Five of the most controversial rock songs ever made
By Lee Vowell
Rock music has always been about pushing the boundaries of what was possible. The genre partly exists because there are no limits. A band can be as loud or as quiet as they want to be and it can still be called rock.
Lyrically, there can be an aspect of aggression that other genres cannot include. There are likely no polka songs such as Nails' "You'll Never Be One of Us," though I am happy to be corrected. All that pent-up anger can sometimes lead to bad songs or bad people interpreting some tunes.
Of the five tracks that follow, not all were intended to instigate riots (or murder). In one case, the band just chose a bad path. All of the songs became controversial in their own way, however.
Five of the most controversial rock songs ever made
The Crystals - "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)"
This song is creepy for a lot of reasons. The lyrics are sad enough, but that future convicted murderer Phil Spector produced the single doesn't help. The positive part is that there is no way a song such as this would find the popularity today that it did when the track was released in 1962. Perhaps more shocking, Carole King is credited as the co-writer of the tune.
No matter how one tries to interpret the song, there is little doubt there is domestic assault happening and the person being assaulted does not feel, mentally or physically, like they can leave. Was the world a different place in the early 1960s? Yeah. Was the world a worse place if domestic assault appeared even more hidden? Yep.
The first verse alone is horrifying: "He hit me and it felt like a kiss/He hit me but it didn't hurt me/He couldn't stand to hear me say/That I'd been with someone new/And when I told him I had been untrue." The hope is that the songwriters based the words on a real situation that they were trying to shed light on and the victim was able to get away.
The other side could be true as well, however. Someone could have heard this song and thought it was fine to be the hitter or the person being hit. Either way, that's more than a real shame. It is very much tragic.