Did former KNTF air a racist song?

[ILOVERADIO]

It's the current KDEY Ontario, and yes, all this happened a long time ago.

KDEY-FM - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Waiting for 30james to call for retroactive sanctions/cancellation for any station that ever played Elton John's "Honky Cat" next.

It bothered me more that Ricky Lee Jones and Randy Newman had popular songs with the N word. (Newman’s “Redneck” and Jones’ “Ricky’s in Love.” The Newman song was in the 70s, and I think Jones’ song was in the 80s.

 

[ILOVERADIO]

It's not even that. He says she's crazy for leaving him, but he crashed his truck into a telephone pole and broke his nose, threw rocks at the truck, and made a fool of himself in front of a crowd of people at a bus stop... so it sure seems like he's the crazy one.

Great point.

 

[ILOVERADIO]

And 36 years later I still like that song and remember when Rodney was big when he first came out.



This! Someone wanna check on James to make sure he’s okay? 🤣🤣🙈

Rodney Crowell is a great talent. But the line “You can’t trust a woman when she’s out of control” though self mocking, definitely offended my wife. We were having fun dancing to this song. But she heard the line, got mad, and stopped dancing. I couldn’t stop laughing.

 

[tbolt909]

It bothered me more that Ricky Lee Jones and Randy Newman had popular songs with the N word. (Newman’s “Redneck” and Jones’ “Ricky’s in Love.” The Newman song was in the 70s, and I think Jones’ song was in the 80s.

Rickie Lee Jones wrote "Chuck E's In Love". The N word isn't in the lyrics. I think you are confused or need your hearing checked.

The Randy Newman song "Rednecks" got very little Radio airplay other than a few FM Album Rock stations. Newman's use of the N word in that song is to illustrate a valid point. It wasn't for shock value...

 

[michael hagerty]

Rickie Lee Jones wrote "Chuck E's In Love". The N word isn't in the lyrics. I think you are confused or need your hearing checked.

I vote for confused. The line in "Chuck E's In Love" that caused discomfort back in the day was:

"Oh, Christ, I think he's even combed his hair".

That was, if I'm not mistaken, the first time anyone had used what was considered blasphemy in a potential hit single since the Beatles' "Ballad of John and Yoko" ten years earlier.

But times had changed. About half of major market Top 40 stations refused to play "Ballad of John and Yoko" in 1969 and it peaked at #8. By 1979, there was no resistance to "Chuck E's in Love" at Top 40, and programming an Adult Contemporary station in Reno at the time, I winced on the first listen, but realized the record was undeniable. It went on, it went to number one, and we never got a single complaint.

I've listened to all of Rickie Lee's albums at one point or another. Don't ever recall use of the "N" word. The "C"-word, yes, in "Living It up" on the Pirates album, but I don't think that ever got airplay.

The Randy Newman song "Rednecks" got very little Radio airplay other than a few FM Album Rock stations. Newman's use of the N word in that song is to illustrate a valid point. It wasn't for shock value...

Exactly. And we need to remember that, in 1974, that word was used in media as a tool to expose racism (Blazing Saddles, the aforementioned SNL skit with Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase and later, in 1977, in the miniseries "Roots") . If a white person used that word in the show---that was the bad guy. No ambiguity at all.

 

[CTListener]

I vote for confused. The line in "Chuck E's In Love" that caused discomfort back in the day was:

"Oh, Christ, I think he's even combed his hair".

I've listened to all of Rickie Lee's albums at one point or another. Don't ever recall use of the "N" word. The "C"-word, yes, in "Living It up" on the Pirates album, but I don't think that ever got airplay.

If you listen to her mumble her way through "make a boy" in this bit of the song, I can see where the OP might have misheard it.

We call and we call
"How come?" we say
Hey, what could make a boy behave this way?

 

[michael hagerty]

If you listen to her mumble her way through "make a boy" in this bit of the song, I can see where the OP might have misheard it.

We call and we call
"How come?" we say
Hey, what could make a boy behave this way?

DXing on a mis-tuned AM radio in a lightning storm, maybe.

But that still leaves context, in which the "N" word makes no sense. And if you didn't understand the lyric, why would anyone jump to that word as the likeliest thing she said?

 

[CTListener]

DXing on a mis-tuned AM radio in a lightning storm, maybe.

But that still leaves context, in which the "N" word makes no sense. And if you didn't understand the lyric, why would anyone jump to that word as the likeliest thing she said?

Because that's what it kind of sounds like on an AM radio while driving in a thunderstorm -- which is how I heard the song quite often down in Arkansas in the summer of 1979! It makes no sense in the context of the lyrics, bur really, who understood every word she was singing even under optimal reception conditions. Maybe the OP and I are the only ones to whom that word even entered our minds upon hearing that lyric. Who knows? What I do know is that I knew she must have been singing something else and, while I never found out the real lyrics until the internet came along, I certainly didn't go the next 25 or 30 years believing that the N-word was in the lyrics. I just forgot about it until I got my first computer and looked the song up.

 

[michael hagerty]

Because that's what it kind of sounds like on an AM radio while driving in a thunderstorm -- which is how I heard the song quite often down in Arkansas in the summer of 1979! It makes no sense in the context of the lyrics, bur really, who understood every word she was singing even under optimal reception conditions. Maybe the OP and I are the only ones to whom that word even entered our minds upon hearing that lyric. Who knows? What I do know is that I knew she must have been singing something else and, while I never found out the real lyrics until the internet came along, I certainly didn't go the next 25 or 30 years believing that the N-word was in the lyrics. I just forgot about it until I got my first computer and looked the song up.

Perhaps it's time for a new addition:

KissThisGuy.com - The Archive of Misheard Song Lyrics

KissThisGuy.com is a social website dedicated to misheard song and music lyrics.

www.kissthisguy.com

 

[TheBigA]

Perhaps it's time for a new addition:

Pretty funny. The first line of the Shaboozey song is "My baby wants a Birken, she's been tellin' me all night long." I thought he said his baby wants a berka, which is the long body covering women wear in Afghanistan. Why would his baby want one of those? Time for a new baby. But it was explained to me that a Birken is a very expensive women's handbag. Oh. That's different. Never mind.

 

[CTListener]

Perhaps it's time for a new addition:

KissThisGuy.com - The Archive of Misheard Song Lyrics

KissThisGuy.com is a social website dedicated to misheard song and music lyrics.

www.kissthisguy.com

There's another site, amiright.com, to which I submitted several misheard lyrics some time ago. Not the Jones song, though. But I am the one responsible for submitting "Gonna leave South Boston behind" for Michael Murphey's "Wildfire." (The actual line is "Gonna leave sodbustin' behind.")

 

[K.M. Richards]

And we need to remember that, in 1974, that word was used in media as a tool to expose racism (Blazing Saddles, the aforementioned SNL skit with Richard Pryor and Chevy Chase and later, in 1977, in the miniseries "Roots") . If a white person used that word in the show---that was the bad guy. No ambiguity at all.

Proof of Mel Brooks' intent to make that word a powerful weapon in Blazing Saddles ... the scene where Hedley LaMarr (played by the always riotously funny Harvey Korman) introduces Bart (Pryor) to Governor LePetomaine (Brooks) as the new sheriff of Rock Ridge:

(Gov takes Bart by the shoulder and walks him away from Hedley)
"Have you gone berserk?? Can't you see that man is a ni--"
(realizes he has the wrong man, walks Bart back and walks Hedley away)
"Have you gone berserk?? Can't you see that man is a ni?"

 

[michael hagerty]

Proof of Mel Brooks' intent to make that word a powerful weapon in Blazing Saddles ... the scene where Hedley LaMarr (played by the always riotously funny Harvey Korman) introduces Bart (Pryor) to Governor LePetomaine (Brooks) as the new sheriff of Rock Ridge:

(Gov takes Bart by the shoulder and walks him away from Hedley)
"Have you gone berserk?? Can't you see that man is a ni--"
(realizes he has the wrong man, walks Bart back and walks Hedley away)
"Have you gone berserk?? Can't you see that man is a ni?"

I saw Blazing Saddles in an advance screening in San Luis Obispo, when I was working at KSLY.

What struck me then, and has every time I've re-watched it, is that the first line that isn't played for laughs is when Gene Wilder wakes up in the drunk tank, hanging upside down from his bunk, and sees a black sheriff.

Gene's character, Jim, is the first white person not to use the "N word. His response to Bart's "Are we awake?" is "We are not sure. Are we---black?"

And Bart's reply, a straight-forward, soft-voiced "Yes we are." is the turning point and the heart of the movie.