Should Cher have cancelled her own ‘offensive’ song?
The singer Cher might now be 78 years old, but rather than preparing for a quiet retirement of round-the-world cruise, she is busier than ever, as she prepares both to publish her first volume of autobiography, snappily title Cher: The Memoir, Part One, and to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. To celebrate, she is about to release her latest best-of collection, or, as the publicity calls it, “a career-spanning anthology”, entitled Forever. Few would dispute her status as a living legend, and one who manages to temper her majestic diva-dom with a healthy dose of self-deprecation.
With great exposure, however, comes even greater scrutiny. It has been noted that her 1973 song Half-Breed, about a mixed-race girl who has suffered as a result of her birth, has been omitted from the otherwise comprehensive collection. Lyrics such as “The Indians said I was white by law/The white man always called me ‘Indian squaw’” are a representative reflection of what the song is, and clearly always was intended as: a well-meaning, if slightly clunky, castigation of racial and social prejudice, which went to Number 1 on the US charts on its release.
Yet such terms as “half breed” are now seen as unacceptable, to say nothing of using “Indian” rather than “Native American”, and so its omission is not a vast surprise. Cher tweeted in 2017, in her usual inimitable fashion, that “I Did Song 50 yrs ago, & it wasn’t meant 2??offensive. However, That’s kinda Bull S*** excuse. Need to retire beautiful Costume, & stop singing it, it’s WAY past time.”
She did continue to perform Half-Breed on the Australian leg of the Here We Go Again tour in 2018, but by the time that she reached America, it had been retired from the setlist. It looks unlikely that it will ever form part of her live repertoire again.
Cher is far from alone in this kind of proactive, or in some cases reactive, self-censorship. In the past couple of years alone, both Beyoncé and Lizzo have removed the word “spaz” from their songs, after an outcry from disabled rights groups; the term, which is African-American slang for being able to freak out, is widely seen as a derogatory reference to those with cerebral palsy, and both artists acknowledged its potential for harm, even inadvertently, and re-recorded the offending lyrics.
Meanwhile, the queen of contemporary music, Taylor Swift, raised eyebrows when the re-recorded version of her song Better Than Revenge, which originally contained the lines “She’s not a saint and she’s not what you think/She’s an actress/She’s better known for the things she does/On the mattress”, came out in 2023 in sanitised fashion; the last two lines were replaced by “He was a moth to the flame/She was holding the matches”. Although the original was hardly outrageous, the possibility that Swift might, in some obscure way, have been slut-shaming another woman was enough to result in the altered lyrics.
Welcome to the world of contemporary music, where artists of all vintages and ages must be alert to shifts in public mores and tastes. In some cases, the sociological alterations that have taken place over the past decades are fascinating. Once, the Beatles would be castigated for apparent drugs allusions in songs like A Day in the Life and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Now, such things go without comment, while the Rolling Stones’ classic Brown Sugar has not been acceptable in the band’s setlists for years, because of its envelope-pushing lyrics referring both to slavery and interracial sex.
Mick Jagger half-disowned Brown Sugar as far back as 1995, saying in a Rolling Stone interview that “God knows what I’m on about on that song. It’s such a mishmash. All the nasty subjects in one go... I never would write that song now. I would probably censor myself. I’d think, ‘Oh God, I can’t. I’ve got to stop. I can’t just write raw like that.’”
Keith Richards, however, who has always been less of a self-conscious politician than Jagger, commented in an interview in 2021, when it was first dropped from the setlists, that “I’m trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is. Didn’t they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery? But they’re trying to bury it. At the moment I don’t want to get into conflicts with all of this s—. But I’m hoping that we’ll be able to resurrect the babe in her glory somewhere along the track.”
Intentionally or otherwise, Keef hit upon something quite profound. In the rush to censor themselves by removing any content that either is, or has been thought to be, offensive, artists run the risk of throwing out the figurative baby with the bathwater and ending up with hopelessly compromised versions of their own work that are true neither to themselves or to anyone else.
Undeniably, many great rock and pop songs are seen as less acceptable by subsequent generations because of changing attitudes. When I interviewed the Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon in 2022, he said, of his excellent but near-the-knuckle 1996 album Casanova, “we were only working with the social mores we had, but some of Casanova is now a bit tricky, what with #MeToo and all. The Frog Princess [a Marseillaise-sampling account of the hollowness of one-night stands], for instance, is a song I can’t play much any more, because I can’t stand by a lot of lyrics in it, even if it is extremely tongue in cheek…still, it was Another Time.”
Yet when I saw the Divine Comedy that September perform a series of career retrospective shows, The Frog Princess received one of the loudest and most enthusiastic reactions of the night, suggesting that the audience were entirely attuned to the irony and intellectual complexity of the song. Either that, or they were simply all thick.
Music is not the only art form that sees its practitioners practicing self-censorship of this kind. Steven Spielberg is one of the most talented filmmakers of the 20th century, and E.T is one of his greatest pictures. Yet when he came to re-release the film in March 2002, he made some trifling but irritating changes, such as altering Elliot’s mother’s line, admonishing him for his fancy dress attire, from “you are not going as a terrorist” to “you are not going as a hippie”.
This, in the wake of the hypersensitivity occasioned by 9/11 a few months ago, is at least understandable. But Spielberg’s decision to digitally alter the guns being held by federal agents pursuing E.T and his friends to walkie talkies was more egregious, suggesting a loss of nerve and a lack of faith in his own picture.
The director had the grace to acknowledge this in 2023. “That was a mistake,” he said. “I never should have done that. E.T. is a product of its era. No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are, either voluntarily, or being forced to peer through.” Spielberg, the highest-grossing filmmaker in cinematic history and a figure of peerless clout in the industry, went on to suggest that, while he was originally happy with the change, “Years went by and I changed my own views. I should have never messed with the archives of my own work, and I don’t recommend anyone do that. All our movies are a kind of a signpost of where we were when we made them, what the world was like and what the world was receiving when we got those stories out there. So I really regret having that out there.”
Literature, likewise, has many forms of self-censorship within it, although most of the current, egregious examples stem from well-meaning estates trying to delete words or phrases that they consider offensive, often with near-illiterate consequences.
Yet Ian Fleming – whose revised Bond novels have been at the forefront of this controversy – gave permission before he died in 1964 for his second 007 novel, Live and Let Die, to have its more tasteless racial slurs toned down or excised for the American market. This later led his estate to comment, when accused of bowdlerising his novels: “We have made changes to Live and Let Die that he himself authorised. Following Ian’s approach, we looked at the instances of several racial terms across the books and removed a number of individual words or else swapped them for terms that are more accepted today but in keeping with the period in which the books were written.”
This is an argument that is at least coherent, but readers are adults who can make up their own minds, and can therefore choose between the original version that Fleming wrote and the later versions; tellingly, Fleming approved the changes, which were made by his concerned editors, rather than making them himself.
Examples of literary self-censorship as dictated by its practitioners are often more telling. For instance, W.H Auden removed the poems September 1 1939 and Spain from collections of his work, with the comment “Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written”. Most would consider the former, especially, to be one of Auden’s finest and most resonant poems, rather than trash. Yet it has to be the author’s right to change his mind about his work, even if his readers disagree with him, and the poem is readily available, as it always has been.
Writers need not go so far as the Victorian critic Walter Pater, who omitted his incendiary conclusion to his 1873 title Studies in the History of the Renaissance – “To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life” – from its subsequent 1877 edition after the outcry its aesthetic call-to-arms produced. He wrote, tongue perhaps in cheek, that “This brief “Conclusion” was omitted in the second edition of this book, as I conceived it might possibly mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall.” Yet it became the most famous, and iconic, thing that he ever wrote, and will be remembered long after everything else he produced is forgotten.
This is unlikely to be the case for Half-Breed, or the Beyoncé or Lizzo songs that were so prudently altered so as not to offend some of their listeners. Yet self-censorship is increasingly not embarked upon for prudent or sensible reasons, but out of a knee-jerk wish to appease a censorious mob with too much time on their hands, and fast internet connections.
Speaking for myself, there are passages in my first book, my 2014 Lord Rochester biography Blazing Star, that I now look at with regret and distaste; I tried too hard to shock, and the book suffers for it. But I would no more want to return to Blazing Star and seek to make changes to appease imagined future readers than I would to read poorly edited versions of Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie and others over the originals.
As Spielberg said, revising our own work beyond sense is a recipe for madness. My message to artists is simple. Burn with the hard, gem-like flame of righteousness, stick to your convictions and be proud of your work, rather than regard it as a subject for opening negotiations with its listeners, viewers or readers. Otherwise great art – or even enjoyable entertainment – will cease to exist, and we will be left with sanitised, tedious dross instead.
