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One lyric change that made me think when it happened - to Lizzie's point, what social conscience or worldview changed - is in "Some Girls" by the Rolling Stones where, when the song was released in 1978, it had a particularly nasty racial lyric about the sexual desires of black women (the song goes through a list of ethnicities and each group's female proclivities - none very nice), but (and I don't remember when it changed) by the '00s, on albums and live, the Stones took out the line about black women (but kept in all the other not-nice stuff about the other ethnicities).
What changed? The song couldn't have been written before the late '60s as nothing was that sexually and ethnically blatant before then, but by '78, the song's lyrics created only a very minor stir when it was released. Overall, the range of acceptable music lyrics since then, IMHO, has become rawer, nastier and more explicit, so what caused the Stones to edit out just that one line? While I'd like to believe our society has become more genuinely sensitive to these issues (I think we have), today, we also, as mentioned, accept aggressively nasty song lyrics (I hear them in the gym and sometimes wonder how we've gotten here) - so why did the Stones engaged in (what I'm guessing is) self editing?
What changed? The song couldn't have been written before the late '60s as nothing was that sexually and ethnically blatant before then, but by '78, the song's lyrics created only a very minor stir when it was released. Overall, the range of acceptable music lyrics since then, IMHO, has become rawer, nastier and more explicit, so what caused the Stones to edit out just that one line? While I'd like to believe our society has become more genuinely sensitive to these issues (I think we have), today, we also, as mentioned, accept aggressively nasty song lyrics (I hear them in the gym and sometimes wonder how we've gotten here) - so why did the Stones engaged in (what I'm guessing is) self editing?