“They’re comin’ to America”: the patriotic anthem banned after 9/11
Censorship of songs is a strange yet strangely common side effect of virtually every global conflict, major incident, or terrorist attack in modern history. Even still, the extensive list of tracks that found themselves banned from airplay in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in the United States is particularly odd.
Back in the early 1990s, during the first Gulf War, the BBC set the standard for censorship, banning an eye-wateringly extensive list of tracks with the thought that they may be seen as inappropriate in the wake of the conflict. While you could see where the Beeb was coming from on certain songs, others seemed totally and utterly unrelated to the conflict in any way, and the precise reason for their banning still remains largely unknown.
Similarly, in the wake of 9/11, Clear Channel Communications circulated an extensive list of banned tracks around its extensive roster of radio stations across the nation. Many of these selections focused on staunch anti-authority tracks, like every song ever recorded by Rage Against the Machine, while others would have been seen as being in poor taste due to the nature of the attacks, like Arthur Brown’s ‘Fire’.
Having learned no lessons from Gulf War-era BBC, though, the list of banned songs also featured a plethora of seemingly innocuous songs, like Sam Cooke’s ‘Wonderful World’, or any song with even a remote connection to the Middle East, such as The Clash’s ‘Rock The Casbah’.
In some cases, the songs that were banned were, in essence, exactly the kind of patriotic sentiments that you might assume American radio stations would lay on thick in the wake of 9/11.
One such example was Neil Diamond’s patriotic, all-American anthem, appropriately entitled ‘America’. Originally recorded for the soundtrack of The Jazz Singer back in 1980, the song has a ‘This Land Is Your Land’ sentiment, telling the tale of America’s history of immigration in a rather dramatic, pop-centric fashion.
Pre-9/11, the song boasted a long and illustrious history as an American anthem, played at virtually all of Diamond’s US tour dates, accompanied by the stars-and-stripes being hung from the rafters. It was even used in the (albeit unsuccessful) presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis back in 1988.
It doesn’t take much of a stretch of the imagination, though, to realise why the song found itself under a ban in the wake of 9/11. After all, the attacks spurred an intense wave of anti-immigration sentiment, xenophobia, and racism that still persists to this day across large swathes of the American electorate – and, indeed, its government.
For his part, Diamond altered the iconic lyric “They’re coming to America” to the far-less catchy “Stand up for America”. Even still, the song experienced a blanket ban in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, making it perhaps the most overtly patriotic song to make its way onto that bizarrely extensive list.
