Okay. I've gone (mostly) through this very long thread, responding to a few things. Now I'll list my few "How the hell did top 40 radio ever play these songs."
My first one is Barry White's "I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More, Baby," from 1973. While it is true that Sylvia, Chachakas, and Jane Birkin had hit the top 40 (or the top 100 in the latter case) with orgasms from the female's perspective, this was the first time I ever heard the same from a male's perspective. I kept waiting for KRIZ, KRUX, and KUPD to stop playing the song but they never did. (In fact, nationally, the song would peak at #3 on Billboard's charts in late June of 1973.)
The next song I would have to pick would be Paul Anka's "(You're) Having My Baby," from 1974. There was no profanity or drug lyrics in the song and I suppose it was catchy (I could hear it on the radio roughly every 30 minutes at the time.) As an 11-year-old, I could never understand why radio would play a song like that. Especially a song that was being adopted by the anti-abortion movement...
Much later, I would hear an interview with Paul Anka (he also composed the song.) During that interview, he stated that he had written that song for his then-wife who was pregnant at the time. He never dreamed that it would become a rallying cry for anti-abortionists...
My next choice would have to be the Eagles' "Life in the Fast Lane," and its use of the word "goddam" in its lyrics. It was the first song I ever heard with that word in its lyrics (though it was followed on the charts almost immediately by Firefall's "Cinderella," which also uses the same word and which I thought (and still think) was a much better song.) What struck me was back in 1977 when I first heard the song, none of the Phoenix radio stations, top-40, album rock, or oldies (KOOL-FM briefly played that one as a current) tried to erase the word goddam from the song's lyrics. It was only during the 2000s and later that I heard an edited version of the song, mostly on IHeart stations online. I assume the growing prudishness announced by the arrival of Christian nationalism had a lot to do with that.
The final song I will list here is "Good Girls Don't", The Knack's follow-up to their 1979 monster, "My Sharona." Like the Charlie Daniels Band's song, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," discussed earlier in this thread, there were some differences in the lyrics between the album and 45 versions. Playboy magazine (which I was receiving in braille at the time) noted them quite correctly. On the album version, part of the first verse reads:
"and she makes you want to scream
Wishing you could get inside her pants."
However, on the 45 version, those two lines read:
"And she makes you want to scream
Wishing she was giving you a chance."
The other edit in the song comes during the middle bridge which is repeated twice. On the album, part of that bridge's lyric reads:
"And in between each madness that you know it generates
Till she's sitting on your face."
But the same portion of the 45 bridge's lyric reads:
"And in between each madness that you know it generates
Till she puts you in your place."
That single version, with its changed lyrics, peaked at #11 on Billboard in November of 1979.
en.wikipedia.org
