Song medleys that some radio stations purposely leave out or cut parts out

[signalman]

Then you have them edit out the line of Money For Nothing by Dire Straits that mentions "Look at the f**t with the earring and the make up, yeah that's his own hair" from their airplay, but I imagine that was done in the studio before time.

I've heard both the edited and unedited version of that song on the radio.  The same goes for Steve Miller's "Jet Airliner".  I've heard both "funky shit going down in the city" and "funky kicks going down in the city" versions.

[Big John]

Or in baseball where the batter "mishit" the ball?

[golden eagle]

Then you have them edit out the line of Money For Nothing by Dire Straits that mentions "Look at the f**t with the earring and the make up, yeah that's his own hair" from their airplay, but I imagine that was done in the studio before time.

I remember the F-word was always included in the song. In recent years, no station plays it.

Other medley that could be played on their own is INXS' "Need You Tonight/Mediate". "Mediate" even had its own video, which was a ripoff of a Bob Dylan video.

[roadman65]

Then you have them edit out the line of Money For Nothing by Dire Straits that mentions "Look at the f**t with the earring and the make up, yeah that's his own hair" from their airplay, but I imagine that was done in the studio before time.

I've heard both the edited and unedited version of that song on the radio.  The same goes for Steve Miller's "Jet Airliner".  I've heard both "funky shit going down in the city" and "funky kicks going down in the city" versions.

Was there ever an edit for Reo Speedwagon's Tough Guys?  I have always heard that line even  when played on WPLJ in New York when they were  a Rock station  at the time and not what they are today when then they played it as "They think they're full of shit" during the early 80s. Then shortly after High In Fidelity, the album it was on, lost popularity the song stopped being played there even though Take It On The Run and Keep On Lovin You kept getting airplay afterward are still played on rock and adult contemporary stations to this day.

[signalman]

Was there ever an edit for Reo Speedwagon's Tough Guys?

If one exists, I've never heard it.

[Laura]

Edit :Speaking of edits What the heck is going on with this site?  It edits out the one word I am trying to make a point of on Money For Nothing and twice it changed it to the word cigarette in this here post.  It looks like music is not the only one editing out things.  Scary I must say.  The word I am talking about is obvious to what it is, but it is the one word to a gay person that is equivlant to the N word for African Americans.

This was covered on page 1 of the thread.

Anyway, "Hotel California" is the first song that comes to mind when I think of a song edited for radio due to time, although I can't think what station plays it this way.

Our classic rock station 100.7 the Bay is really good about playing unedited songs - I'm going to listen for the big ones covered in this thread ("Walk on the Wild Side", "Money for Nothing") and see what they do about those. I don't recall them editing anything, though.

Any reason that songs that generally use the word "bitch" air on stations unedited? I can think of stations who leave out references to bad things (like editing the word smoking) that play "The Bitch is Back" and "I'm a Bitch, I'm a lover" unedited.

[Pete from Boston]

I can't believe there are stations that edit out references to smoking or that they still have listeners.  Are they Radio Disney?

"Bitch" is not considered offensive to community standards in the way "fuck" is (and certainly not on the FCC "list").  Ban "bitch" and you might as well ban "hell" and "damn."  If you can say "ass" on the radio, there's no reason you can't say "bitch."

[freebrickproductions]

Censored songs: Steve Miller's "Jet Airliner" has the single edit (which also appears on his greatest hits album that every college kid owns) that changes "funky shit goin' down in the city" to "funky kicks." I've only heard the uncensored version on XM, never on FM. First time I heard it I was surprised because I had only heard the single edit, but the censored lyric doesn't make any sense anyway

I have a copy of the Steve Miller's Greatest Hit's album and it has the uncensored version of "Jet Airliner" on it.

[1995hoo]

Censored songs: Steve Miller's "Jet Airliner" has the single edit (which also appears on his greatest hits album that every college kid owns) that changes "funky shit goin' down in the city" to "funky kicks." I've only heard the uncensored version on XM, never on FM. First time I heard it I was surprised because I had only heard the single edit, but the censored lyric doesn't make any sense anyway

I have a copy of the Steve Miller's Greatest Hit's album and it has the uncensored version of "Jet Airliner" on it.

Must be something new, then, because I've had a copy for about 20 years (not coincidentally, I was in college 20 years ago) and it has the censored version.

[PHLBOS]

Censored songs: Steve Miller's "Jet Airliner" has the single edit (which also appears on his greatest hits album that every college kid owns) that changes "funky shit goin' down in the city" to "funky kicks." I've only heard the uncensored version on XM, never on FM. First time I heard it I was surprised because I had only heard the single edit, but the censored lyric doesn't make any sense anyway

I have a copy of the Steve Miller's Greatest Hit's album and it has the uncensored version of "Jet Airliner" on it.

Must be something new, then, because I've had a copy for about 20 years (not coincidentally, I was in college 20 years ago) and it has the censored version.

If memory serve, the censored version of that song had a shorter intro whereas the uncensored version had the long-synthesizer intro.  IIRC, the former was originally made for the single 45 release and the version that AM stations would play whereas the latter was in the original album (Book of Dreams) and played on FM stations.

FWIW, from Wiki

The single edit was included on the original release of Greatest Hits 1974—78, although the full album version has been used for later reissues of the compilation.

I'm surprise that nobody yet mentioned Nickelback's Rockstar; many stations play a version that even has the word drug censored out (drugs come cheap..., everybody's got a drug dealer on speed dial) of the lyrics.

For many years, FM radio stations would always play the Who's Who Are You? unedited (the latter part of the song contains the F-bomb (Oh who the f%&k are you?)); now that particular portion of the song is completely cut out.

True story, when I first heard Wild Cherry's Play that Funky Music on an AM music station (Boston's WRKO before it became an all-talk station); I thought they were saying the F-bomb (it wasn't called such back then) and thought "Can they say that on the radio?"  Before anyone says how naive I was; let me state that I was about 9 or 10 at the time and did not regularly listen to FM radio then.

[Laura]

Speaking of Steve Miller: Fly Like an Eagle is another song where the beginning and end instrumentals are often edited out for radio play.


iPhone

[jp the roadgeek]

You know what songs that are not played together, but should be played somewhere on radio.  The China Cat Sunflower and I Know You Rider medley from Grateful Dead off their Europe 72 album.  I love the transition between the two songs with the long intro jam for I Know You Rider.

Those two songs were married to each other in the Dead's repertoire from 1971 on. They were played apart a total of 5 times from 72-'95.

[Brandon]

I can't believe there are stations that edit out references to smoking or that they still have listeners.  Are they Radio Disney?

"Bitch" is not considered offensive to community standards in the way "fuck" is (and certainly not on the FCC "list").  Ban "bitch" and you might as well ban "hell" and "damn."  If you can say "ass" on the radio, there's no reason you can't say "bitch."

Fuck it, let's just bring back the Hays Code. 

[1995hoo]

....

For many years, FM radio stations would always play the Who's Who Are You? unedited (the latter part of the song contains the F-bomb (Oh who the f%&k are you?)); now that particular portion of the song is completely cut out.

....

I heard that song (uncensored) yesterday, though it was on XM so it doesn't really count. I found myself wondering why Pete Townshend found it necessary to include the word "fuck" at all. It doesn't really serve much purpose there.

[PHLBOS]

I heard that song (uncensored) yesterday, though it was on XM so it doesn't really count. I found myself wondering why Pete Townshend found it necessary to include the word "fuck" at all. It doesn't really serve much purpose there.

I agree; nonetheless, the reasoning to include such can be summed up in 2 words... shock factor.

[Buck87]

True story, when I first heard Wild Cherry's Play that Funky Music on an AM music station (Boston's WRKO before it became an all-talk station); I thought they were saying the F-bomb (it wasn't called such back then) and thought "Can they say that on the radio?"  Before anyone says how naive I was; let me state that I was about 9 or 10 at the time and did not regularly listen to FM radio then.

Ha, I had a similar misunderstanding the first few times I heard the Doobie Brothers "Black Water" when I was a kid

[bandit957]

Lou Reed "Take a Walk on the Wild Side"

The pop station in 1987 made replaced "Sex" in "I Want Your Sex" with "Love"  I want your love, I want your love.

It annoyed me when WKRQ in Cincinnati deleted "I Want Your Sex" from 'American Top 40'. That station had no trouble playing that song 5 years later, but they never played it when it was new.

[bandit957]

The pop station in 1987 made replaced "Sex" in "I Want Your Sex" with "Love"  I want your love, I want your love.

That would just sound awful.. I've only heard the real version of that song.

I swear I heard this version once before. It sounded ridiculous.

[bandit957]

I have a copy of the Steve Miller's Greatest Hit's album and it has the uncensored version of "Jet Airliner" on it.

I'm not sure, but I thought the vinyl version was uncensored, while the CD version was censored.

[PHLBOS]

I have a copy of the Steve Miller's Greatest Hit's album and it has the uncensored version of "Jet Airliner" on it.

I'm not sure, but I thought the vinyl version was uncensored, while the CD version was censored.

Repost from several posts back:

From Wiki

The single edit was included on the original release of Greatest Hits 1974—78, although the full album version has been used for later reissues of the compilation.

[Laura]

Okay, just heard Money for Nothin on HOT 100 (100.3 classic rock) outside of DC, and I was waiting to see what they did about the f line, and I got to the end of the song and thought "wait...did they skip the whole stanza?" Because I don't remember hearing it at all. Anyone from DC know from experience if they leave the whole stanza out, or if I was too busy watching traffic to notice?


iPhone

[bandit957]

Okay, just heard Money for Nothin on HOT 100 (100.3 classic rock) outside of DC, and I was waiting to see what they did about the f line, and I got to the end of the song and thought "wait...did they skip the whole stanza?" Because I don't remember hearing it at all. Anyone from DC know from experience if they leave the whole stanza out, or if I was too busy watching traffic to notice?


iPhone

Most stations around here (pop stations at least) always deleted the whole verse. I think there was a promo version for radio stations that removed this verse.

WKRQ always chopped up the song even more. They always cut out the "I want my MTV" chant at the beginning. Their version sounded like they had their hand on the turntable as they started it up.

[golden eagle]

The pop station in 1987 made replaced "Sex" in "I Want Your Sex" with "Love"  I want your love, I want your love.

That would just sound awful.. I've only heard the real version of that song.

I swear I heard this version once before. It sounded ridiculous.

There was a station in Georgia that played a "cleaner" version of "I Wanna Sex You Up" by Color Me Badd. Theirs was "I Wanna Love You Up".

[texaskdog]

Hope I'm not repeating a post but "Cum On Feel The Noize, Girls Rock your boys".  The 2nd line said "Girls, F*ck your boys"  but since it sounded a lot like Rock it slides by every time.

[texaskdog]

I had to laugh reading about the lengths AT40 had to go to have a clean show.  It got worse over the years.  Sorry for the long post but I think it's pretty amusing.

Censorship, offensive songs and affiliate standards[edit]

American Top 40 airs radio edits for American radio stations, no matter what the country it airs in.[citation needed]

Casey Kasem and Watermark's policy regarding putting American Top 40 together was to always play the 40 most popular songs in the United States and never to ban a record from the countdown. However, whenever songs with potentially offensive lyrical content made the top 40, Watermark would send out memos to affiliated stations alerting them of the presence of that song in the countdown and sometimes provide stations with suggestions on how to edit the song out of their AT40 broadcasts. The first song to receive this advisory was in April and May 1971, with a spoken word piece, "The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley", by Terry Nelson and C-Company.[25][26] Some more well-known songs which received this treatment included "Kodachrome" by Paul Simon, "Roxanne" by The Police, "Ain't Love a Bitch" by Rod Stewart, and "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" by Meat Loaf.

Perhaps the most infamous of these songs was Chuck Berry's number-one hit "My Ding-a-Ling", which put some stations in the odd position of having to air AT40 without playing the number one song; at least one station, KELI in Tulsa, Oklahoma, censored out the song at its #1 position, replacing it with a message from station management, explaining why they chose to censor the program.[27] The censorship of this song continues even today as some stations, such as WOGL in Philadelphia, replaced this song with an optional extra when it aired a rerun of the November 18, 1972 broadcast (where it ranked at #14)[28] on December 6, 2008.

In the summer of 1977, radio station KRNQ in Des Moines, Iowa, edited out "The Killing of Georgie" by Rod Stewart, because of the subject matter of a homosexual being murdered;[citation needed] that song peaked at #30 on the countdown.

Another example of this policy dates from 1978, when Billy Joel's "Only the Good Die Young" was on the charts. Because of the nature of the song (Joel singing about urging pre-marital sex by a teen Catholic girl, Virginia), AT40 had placed warnings in shipments to warn affiliates in highly Catholic populated areas along with a special break in the countdown for stations to substitute another song in its place. The affiliates usually used the suggestion, though some did not and no major complaints were ever heard. Many of these memos have been reprinted in Pete Battistini's book, "American Top 40 with Casey Kasem (The 1970s)."

In situations where a charting song contained offensive language and the record company was unable to provide AT40 with a clean edit of the song, the producers would often make an edit themselves. Such was a case with Bob Dylan's Top 40 single, "George Jackson", which peaked at #33 in January 1972 and appeared for two weeks on AT40. The offensive lyric in the song was, "He wouldn't take shit from no one." To rectify the problem, AT40 engineer Bill Hergonson edited the lyric, which was now heard as "He wouldn't take it from no one."[29] A similar situation occurred again in July 1975, when The Isley Brothers' Fight the Power was in the Top 40, but in this case, the substitute version provided by the group's label was unsuitable, resorting to the engineer to substitute grunts and extra drum beats over the offending parts of the original record. However, this was not before AT40 erroneously played the uncensored version (with the lyric "...by all this bullshit goin' down") the first two weeks on the chart, on the July 12 and 19, 1975 editions.[30]

Although Kasem and his crew never banned a song from airplay on the countdown, there was at least one instance in which Kasem refused to announce the title of a song on his show. When George Michael's "I Want Your Sex" hit the Billboard charts in the summer of 1987, Kasem refused to announce the name of the song; only its artist (e.g., "George Michael's latest hit is up five notches this week..."). Also, as had been done with previous controversial hits, because of the song's suggestiveness, the show's structure was altered slightly, so stations could opt out of the song. This pattern was also evident during the 1987 Year End countdown. The song title was mentioned five times during its chart run (June 20, 1987; June 27, 1987; April 7, 1987; December 9, 1987 and September 19, 1987), during the week-ending episode of September 26, 1987, when it dropped out of the Top 40, and during the Top 100 of 1987 show; Shadoe Stevens, his successor, however did mention the title on the show from July 31, 1993 as part of the Flashback feature, as it was in the top 5 from that week in 1987. In the spring of 1991, when "People Are Still Having Sex" by LaTour and "I Wanna Sex You Up" by Color Me Badd debuted the same week, their titles were announced in full.[citation needed]

Another song that had its title unannounced after its first week was "Me So Horny" by 2 Live Crew, in the fall of 1989 [the Shadoe Stevens era]. It was mentioned twice at the beginning of the song, and back announced once, its debut week. For the rest of its chart run, the title was never again mentioned. When the 2 Live Crew returned to the top 40 in the Summer of 1990, with "Banned in the U.S.A.", Shadoe did mention that it was the follow-up to "Me So Horny". The song did come with edit out instructions for stations as well. Other songs around that time with edit out warnings were "The Humpty Dance" by The Digital Underground, and "Tic Tac Toe" by Kyper.

Very rarely does a song on that week's chart be excluded from that week's AT40, if so only due to time considerations–on an edition that aired the weekend of December 19, 1970, The Guess Who's "Share the Land", which ranked at #30 that week, was omitted from AT40, in order to play both sides of that week's #1 Double A-side hit, George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" / "Isn't It a Pity".[31] Normally when a Double A-side appears on the charts, one side is played one week, with the other played the next week, alternating each week as long as it was in the Top 40.

As has been mentioned previously, many rock radio stations in the late 1970s adopted anti-disco stances, and this, too, was reflected in the way some affiliates edited AT40. For example, one 1979 show featured a story about disco saving New York; again, the show was structured so that anti-disco stations could edit the story out of the show. (Notably, Kasem ended the monologue with the prediction that "disco is here to stay," which was proven false in short order, as disco rapidly fell out of fashion by 1980.)

More famously, on the weekend of July 7—8, 1979, Cleveland, Ohio AT40 affiliate WGCL (now WNCX), instead of carrying the "American Top 40 Top 40 Disco Songs" special because of being an anti-disco radio station, did its own version of American Top 40 using the July 7, 1979 Billboard chart as the source with Townsend Coleman handling the hosting duties for Casey Kasem. The special Cleveland-only American Top 40 episode did not feature the AT40 Archives, extras, or Long Distance Dedications — just the top 40 singles of that week, which was preceded by a recap of the previous week's top three. Most of the songs played were longer album versions or 12-inch extended versions. Through clever editing, Coleman also took the "Casey's Coast to Coast" jingle (pronounced "K-C's Coast to Coast") and spliced in a "T," to provide an appropriate "TC's Coast to Coast" jingle. Kasem did not learn about the deception until 1996, laughing the whole thing off by saying, "Maybe I don't want to hear it!"

Coleman's sleight-of-hand was actually the second time a version of the AT40 had aired that was not quite on the up and up. According to Rob Durkee's book "American Top 40: The Countdown of the Century", Dave Morgan of WDHF (now WNUA) in Chicago ghosted an edition of the program sometime in the summer of 1975. When the station's copy of the show did not arrive in time, he used Billboard's list and merely played the records, apparently heavily implying that the show was American Top 40 without actually identifying it as such. "My program director made me do it!" Morgan said years later. The following year, WDHF would refuse to play AT40's "Fourth of July's Greatest Hits" special, due to the special's overabundance of #1 hits from the pre-rock era. But while the special was a stark departure from the contemporary sound of the 1970s, Tom Rounds in his press release reminded stations that it was the United States' "one and only bicentennial."[32]

From 1992 to 1994, two radio stations still carrying American Top 40 had to carry customized versions of the show. WPLJ in New York City aired the show with the urban/dance/rap songs mentioned but not played and were replaced here and there by Hot Adult Contemporary leaning extras. KUBE in Seattle, Washington aired AT40 with a few songs that did not fit the station's Top 40 Rhythm format omitted each week. It has also been reported that WSTR in Atlanta, Georgia, being an anti-rap station and a very Adult Contemporary-leaning CHR, edited "Another Night" by Real McCoy (a Euro disco record with rap breaks) out of its broadcasts of Casey's Top 40 in 1994, even while the song was at #1 on the show (which used the Radio & Records CHR/Pop chart).

In 2010, "Fuck You" by Cee Lo Green was changed to "Forget You" for radio airplay and hit #1 the following year after re-entering the American Top 40. "Fuckin' Perfect" by Pink was changed to "Perfect" for radio airplay and also hit #1 on the American Top 40. "Tonight (I'm Fuckin' You)" by Enrique Iglesias was changed to "Tonight (I'm Lovin' You)" for radio airplay and hit #1 on the American Top 40 as well. "Niggas in Paris" by Jay-Z & Kanye West was changed to "In Paris" for radio airplay. "Ass Back Home" by Gym Class Heroes, which was changed to "Get Yourself Back Home" for radio airplay. The most recent radio edit was by Neon Hitch with her song "Fuck U Betta"; it was changed to "Love U Betta" for radio airplay (this song was first played in Subway's Fresh Buzz song of the week).[citation needed]

In early 2013, Justin Timberlake's single "Mirrors" had to be edited for time, as the song is over 8 minutes long.[citation needed]