metal musicians (including black metallers) criticise and berate it for, among others, contradicting "[metal's] focus on individualism." Even some white supremacists with a conservative m.o. lashed at it for having a "black" or "negroid" influence.
  • C'est la Vie by B*witched is a '90s pop song sung from the perspective of a child wanting to see a friend's treehouse and compare it to her own house. Innocent enough, except that this is relayed through the lyrics "I'll show you mine if you show me yours."
  • Tom Lehrer has "I Got It From Agnes". "It" is never actually described, but it's certainly implied that it's an STI. It also sneaks a bisexual or homosexual orgy in at one point, as well as bestiality and incest. However, it's worth noting that this did NOT get past the radar around the time of it's release. Still a pretty worthwhile attempt...
  • Same concept with Procol Harum's "A Souvenir of London".

Want to keep it confidential, but the truth is leaking out,
Got a souvenir in London. There's a lot of it about.

  • Ludo has "Whipped Cream", all about the odd antics that a person taking advantage does. It's not so subtle with the music video though.
  • "Faster" by Matt Nathanson gets fairly regular radio play (at least to my knowledge) despite its subject, which can be discerned by paying attention for less than one line.
  • Particularly since the über-PC 1990s, Country Music has an ultra low tolerance for anything even resembling profanity. And yet:
    • Garth Brooks somehow got "It's Midnight Cinderella", complete with the line "By the way he's walking, I can guess where your slipper's at", into the top 5.
    • Sugarland's "It Happens" sticks a "Pssh" interjection before the title.
    • The Kenny Chesney / George Strait duet "Shiftwork" draws out the I and almost elides the F.
    • Toby Keith went the Spoonerism route on "American Ride" by singing "The fit's gonna hit the shan".
    • In 1992, Joe Diffie got "Ships That Don't Come In" to #1 despite having the lyric "we bitch about a dollar" in it. This is pretty much the only mainstream country song ever to have that word in it.
    • In 2005, Blake Shelton somehow got a four-week #1 hit with a song titled "Some Beach". Say that out loud and see if you can figure out what he's really meaning to say.
  • 19th century hymn:

O higher than the cherubim
More glorious than the seraphim
Lead their praises. Hallelujah!
Thou bearer of the eternal Word
Most gracious, magnify the Lord

  • There's a lovely old Swedish folk song called "Uti vår hage" which most school kids get to learn by heart. It's a sweet song about a girl inviting a boy out to the meadow to pick a certain selection of berries and flowers. Put them together, and you have... an old home remedy intended to cause miscarriage.
  • And the Lords of Acids, who pretty much ignores censors and just.. makes their songs. Among them "I must Increase my bust", a song about how a girl wants to have gigantic breasts to get men, or "I sit on Acid." which starts with the line
  • Yes, Fergie's "London Bridge" is about a spit roast or lazy H or whatever you want to call it. One guy doing a girl via rear entry, and the other getting a blowjob from the same girl.
  • Indigenous had album art where the inside flap featured a man going on a vision quest. But he's holding his loincloth up. Yes, he's naked.

Darling come here, f*** me up the *Techno noise*

I'm a Communist because I'm left handed,
That's the hand I use...well, never mind.

  • The line 'walking in the moonlight' in the fade-out to ABBA's 'Summer Night City' sounds an awful lot like 'fucking in the moonlight'.
  • The Yeah Yeah Yeahs' 'Bang' got played on the radio, despite the line 'as a fuck, son, you suck!'
  • Space's duet with Cerys Matthews, 'The Ballad Of Tom Jones', contains the line 'and I just want to cut off your nuts'. It made it past the censors, although Cerys didn't sing the word 'nuts' when she and the band peformed it on some TV shows.
  • Clint Black's album track "Straight from the Factory" has the line "You're the only lock that's made to fit my key."
  • The Smashing Pumpkins' single "Zero" includes the line "Bullshit Fakers", which has never been censored on American Radio, to this day.
  • Cage The Elephant's single "In One Ear" featured the line "The crowd will only like me if they're really fuckin' drunk". The radio edit did change this... to "the crowd will only like me if they're all smacked up". Thus, they got rid of an f-bomb, but also changed a reference to drinking to a reference to heroin use.
  • The Kinks did a song about pollution and environmental issues called Apeman. Opinion is divided as to whether one line, delivered in a cod-reggae accent by Ray Davies, goes the air pollution is a-foggin' up my eyes.... or, er, something else. It is just ambiguous enough. The BBC plays it without censorship, anyway.
  • And the name of an actually not-bad indie band - the Test Icicles. Again the BBC let this go without comment.
  • Green Day's song "Longview" says the phrase "I smell like shit" more than once, but Billie Joe Armstrong, the band's singer, doesn't pronounce the "T" in the offending word. This goes completely unedited on radio.
  • X Japan had a quite amusing variant that combined this with Refuge in Audacity. The original version of "Stab Me In The Back" is Intercourse with You + Stuffy Old Songs About the Buttocks. It is literally begging to be the receptive partner in male-male anal sex. So, when the band had to do this song on an album that wasn't released by their own label, 1991's Jealousy, it of course had to be rewritten. And Yoshiki did so, rewriting the song to be entirely about using drugs (which was, at the time, an even bigger taboo in Japan than gay sex). This rewrite is the one that is on Jealousy.
  • Jojo's second album "The High Road" was an exercise in this very trope.
  • Lola by The Kinks was censored by the BBC not for its lyrics about a sexual tryst with a transvestite, but for its use of the brand name Coca-Cola. This was duly changed to "cherry cola". Probably more a case of Letting Crap Past The Radar.
    • Their next single, Apeman, contains the line "this air pollution is fogging up my eyes". They knew it sounds like "fucking". We know it sounds like "fucking". And whoever produced the album knew it sounds like "fucking", since they very clumsily reduce that solitary word's volume so it's barely audible. Ironically, while everyone involved claims it's definitely "fogging", this makes it harder to decipher whether Ray Davies does actually sing "fogging" or "fucking".
  • Even The Monkees managed this. Their song "Gonna Buy Me A Dog" is about a guy whose girlfriend has just broken up with him. It includes the lines "She used to keep me so contented / But I can teach a dog to do that!" This went right over my head at age 11; hearing the song again some 20 years later, my reaction was, "They said WHAT?!!"
  • Steps were a very family-friendly pop group with many young fans, famous in Britain during the late 1990s-early 2000s. Their video for the song "Say You'll Be Mine" (a cheesy but clean love song) showed them re-enacting famous scenes from romantic movies, including the one from There's Something About Mary where Cameron Diaz spikes her hair up. We can only guess that young viewers weren't aware what she was using as hair gel in the original ...
  • Every protest song during a dictatorship or totalitarian regime ever, if they want to get it past the censors.
  • Bloodhound Gang just bowls right over the radar with almost blunt innuendos. Though most famously is "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo" which is laden with innuendo. though that was to sneak the true innuendo with the title as it just so happens to use military phoenetics and once you figure it out, well.
  • The music video for "Is Anybody Out There?" by K'naan and Nelly Furtado features 3 different examples of this trope. At the beginning, when the emo looking girl is inside of the comic book store and the man asks her if she's gonna buy something, she yells "Shit! Leave me alone!" at him. Later on, some other girl sees her looking in the window of the restaurant she's eating in and she says "What a skank..." and then shortly after that, the emo girl writes STFU on the window of a restaurant and flips the bird at everyone inside. This video gets regular rotation on VH-1.
  • Huey Lewis and the News' "Power of Love" is a cheerful little pop ditty about the Power of Love, right? And certainly appropriate for the soundtrack of a PG-rated film like Back to The Future (although heaven knows that film has a pretty long entry of its own on the film sub-page of this trope), right? Except that one of the ways that the lyrics describe the Power of Love is as "Stronger and harder than a bad girl's dream...." So yeah, that's perfectly innocent.
  • Spice Girl Emma Bunton's solo hit "What Took You So Long" sneaks in the line "I'll Suck You All Night" instead of the official "What Took You All Night", if you listen closely from around 2:00.
    • In "A Girl Like Me", if one pays attention to the lyric Cant - with a Girl like me, one can either use "mess" or "fuck" and it'll still make sense.
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