Tuesday, February 07, 2006
It is 50 years since the Ed Sullivan Show in the US took the decision to only film Elvis Presley from the waist upwards to avoid the morals of the nation's youth from being corrupted by his pelvic movements. It is 40 years since the Rolling Stones were made to change the words of to 'Let's Spend the Night Together' to 'Let's Spend Some Time Together' in case the original words drove a generation of Southern Baptist Girls into spending lustful nights with boys who were not planning to spread the gospel. And still today, in the 21st Century, in a land which produces grisly 'shoot 'em up' X-Box nasties and Playstation games about running people down in the street with souped up stolen vehicles, the Texas Taliban are censoring the lyrics of the Rolling Stones. The notion that a bunch of old age pensioners singing iffy lyrics (“You make a dead man come” - how ironic is that when sung by a bloke with a free bus pass) is going to corrupt the moral compass of the nation's youth settling down to watch a bunch of blokes bashing seven bells out of each other tells me they've got their priorities wrong somewhere.