The controversial line Lou Reed was forced to change
Lyric changes tend to get people up in arms for some reason. Each time an artist realises that perhaps their original work isn’t appropriate today, or accepts that it never was and needs to be altered now to apologise for the error, there is swiftly a chorus of red-faced protesters demanding the offensive original.
In that category was Lou Reed’s track ‘Walk on the Wild Side’.
It’s a tricky line to walk, though. While offensive lyrics have no place on the radio, and fans deserve to feel safe and included at gigs rather than subjected to exclusionary, racist, misogynistic, or simply offensive language, there’s a wider conversation that comes along with it.
The idea of changing lyrics, and the anger it causes, is less about the lyrics and whether a person should or shouldn’t say something and more about the tricky balance between responsibility and revisionist history. Some argue that an artist should never rewrite what they originally said, no matter what, and that the original should always be honoured, seeing art as a thing set in stone from the start.
In the minds of those causing the uproar, any time a line is changed, an artist should never have to alter their past for new rules and standards in the present, or, as exhausting as the whole argument is, an artist shouldn’t have to bow to ‘woke’ new rules around language.
But time and time again, the artists themselves defy those people. While people acted in complete outrage about the suggestion that ‘Fairytale of New York’ should be changed due to the use of a homophobic slur, Shane MacGowan himself was all for altering it, stating, “I am absolutely fine with them bleeping the word, but I don’t want to get into an argument”.
Meanwhile, Nick Cave was part of the choir, claiming that it was wrong, and saying that the BBC were “mutilating” by not playing the original and that the version with different lyrics was “stripped of its value”. Yet in his own career, Cave no longer plays ‘Stagger Lee’ for the same reason, realising that the lyrics are too offensive to put in front of people.
So it’s an issue that divides music makers and music fans alike, including Roger Waters and Lou Reed, who both had different views on what should be done with ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and the original lyric of, “And the colored girls go / Doo, do-doo, do-doo, do-do-doo”.
“I saw Lou Reed on an awards show not long ago and noticed that he no longer says, ‘and the coloured girls sing’ in ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. He omits the word ‘coloured’,” Waters recalled, “I ran into him in the Caribbean a few days ago, and I asked him about it. I said, ‘Don’t you think your fans know you well enough to know that you’re not racist?’”
However, it’s not as simple as the audience knowing and trusting that Lou Reed didn’t mean offence with the original lyrics and wasn’t racist. Instead, the issue is unchecked repetition of offensive language on the radio and in popular culture that keeps it present. It keeps the word lingering around, and Reed seemed to get that.
“Well, you know what Lou’s like, he was very phlegmatic. He said, ‘Well, these people, they wanted me to change it…’ and he felt he should do it,” Waters said, but he seemed genuinely disappointed that Reed had buckled to the pressure.
But of course he did, given that this entire quote came in the context of Waters looking for permission for his own use of the word. “There’s a song, ‘Flickering Flame’, on my new album that mentions coloured girls. It says, ‘When the coloured girls sing, I feel my heart swoon’,” he said, and he was clearly on the hunt for someone, anyone, to tell him that his problematic language was OK. First, he asked his own band, “So I asked the girl singers that I’ve worked with for years, Black girls, if they found it offensive, and they had no problem with it”. Then, he turned to Reed, getting him to reflect on his own lyrical revision, but to no avail.
