|
How to
Detect "Offensive" Gold
Standard Songs
|
-
The H.U.M.S. Committee had clear
instructions to disregard supposed “offensiveness” of any song under
consideration for inclusion on the Gold Standard Song List (see
Gold Standard Song List Selection Criteria).
-
Indeed, how could anyone put together
any list of 5,000 songs spanning 100 years and 14 genres without including
(even inadvertently) some songs likely to offend some people? Even
“Christopher Robin At Buckingham Palace” must surely offend vast segments
of certain self-righteous populations.
-
So, if you’re on the lookout for
“offensive” songs (sigh), here’s a list of keywords and phrases to start
you off. Enter
these keywords on the Song Title page (a
page that lists all 5,000 songs). Some of these keywords will flag song titles,
others will flag songwriters. These keywords will lead you to only a
sampling of all the songs and songwriters on the GSSL deemed “offensive”
by the sanctimonious.
2Pac
arab
bitch
Catholic
cop
Delorme
Frank Zappa
fuck
Jesus
|
jew
kill
Kinky Friedman
kkk
Mafia
Monty Python
N. W. A.
nigga
nigger
|
Notorious B. I. G.
Ol’Dirty Bastard
penis
Public Enemy
pussy
sperm
thug
Vatican
Wu-Tang
|
-
Finally, a couple of quotes to inspire
you in your search:
The great artists of the world are never
Puritans and seldom respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the
YMCA sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a
symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading.
— H. L. Mencken
In Italy for 30
years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed,
but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.
In Switzerland they had brotherly love—they had 500 years of democracy
and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.
— Harry Lime in Graham Greene's The Third Man
|