Some of you have put this much more succinctly and better than me, but here’s my two pennorth...
Have missed much of this, but I have since watched the video in question and commented accordingly beneath it. I think as with all these things, there are black, white and many many shades of grey. Funny that you should mention two Lennon songs Randy, Run For Your Life is a particularly awkward one. “I’d rather see you dead little girl than to be with another man.” Is Lennon describing his willingness to kill his partner? Or using extreme language to illustrate how desperate he is if she should leave him, but he wouldn’t actually follow through with the act? Who knows, it’s not as if we can ask him now. But that is what sets Lennon’s Beatles songs apart. There’s an edginess to them, often bordering on, or straying into, fairly unpleasant territory, which you don’t get with Macca’s songs ( no disrespect to Macca, I love his songs equally). Either way, as much as I love Lennon, it’s one of his songs I’ve steered clear of thus far because it makes me uncomfortable. Is it much different to Delilah, which I have sung before? Well to my mind, I think there’s a nastiness in Lennon’s lyric which isn’t present in Delilah. As I’ve said previously, we have a long tradition of Murder Ballads here (See Matty Groves etc). I’m not equating “traditional” with automatically acceptable, otherwise we’d still have bear baiting and other such cruelty, but you have to take each song on its merits, as YOU see them, as per your sensitivities and personal politics, and make your own mind up that is a) very offensive b) not at all offensive c) somewhere in between. Everyone’s idea of what constitutes a, b or c will differ. You know Every Breath You Take is a very popular song, it’s even been used as a wedding song, but the lyrics point to a very unhealthy obsessive love, it’s stalking really. But that hasn’t stopped many people taking it a completely different way. There was a recent furore about the Robin Thicke song Blurred Lines, which was accused of misogyny. Seemed to me it was simply a song about meeting someone, finding them attractive and wanting to have sex with them, which is pretty much the bedrock of Rock and Roll. You can find offence in almost anything these days if you’ve a mind to find it. The Chiffons, “He’s so fine, I’m gonna make him mine”. Well what if he doesn’t want you to make him yours? Isn’t there something vaguely menacing about that point of view.? Well I guess there is if you look hard enough. There are people who seem to be professional offence takers, and at the other end of the scale you have the “It’s PC gone mad!” camp. In between there are the rest of us, trying to make sense of it all. Trying not to be deliberately offensive, but having the capacity to make our own judgements. Sometimes we’ll get it wrong, sometimes right. I don’t think there is any need for a PC censor. I think we all have the capacity to consider who we are singing too, and to know that a song that might be harmless in one context, wouldn’t be in another. Interestingly, our uke group plays both Delilah and Running Bear, plus another interesting one you didn’t mention, She Wears Red Feathers, regularly to groups, none of whom have ever raised any objection. I think this is partly down to the age profile of our audience, who have a fondness for these songs and remember them from the charts when they were younger. We don’t tend play Bad Moon Rising when we sing in hospice settings because of the line “Hope you are quite prepared to die.” We are quite capable of censoring ourselves.
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