D
dalethorn
Guest
never knew that story, Pete. Pretty cool. Makes me appreciate that tune a bit more.
A friend of my wife's we hung out with in 1972, he was black (African-American), and he objected to the line "and the colored girls go ...." -- the song was very important then for many reasons - Lou Reed's Transformer and David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust kicked off Glamrock in a huge way in the U.S., providing some relief from the excesses of the late 1960's. Walk On The Wild Side ran into censor problems for "...but she never lost her head, even when she was giving....", but us kids knew in an instant, and lack of Internet was no deterrent.
But move forward a few years to Money For Nothing, and we still have these censor issues - for example in the mid-1980s MTV played the video uncensored, radio stations spun it as well, but forward into the 2000's it's no longer acceptable in general society for the gay slurs.
Race, gender, and age sensitivities were all the rage in 1972, and one of my wife's friends used to intone so seriously back then "We're not girls, we're women" -- but fast-forward to the 90's and 2000's and here in the U.S. they're now called "guys". -Unintended consequences.