I’d like to imagine Ryan Clark sitting in freshman English class passing a love letter to some gothic girl, only to have the note intercepted. Perhaps the teacher had been lecturing on a short story by Edgar Allen Poe, and was rudely interrupted by the rustling of paper passed through the aisles of desks. The teacher resembles the late Alan Rickman and he reads the letter, muttering in his gravelly Severus Snape voice. “You see class,” he speaks up, “if you want the opposite sex to fall for you, a writer doesn’t merely say, ‘I will love you to death.’ The writer uses more vivid language to express the intentions of his heart.” Young Ryan Clark took this as a challenge and wrote the gothic love song that appears in my 2021 February Playlist.
IT’S BURIED DEEP WITHIN THE PAST. In early April of my Junior year, my school went on a mission trip to Chattanooga, Tennessee. We did a lot of driving and listened to a lot of music during that time. Many of my classmates were into hardcore and metal, and Demon Hunter‘s Summer of Darknessalbum was about to be released. Somehow this song made its way onto a mixtape or a promo CD, and everyone was in awe of how cool this song was. The dark lyrics and demon imagery spoke to the group’s collective religiosity and turned the youth group to a darker shade. Gone were the days of Newsboys and Audio Adrenaline. Now everyone was obsessed with demonology. And this was a pretty good alternative to Harry Potter, right?
THE DARK AESTHETIC. I wrote about Demon Hunter last month. Ryan Clark has talked about how Demon Hunter was an art project before it was a band on the Labeled podcast. He talks about the band is continuously influenced by bands like Nine Inch Nails on their latest albums. He talks about how Pink Floyd’s Wish You We Here album cover influenced his album artwork design on the Lead Singer Syndrome podcast. This caused him and his brother to create a highly successful graphic design company who has designed the most iconic album covers to the CDs I owned back in high school and a plethora of other projects including work commissioned by NASA, Target, and other companies. Clark is a versatile artist working, so not everything is dark and dreary. However, for his personal aesthetic, it gets dark. From screaming at the gates of hell to singing about to dying of old age–rather decaying, with his wife.
Before The Fray and OneRepublic, Lifehouse was the pop-rock band that appeared with their song “Hanging by a Moment” and then crossed over to the Christian market. Their debut album, No Name Face garnered a lot of love both in the Christian and pop markets. Songs like “Hanging By a Moment” and “Breathing” were huge Top 40 hits, while the song “Sick Cycle Carousel” was a hit on the Christian radio stations. The band signed a deal with Sparrow Records for their second album, Stanley Climbfall, and solidified their hold in the Christian market and lessened their hold on mainstream radio. However, their third and self-titled album produced their biggest pop hit “You and Me” and their fourth album Who We Are, lessened their grip on the Christian market. And by their fifth through seventh albums the band’s pop appeal had diminished as their post-grunge sound fell out of favor with pop radio.
HOW COULD ANYTHING BE BETTER THAN THIS? If we’re going to talk about this song, we have to talk about Smallville. Honestly, I don’t think this show has aged well. I’d have to rewatch it to find out. Maybe it just went on too long and outlived the writers intentions. CGI from old shows is embarrassing. What looked so realistic before is hard to watch. That’s what I noticed when I watched The Matrix: Reloaded just 10 years ago. Maybe its stars never really went on to do much. Except for Allison Mack, of course, who played the fan’s favorite character, Chloe, who was in love with young Clark Kent and kept track of all of the weird things that happened around town on her Wall of Weird. Something she didn’t pin on the Wall of Weird that certainly belongs there is Allison Mack’s involvement with the NXIVM cult. For that reason, rewatching Smallville will be a very hard task. But let’s go back past the ridiculous later seasons to the core that made the show what it was. It was a high school drama, so let’s keep the kids in school. I first started watching the show because of the music. The early seasons were focused on music. I watched the first three seasons on ABC Family. The show was squeaky clean until Season 4. A cliche small-town romance with a supernatural twist. The origin story of Superman, rebooted for Millennials.
BECAUSE YOU’RE ALL I NEED. Lifehouse performed on Smallville twice and songs from their first three albums were included in the shows first four seasons. The pilot ends with this song. Clark is looking out his telescope, looking at the stars thinking about his crush, Lana Lang. He then imagines that she has saved a dance from the Homecoming dance for him. In the season finale, Lifehouse performs this song in the Smallville High prom, only to be interrupted by a tornado warning. Lifehouse and other music served as a musical soundtrack to the drama in this series, heightening moments of romance, tensions between characters, like Lex and his emotionally abusive father, Lionel, and moments of self discovery as Clark realizes his powers and purposes for them. Cheesy? Perhaps. But it was the early 2000s on the WB/CW network. This was around the time of Dawson’s Creek and Gilmore Girls. Only Smallville was a supernatural teen drama. I miss when music played such a big role in television.
Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Gordon Lightfoot–the legendary folk singers of North America have interesting stories to tell, but only if you listen closely. Tooth & Nail Records signed Tyson Motsenbocker as a solo artist back in 2016 beginning a new direction for the label. I first checked out Motsenbocker after hearing his story on The BadChristian Podcast where he talked about how his foot journey between San Diego and San Francisco informed the lyrics to his first LP, Letters to Lost Loves. Motsenbocker followed up his full length with two EPs the next year. The song I chose for today comes from the EP Almira, which is a perfect winter’s day record.
I SAW THE SUN COMING UP. I promised a break-up song at the beginning of the month. And although technically “This Love” could count, we’re still calling it a love song. This song is dedicated to 2020. Today is the first of a three-day holiday in South Korea and other countries in the Sinosphere (East Asian countries that get a large part of their culture or influence from China) celebrating the lunar new year, aka Chinese New Year. Every lunar year has a zodiac symbol. There are 12 symbols total, and just like western astrology there are special meanings for each symbol. The difference to the western zodiac is that every year rather than month has the same characteristics. This is partially why age and the idea of chingu (친구) is so important in Korea. I wrote about Korean age in my January 3rd post “Age” by From the Airport. Many Koreans celebrate both solar (January 1st) and lunar (Seollar/Chinese New Year) New Year’s Day by staying up all night, climbing a mountain or driving to the coast and watching the sunrise, eating rice-cake soup (떡국), meeting family and bowing to elders and ancestors, thanking them for their prosperity.
ALL METAL RUSTS. Tomorrow is Lunar New Year’s Day, so today is kind of like a Lunar New Year’s Eve. Celebrations are going to be kept to a minimum here in South Korea as gathers are restricted to only four people outside of your immediate family. Last year we welcomed the Year of the Rat. However, by last Lunar New Year’s Day, January 25, 2020, South Korea and the United States had already had their first cases of the plague. The year of the rat brought an infestation of destruction we’ve never seen in our lifetimes. So many things changed suddenly. The safety precautions kept changing. Many people lost everything. So much change left us hardened, rusted even to the new normal. Tomorrow, begins the Year of the Ox. The cow will crush the rat and we can hope for better…but let’s not forget that cows introduced tuberculosis to humans.
Ryan Tedder might be the most successful pop musician to have graduated from Oral Roberts University, an Evangelical college founded by the evangelist of the same name and which spawned preachers such as Kenneth Copeland, Joel Osteen, and Ted Haggard. I remember when OneRepublic debuted in 2007 with their song “Apologize.” Tedder talked about his religious background in interviews and how he was influenced by CCM music when he was growing up. Another group, The Fray, had debuted two years before OneRepublic with a similar story and hometown in Colorado. Christian radio fell hard for The Fray, playing songs like “How to Save a Life” and “You Found Me” on Christian radio stations. They didn’t fall in love with OneRepublic quite as much. Both bands were multi-platinum bands, but OneRepublic stuck around longer than The Fray whose third and fourth albums failed to achieve the greatness of their first two albums.
YESTERDAY’S GONE. I discovered this song last May. “All These Things” is not a hit and it is in the middle of the album. I haven’t kept up with OneRepublic’s career past their second album 2009’s Waking Up. Pop-rock kind of gets old after a while. However, the lyrics of this song stuck with me. In the middle of the pandemic, the school schedule kept changing and the supervisors kept changing the expectations of students and teachers. We had never taught online before, and although we had used many resources to create class materials, we had never met students online. To make matters worse we were given no time to learn how to do it. We were just told to do it. One of my coworkers threw himself into learning technology. He spent his weekends working and creating content. But he got pretty burnt out. Sure, he was experiencing more success than others, but they were able to use what he learned and mostly have their weekends off. The burnout my coworker experienced made me think about what in life is really worth investing your time in.
GIVE YOU MY YOUTH FOR SOME MILLION DAYS. This line from the song made me think about the investment in time. I had to do the math. One million days is 2,739.73 years, a number that far exceeds a lifetime. In Korea, anniversaries are counted in days rather than years. Parents celebrate a baby’s 100th day of life. This has roots in a time of high infant mortality, and a baby that survived 100 days was to be celebrated as a successful life. Similarly, Korean couples (and some foreigners who date Koreans) celebrate the first 100 days of their relationship. With every 100 days, a relationship is celebrated and evaluated. Is it worth the time and effort? Today is a very special day because it marks my 2000th day in a relationship. 2000 days is nowhere close to a million, but a lot can happen in that amount of time. For some context, Apple TV+ has a documentary series called Becoming You which follows children from around the world for from birth to their 2000th day. A 5 1/2 year old child has learned how to walk, talk, tell a simple joke, goes to school, counts to 100, and can help out a parent do tasks. Two thousand days can span the tail-end of a presidency, a very bad one-term presidency, and the first days of yet another president. Korean conscription is only 36% of 2,000 days. It spans the time of six one-year contracts. Korean middle school students in their second semester will have graduated high school in 2000 days. I don’t take today lightly. I believe I’ve spent my time well. We never know for sure if things are going to work out, but the investment of time and effort can make a very happy life.
In 2018, South Korean indie rock band The Koxx’s keyboardist, Shaun, debuted with a solo single that immediately went to number 1 on the K-pop charts. Obsessed with chart numbers, K-pop fans cried foul. But were the charts manipulated? How could a relatively unknown singer-songwriter blow up the charts? The world of K-pop is rather cutthroat when it comes to fans and from my research it seems that the matter hasn’t been settled to anyone’s liking. Still, how can an artist or record company manipulate the charts? The Korea Herald explains. Once the song had topped the charts, it was everywhere in Korea and even made waves in other countries. Shaun worked with English singer-songwriter Connor Maynard to produce an English version. This version has been misappropriated by Justin Bieber online.
MY LONG, LONG JOURNEY ENDS NOW. The Mandela Effect is a situation that people (often large groups of people) misremember the facts of something that happened in the past. The situation gets its name from people who claimed to remember that they had heard that Nelson Mandela had died in prison back in the ’90s. I don’t remember exactly when I first heard this song, but it was everywhere. I also suffered from Mandela Effect. I could swear I had heard this song since I had been in Korea. I thought it was an old song from the ’90s. But in fact, it has only been out since June of 2018 and I have been in Korea since 2012. I wrote about this on February 1st when I talked about SHINee’s music. K-pop often uses the vaguely familiar in the same way pop music uses the millennial whoop to keep music sounding both classic and new at the same time.
I’LL FIND MY WAY BACK HOME. Poetry doesn’t translate well, so of course some of the nuisance is lost in a song. The English lyric translation for this song aren’t the same as the Conor Maynard version. Korean is a much more versatile language than English because of the Subject-Object-Verb sentence pattern. Verbs often end in “yo”s, “ah”s or “-nida”s so it’s pretty easy to make rhymes in the language. The lyrics of this song deal with an unrelenting love that no matter how you try to quench it continues. It also talks about a journey that the singer takes, but the singer is sure that the path he takes will lead him home again. So that’s the message of this love song as we count down the days to Valentine’s Day: “I always wind up by your side.”
Country music is the sound of the South, talking about God, girls, and guns. Drunken Saturday nights and church on Sunday morning. Go up North and it ain’t all rock ‘n’ roll, though. I discovered Stephen Kellogg and the Sixers on a Valentine’s NoiseTrade sampler. Some indie mix tapes might make the coldest heart sceptic believe in love. The song Kellogg contributed to the mix was “Song for Lovers,” which is as much about existential dread as it is a love song. Years later, I discovered the rest of the album Gift Horse, which is Northeastern folk-rock, which is pretty darn close to country music. Kellogg sings about watching his family grow up, relationships that didn’t quite work out, the doubt in the existence of God, and life in the country.
I GOTTA GET BACK TO THE COUNTRY. This song struck me today on my walk. I was born in a small town in Upstate New York. And calling it a town is a compliment. We lived off the beaten path down a dirt road that will tear up your car after a few months. If the potholes didn’t get you, the salt from melting the snow would. We’d have to drive 20 minutes to the nearest gas station. Two hours on the bus to school and two hours back, unless it was snowy. It could take all night. One year it snowed from Halloween until March and we hardly could get to town. In the early spring we’d make Maple Syrup at my grandfather’s farm. We moved to North Carolina when I was 10 where we lived closer to town (which is rightly called a town). I never lived in a city
I GOTTA GET BACK TO THE CITY. until I moved to Korea. A small Korean city is 250,000 people. The town in North Carolina was maybe about 20,000 people. In New York it seemed like it was a population of 500, but I’m probably wrong. In Korea I could walk out my door 24/7 and buy something to eat. I could get anything delivered with a little language skills I didn’t need a car. The bus or subway got me there quickly. My current school is in the country with a jacked up bus schedule, but it is possible to get to work using only public transportation. I step outside and there are always people around. It gets hard to clear your head when taking a walk, but the convenience is quite incredible.
THIS IS MY FAVORITE PLACE. I often wonder which I prefer. When I was young, I dreamed of living in a big city. I didn’t know what that would entail–a small apartment, long hours on the job, noise, people constantly around me. Some days I long to go back to the country. I’ve entertained thoughts about learning a practical skill or getting into farming and moving to a life where I could be forgotten our of sight rather than erased among the masses. But I awake from the daydream realizing that I don’t have any of those skills. I never learned them. I wasn’t drawn to them as a kid, and I avoided working with my dad. I guess it’s life in the city for now. And if you have the ones you love around, it’s quite nice wherever you land.
For today’s blog post, I am going to assign a lot of homework. By the end of the lesson, you will know all about purity culture and how it affected a generation or two of evangelicals. The Cliff’s Notes version: purity culture is the belief that teenagers should wait until they are married in a heterosexual marriage. That is the only way to be blessed by God. Purity culture was steeped in evangelical and even crossed over to pop culture until the late 2000s. There were rallies called True Love Waits, and there were songs like Rebecca St. James’ “Wait for Me.” Some may even recall The Jonas Brothers wore purity rings, which were quite common among evangelical teenagers, and parishioners of the 20th-century doctrine. The idea was you wore the purity ring until you replaced it with a wedding ring. The Jonas Brothers have since taken them off.
YOU THINK I’M PRETTY WITHOUT ANY MAKEUP ON. One of my favorite podcasts, Good Christian Fun, talks about Christian pop culture. The first episode was about Katie Perry’s Christian album, the self-titled Katy Hudson.Hudson is the singer’s actual surname. Later episodes have talked about Katy Perry from multiple angles and how she influenced other artists around that time. The daughter of a Pentecostal pastor, Katy Perry was obviously aware of purity culture. There are rumors that the song on the same album “The One That Got Away” is about her ex-boyfriend Matt Thiessen, the frontman of the youth-group favorite Christian punk band Relient K. Katy Perry is somewhat of a legend of the CCM scene. From songwriting sessions with Jennifer Knapp to featuring on P.O.D.’s “Goodbye for Now,” Perry was set for quite a career in Christian music. Speaking of goodbyes, Joshua Harris wrote a book calledI Kissed Dating Goodbye, which was very popular among my classmates. He argues in the book that teens should not date casually, but rather focus on finding the right one through courting. Harris and Evangelical thought leaders inculcated a single interpretation of sexual purity for a generation. Juxtaposed to that book, Katy Perry’s first hit “I Kissed a Girl,” showed the star popularizing bi-curiosity. How far the evangelical darling had fallen. Youth pastors doubled down on the message, yet it seemed everyone was having sex. And if they weren’t having regular sex, they were doing oral or anal. Christian teens either hid it, denied to themselves that it happened, or just took the hit of shame and were ostracized. I used to think, “It’s just my youth group, right? Somehow we let in secular influence that others hadn’t.”
LET’S GO ALL THE WAY TONIGHT. I’m very hesitant to share personal stories because I’m a teacher employed by a Christian school. However, I’ve been in a state of self-censorship for years. I hope that the wrong person doesn’t read my blog. But if you can’t talk about your views as a teacher, what’s the point of teaching? I think that as I keep writing the personal stories will come, but I’d rather spend the end of this post giving a collection of resources on how I would advise others dealing with the traumas of purity culture and what to teach teenagers today. Two podcast episodes of You Have Permission about Purity Culture and Shame, the latter with therapist Matthias Roberts who wrote a book called Beyond Shame: Creating a Healthy Sex Life on Your Own Terms, which is on my Kindle waiting to be read. The people who teach us that the Bible is very clear haven’t read it without their own cultural biases. Repression has caused sex to get weird. It has messed up generations of people. It’s time to stop scaring and start healing. Sexually healing.
This album, though… I can listen to it from start to finish without skipping a track. This feels like a confession. At some point I’ll probably make a case for “Call Me Maybe,” which I still haven’t gotten sick of, but for today, let’s enjoy this banger, the first track on Carly Rae Jepsen’s finest album. Starting with an almost kazoo-sounding saxophone riff–though not strange at all–which plays under the vocals when Carly cuts to the chorus. Somehow I happened to find this album while riding on a bus one weekend exploring something new. This was in 2016 when I lived on campus of my school, so every weekend for my sanity I had to go on an adventure. This meant lots of time on the rural-to-city bus. I listened to a lot of music while on the bus and waiting to transfer. At this point I spent quite a few weekends looking for something new whether it was coffee houses, interesting restaurants, different areas of town, new places to watch the flowers bloom or the leaves change.
YOUR STUCK IN MY HEAD, STUCK IN MY HEART, STUCK IN MY BODY. I can tell you a few good restaurants in Daegu. I know where to shop for _____. I can recommend an excellent place to get gelato. But those places change. New 맛집(popular restaurants) come and go. I can tell you the over-rated places. Hint: be very suspicious of Mexican food in Korea in general. I can tell you where you’ll spend too much money. I’ll tell you that it’s not worth it to go to the Arboretum when the leaves change. There will just be too many people. However, if you do happen to be in Dalseo-gu when the leaves have changed and it’s approaching sunset on a clear day, don’t take the subway. Take a bus and watch the scenery go by in the window. You’ll have quite a show of color. I can’t separate a single weekend, but I do know that Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion was the soundtrack to my exploration.
PACKING A BAG, LEAVING TONIGHT, WHILE EVERYONE’S SLEEPING. Those weekends feel like a lifetime ago. Last year I heard this song while I was in North Carolina shopping at the outlet mall on a very cold weekend. I end up going home about every other year. Now who knows when travel will normalize again. I don’t take the bus very often because of Corona, and I try to stay pretty local. I walk a lot, and take out food and coffee. I don’t carry a backpack much anymore. When you lived out in the middle of nowhere I carried my home with me. I often brought a change of clothes just in case I was on the other side of town or another city and couldn’t get home. The days of adventure are waning. Still whenever I hear this song it makes me feel like some weekend, in the near future, “we can turn the world to gold.”
Before “Shape of You,” Ed Sheeran was known primarily as a singer-songwriter. His albums + and X took clear influence from The Beatles, Carol King, Elton John, James Taylor, and the ballad writers of yesteryear. But he had a knack for throwing in a few rap bars along the way. With every record, Sheeran gained more acclaim. His sophomore record produced the mega Billboard #2 hit, “Thinking Out Loud,” which won two Grammys including Song of the Year. The final single from the album, “Photograph” was written in collaboration with Snow Patrol‘s Johnny McDaid. Sheeran drew inspiration from his long distance relationship with singer/songwriter Nina Nesbitt (the featured musician on Kodaline’s acoustic version of “Brand New Day”). The two spent five months apart. They would eventually break up, but the song remains a gem on Sheeran’s second best-selling record.
LOVING CAN HURT. “Photograph” was the song that introduced me to the talent of Ed Sheeran. Unfortunately, because of the hit “Shape of You” on his next album, Divide, I cast Sheeran aside and forgot about the truly inspiring lyrics on the X album. Songs like “Even My Dad Does Sometimes,” “Tenerife Sea,” and “Afire Love,” and the song I chose today, “Photograph,” show of tenderness without gushing with sentimentality. The music video doesn’t address the topic of the song. However, it shows young Sheeran with his first love–music. The video is a collection of old footage of Sheeran playing music throughout his childhood and teenage years. This song was especially impactful to me in 2016. I had taken on the responsibility of coordinating the native English department at my Christian school. I was the only native English teacher who remained that year, so I was left with the task of assembling a new team. One coworker was particularly disrespectful and hard to manage. I was learning to work in a Korean system. But one other aspect of this year was particularly stressful. In February of 2016, my boyfriend of six months was conscripted. Korea has a mandatory military service that all Korean males must complete before the age of 30. This meant very limited phone conversations and not seeing him for six weeks at a time.
LOVING CAN HEAL. Unlike Ed Sheeran and Nina Nesbitt, we did not break up. The time we spent together, we used it to build our relationship. Because we had many common interests, we spent every moment doing this things together. Museums and discovering new places to find ____ foods, shopping, talking, going to the park. Simple but it kept us together. We made plans to watch shows together. We read the same books. We talked about them whenever we could. It may have been expensive with all of the traveling, but it was money I would gladly spend again. I don’t wish for the hard times again. But when you go through the tough times, the lessons you learn are the most valuable. The mistakes you make are never erased but you can look at when you do it the right way, you remember why you don’t do it the other way. 2016 was a year the built my future. It was a foundational year at work. I learned how and how not to be a leader. And I learned how to love deeper. Love isn’t always the tender moments, but also the work in between. And you gotta pay the bills if you want to play on the weekends, hence long distance. I think love is really about balancing the sentimental with the practical. Swerve to the left, it’s just a fantasy. Swerve to the right, it’s just bitterness.
Love them or hate them, it’s still incredible how long of a career Maroon 5 has had. Today we’re moving out of ’80s and ’90s vibes and replacing synthesizers with keys. We’re traveling back 2004 to the first song I remember from Maroon 5, their second single “This Love.” Is this song a love song or a breakup song? The verse says that Jane, the titular character in the album’s title and mentioned in this song “got on a plane/ Never to return again,” but in the chorus singer Adam Levine says that although “this love has taken a tole on [him, he] won’t say goodbye anymore.” Much of the focus of the song is on the relationship, so I’ll justify it as a love song.
MEMORIES. In 2004 I was in high school. Maroon 5 debuted as a pop-rock band, which had only been a thing since the late ’90s. Of course there had been rock bands that went pop, but they usually consider themselves rock bands. You could argue that the Beatles was a pop-rock band, but they came from a time that pop music was rock music. I remember hearing Matchbox 20’s lead singer Rob Thomas talking about how he was proud to be known as a pop band. And while you might call Maroon 5’s first album pop-rock, they strayed from that sound in their subsequent albums. I remember hearing this song in the car with my friends sitting in the parking lot of the liquor store as my friend’s mom went to pick something up. My friend said, “What do you think the cops would think? My mom is buying alcohol and she’s driving a car full of teenagers.”
LOST STARS. I had hope for this band when I heard this album. I thought we could use a band that incorporates funk into pop and light rock. Indie rock at that time wasn’t afraid of falsetto, why should the mainstream? But the band lead me through disappointment after disappointment throughout their musical career. With the exception of their last album which brings the band back into the studio and even includes a lengthy jam session, Maroon 5 stays pretty secure in the realm of music written to make money. When I saw the movie Begin Again, I thought about how Adam Levine’s character was exactly how I felt about the band. I was a little charmed in the beginning. But after a while in the relationship, they started being unfaithful to my musical needs. They started sleeping around with other producers that warped their songs. The lyrics became drier and lacking the passion I needed in a band. The band says their trying hard to “feed [my] appetite,” but I just see lazier musicianship. Run away Jane. Don’t buy a return ticket.
RADIO EDIT. I saw the music video on MTV and Fuse. That was my first exposure to this song. It wasn’t the most graphic video, but it was a little graphic for the time. It tries to focus on a then very skinny Adam Levine, shirtless, and in bed with the woman he’s making love to. He sings into the camera the line: “I tried my best to feed her appetite/ Keep her coming every night.” When the song hit the Top 40 stations I heard those lines. I didn’t think too deeply about it. Yes, it sounded sexual. But I didn’t think too deeply about it. They then played it on the light rock stations, you know the ones that they play when your mom goes to the hair saloon, between the Eagles and Enya. However, around this time the FCC was on a rampage against sex. We had seen Janet Jackson’s breast in the super bowl earlier that year, so it was important to get rid of every notion of sex in the media period. So, some stations started censoring this song. “Keep her —- every night.” Others did not. I really hate when a song gets censored on the radio. I don’t think that everything should go, but if a song is going to be a hit, there should be an alternate recording. By censoring this song, it sounded so much dirtier. Double entendres appear in Shakespeare, but a wise English teacher isn’t blacking out the books before school. It just gives the “perversion” more power. The FCC certainly succeeded in making sex more enticing for society.
Mixtapemotions 