What is the best-selling banned single?
If any great pop star hasn’t gotten one of their songs banned, chances are they aren’t doing their job correctly. Although many people have been offended by the occasional song they didn’t agree with, there have always been artists willing to provoke the uptight sects of society to get a rise out of them. Even though people might like the idea of people stomping out the immoral parts of the music industry, they usually have the exact opposite effect.
Starting with the earliest days of rock and roll, concerned parents have been trying to beat the biggest artists into submission. Whether it was Elvis Presley shaking his ass on TV or The Beatles alluding to the fact that they may be taking hard drugs in their off hours, some lyrics in the biggest songs of all time have popped many monocles in their day.
For all the people who were crying out ‘THINK OF THE CHILDREN’, though, that didn’t stop those same children from buying these records by the bucketloads. Even when checking the highest-selling singles in the world, ‘Blurred Lines’ by Robin Thicke is among the highest despite being one of the most banned songs in the world, selling 14.8 million copies to date.
‘Blurred Lines’s lyrics are a bit of a different story, though. While artists might try to provoke people, this is the kind of hedonist anthem that gets a little bit too on the nose in some spots, which makes sense why it was blacklisted from many universities at the time of release. When you listen to this song, you can easily see the suave ladies man with an ill-fitting suit on trying his best to charm any woman at the end of the bar and coming off as a total schlub. But why are these kinds of songs so deplorable in the eyes of the morality police?
Why do songs get banned?
Although every artist has the right to put whatever they want to in a song, there’s always a fine line on whether it’s something people want to hear. As much as Eminem may have sold millions of records in his day, there’s a good chance a lot of fairweather fans were going back to the lyrics to ‘Lose Yourself’ on their gym playlist rather than jamming songs about how he tried to kill his ex-girlfriend. But there’s more to songs being banned than just violence.
As the saying goes, it’s all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and most artists have an affinity for writing about the first two a lot more often. Def Leppard may have written the rulebook on writing songs like “rock” in the title, but people were much more aghast hearing a song like ‘Relax’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, which contains some of the filthiest lyrics ever put on the hit parade.
Even the mere suggestion of something was enough to get people riled up. Though fans have talked about the implications of The Beatles’ ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ for years, the mere fact that it spelt out LSD was enough for radio stations to claim that even the Fab Four had succumbed to such filth in their lyrics.
Why do banned records become best-sellers?
Although some people might claim to have their younger children at heart when banning songs, a ban can also be a double-edged sword. There might be some people who would rather see artists thrown out of the industry for making something they didn’t agree with, but they might not realise how much free advertising they’re giving to a song.
Take a song like ‘God Save the Queen’ by Sex Pistols. This is a transparent piss-take on one of the most recognisable British songs of all time, and yet the song is one of the most celebrated tracks in the punk pantheon. Its lyrics may have been considered heinous by some back in the day, but the more people shouted about it being bad for the future generations of listeners, the more those same listeners wanted to go out and buy the record to see what the fuss was about.
The whole thing continues to this day, too. There may have been a million people who blew a gasket the minute that they heard ‘WAP’ by Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion, but the second that everyone got started calling it one of the most offensive songs ever, it received some of the highest ratings of the year. It’s never easy to try to make a name for yourself in the industry, but if there’s a ban on an artist’s song, they may as well wear it like a badge of honour.
