Sitting in my porch swing
Strummin’ My four string
Making up verses as I go along
It don’t really matter
If they’re gooder or badder
I’ll take Jimmy’s music
and make it my own
Updating songs, rewriting lyrics, and repurposing tunes are a thing, but they’re not a new thing. Music is not stonework. The times they are a changing, and so are the verses.
- Americans repurposed “God Save the King” as “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” in 1831
- Canada now commands patriot love in “all of us” not just in her sons.
- Cee Lo Imagined all religion instead of no religion as ideal
- Paul Simon can’t decide if everything is better or worse in black and white.
- Jimmy Buffet probably hasn’t sung Margaritaville as written in decades.
- Weird Al. Just Weird Al.
Music (and life) are all about context, and contexts change both on the small scale (Ireland to your SAS town) and large scale (the Baby It’s Cold Outside conversation)
I don’t think anybody has serious problems with the loving tributes and parodies.
If you’re going to fix a lyric then know your audience and be deliberate and careful to make the point that you want to make. If you don’t know your audience, especially if your audience is broad, and if you don’t want to engage in social conversation then go elsewhere.
Don’t fear offending people, but don’t offend people casually. Make sure you understand what you’re singing, if it may be offensive to your audience, and why. Then be deliberate about if that’s a point you want to make.
Updating your Irish song is good because it directly insults your audience, and that’s not your point. Know thy audience
Updating BICO is good if you want to make a point about consent.
Updating Imagine was bad since Cee Lo didn’t intend to make the point he made. He was just trying to avoid controversy, and you can’t mess with Lennon’s message without making people talk.
There definitely are songs that I won’t sing because external context gives them meaning that I don’t intend. In several cases this was meaning that I didn’t even have the context to understand just from the lyrics.
And there are some songs with lyrics I find vile and yet are so compelling I love and sing them anyway. Looking at you,
Shaggy