Distanced From Current Events / Music

Albums

• Following the death of Princess Diana, Kylie Minogue pushed back the European and Australian release of her album Impossible Princess to early 1998, and retitled it Kylie Minogue. The 2003 reissue restored the original title.
• An accidental case happened with the first Foo Fighters album, given back then reviewers and fans just thought everything a former Nirvana member would do just had to do with Kurt Cobain killing himself. Thus Billboard said the Ray Gun on the cover was "tasteless" even if it was just another sci-fi element like the band name, and others criticized the line "one shot, nothing" in "Weenie Beenie", when, in reality, Dave Grohl wrote the song the same year he joined Nirvana.
• The Black Sabbath album Paranoid was originally going to be called War Pigs, but was retitled due to The Vietnam War. Of course, the war was already going on, and "War Pigs" (the song) was probably about the Vietnam War on some level. The retitle was intended to make the album marketable, and the song stayed on. Still, the cover depicting a soldier remained. Also, the album tour was considered to be in bad taste by many because it happened right on the heels of the Charles Manson murders - despite Charles Manson and Black Sabbath having absolutely nothing to do with each other, except for both being "dark."
• The album Recover by Great White got an unauthorized reissue by an Italian record label in 2004. This alone wasn't good news for the band, but they might not have objected so strongly if the label hadn't renamed it Burning House of Love, a very sensitive title given that the year before, a fire had broken out at a Great White concert and killed 100 people. Right away, the band urged fans not to buy this version; the label did later rename it Love Removal Machine, though the band's still not happy that it was illegally re-released at all.
  • That wasn't the only illegally released Great White compilation with insensitive content that came out that year either, there was another compilation that combined Recover and the Led Zeppelin covers album Great Zeppelin called A Double Dose. The original release featured a burning shark on the cover art, resulting in backlash from the band and fans alike and forcing the cover to be changed to a more innocuous shot of a shark emerging from the water.
• Lynyrd Skynyrd's fifth album Street Survivors had its cover changed immediately after the 1977 plane crash that killed three of it's members, as the original cover showed the band surrounded by flames. The 2007 reissue of the album restored the original flames cover.
• Capsule's 2011 album was set to be released shortly after the Japanese tsunami but was delayed so the title could be changed from Killer Wave to World of Fantasy.

Songs

• Due to the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, radio stations in Germany removed "Die Flut" (The Flood) by Witt/Heppner, "Land unter" (Land Under) by Herbert Grönemeyer and, most (in)famously "Die perfekte Welle" (The Perfect Wave) by Juli from regular schedules.
• Several Australian childcare centers stopped playing music by Rolf Harris, including the regional Christmas song "Six White Boomers," after Harris was convicted of sexually assaulting four children.
• In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in December 2012, some radio stations temporarily pulled songs that were deemed insensitive due to their lyrics despite the fact that they were big hits at the time, including "Die Young" by Kesha ("Let's make the most of the night like we're gonna die young"), "Titanium" by David Guetta and Sia ("You shoot me down, but I won't fall / I am Titanium") and "Pumped Up Kicks" by Foster the People ("All the other kids with your pumped up kicks / You better run, better run, faster than my bullets"). This latter was specially seen as problematic as (despite the Lyrical Dissonance) it talks about gun violence and mental health in young people, although these songs were already past their prime.
  • Similarly, country radio stations temporarily pulled "If I Die Young" and "Better Dig Two," both by The Band Perry as a direct result of the aforementioned school shooting.
• After the February 1, 2003, Columbia space shuttle disaster, some radio stations briefly stopped playing Mark Wills' "19 Somethin'", which contained the line "The space shuttle fell out of the sky" (in reference to the 1986 Challenger disaster). However, this was only a momentary dip at best, as the song still spent a monstrous seven weeks at #1.
• Trace Adkins withdrew his 2005 single "Arlington", a first-person view of a soldier buried in Arlington National Cemetery, because family members of soldiers lost in combat in Iraq felt that the material was too close to home for them.
• In May of 2009, Aqua released the song "Back to the 80's", which included the lyric "And Michael Jackson's skin was black". A month later, Michael Jackson died, so the international version of the single changed the line to "And Arnie told us I'll be back" out of respect.
• Billy Joe Royal's single "Burned Like a Rocket" was climbing up the country music charts when the Challenger disaster occurred. As a result, radio stations withdrew the single from their playlists, ending the song's chart run.
• Brian Eno's song "Burning Airlines Give You So Much More" (1974) was subject to this. It was originally titled "Turkish Airways Give You So Much More," referencing a then-recent plane crash. (Eno was fond of Gallows Humor and Black Comedy at the time.) The record company made him change it, though they somehow found a song about burning airlines acceptable.
• Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997" pointedly avoided one particular line from the original ("Even when you died the press still hounded you"), as using a tribute song for much-beloved Princess Diana to vent conspiracies about paparazzi playing an indirect role in her fatal car accident would have been seen as incredibly tactless (not helped by the wall-to-wall news coverage of her death). If you knew the original, though, the implication is still there.
• In response to the COVID-19 outbreak, the title of Powfu & beebadoobee's "death bed" was changed to "death bed (coffee for your head)", with some radio DJs only referring to it as "Coffee For Your Head". Some radio stations also played an edit which changed the lyrics referring to death.
  I don't want to be alone, I don't want to go away^note Originally says "pass away"
• Orden Ogan's 2021 album Final Days, a themed album about various versions of The End of the World as We Know It, was to include the song "December", written in 2019. The song describes a biological weapon leaking from a lab in "the east" and fake news crippling the response. Eerily prophetic, right?^note The "lab leak" was a well-known conspiracy theory about the origin of SARS-CoV-2. The band thought so, too, and cut it from the original version of the album out of respect for the victims of the real-life COVID-19 Pandemic, instead putting it on the Orden Ogan and Friends rerelease in October 2022.
• Europe's signature single "The Final Countdown" was released in their home country just two weeks after the Challenger disaster, which set its American release back three months.
• Yung Gravy's song "Forget-Me-Thots" contains the line "Pull up on your daughter like I'm Kevin fuckin' Spacey!" (referencing American Beauty where Spacey's character becomes infatuated with a teenage girl). The song was written before the sexual harassment and assault allegations that more or less ended Spacey's career became public. The music video, which was released a few years later, features Yung Gravy addressing the issue in a mid-song Public Service Announcement:
  Yung Gravy: Pull up on your daughter like I'm— [*static noise*] This part of the song initially contained a reference to the movie American Beauty starring Kevin Spacey. This was long before we learned that Kevin Space was a nasty bitch. [...] So my message to you today is: Fuck you Kevin Spacey, you are a pussy.
• "Hana No Image" was already completed and ready for release when Yukiko Okada committed suicide by jumping off a building. Due to the tragic news, Pony Canyon decided to temporarily shelve "Hana No Image" in order to prevent further suicides. The song would later get released in a compilation album 13 years after Okada's death.
• The last verse to "I Get a Kick Out of You" by Cole Porter was originally: "I get no kick in a plane / I shouldn't care for those nights in the air / That the fair Mrs. Lindbergh goes through." Following the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, however, Porter changed it to the familiar "I get no kick in a plane / Flying too high with some gal in the sky / Is my idea of nothing to do."
• The "Pennyroyal Tea" single from Nirvana's album, In Utero, was recalled shortly after Kurt Cobain's death in April 1994. The single's cancellation may have been in part due to the title of one of the B-sides, "I Hate Myself and Want to Die," although it may have been cancelled regardless of this, so as not to capitalize on Cobain's death. As a result, the only country where it saw release before the recall was Germany (plus a promo release in the UK). 20 years later, the song was re-released on 7-inch vinyl for Record Store Day 2014, limited to only 6000 copies. It was the top-selling vinyl single of Record Store Day in the US, reaching number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles Sales Chart.
• IU was going to put a cover of a song by Kim Kwang-seok in her album A Flower Bookmark 2, but due to a conspiracy theory about the circumstances of Kim's death surfacing around the time of release, she removed that track from the album. The albums that were distributed to stores had to be pulled just before they went on sale. She eventually uploaded the music video on Youtube in 2018.
• Yasuko Endo's first and only single, "In the Distance" was scheduled for release in May 1986, but two months prior, she tragically took her own life. In light of this, her label Riv.Star Records cancelled its release, and destroyed most remaining copies that still existed at the time. However, Tetsuo Sakurai, who produced the song, did his own cover of it with slightly different lyrics.
• Pam Tillis withdrew her 1995 single "I Was Blown Away" over concerns that the title would be insensitive in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombings.
• Beth Hart's 1999 single "LA Song" was sent out to radio stations on a CD single that included two versions of the song — one that was identical to the album version save for blanking out a swear word, and one that also altered one of the verses due to a reference to having a gun. The promo single included a note from the artist, indirectly referring to the recent Columbine shootings, stating that she wanted the song to still be released because it ultimately had a positive message, and that it was up to broadcasters to decide which version would be appropriate for their audience.
• They Might Be Giants released a song for Halloween 2011 entitled "Marty Beller Mask", which heavily references Whitney Houston and her work, and it became a staple at live shows...for a few months, until the February 2012 death of Houston. Out of respect, the band retired the song from live performance, and it wasn't played publicly again until 2022. An official music video was also temporarily removed from the band's YouTube channel, but was restored at a later date.
• Chris Cornell's video for "Nearly Forgot My Broken Heart" has him playing a prisoner about to be hanged. Three weeks after Cornell's suicide by hanging on May 18, 2017, the music video was removed from YouTube.
• Stone Temple Pilots re-recorded an early demo from the Core sessions called "Only Dying" with the intention of giving it to the soundtrack of The Crow (1994) - Once the film's lead actor Brandon Lee died in a stunt mishap during filming, the title was considered to be in poor taste, so the previously released song, "Big Empty", from their album Purple was used in its place.
• Radiohead's "Sulk" was originally going to have the line "Just shoot your gun, you'll never change" as part of the refrain, and early live performances included this lyric. By the time it was recorded for The Bends in late 1994, "Just shoot your gun" became "Just like your dad", due to Kurt Cobain's then-recent suicide by gun. The song was actually inspired by a different tragedy, but one that would have been less fresh in listeners' minds at the time: A lone gunman's killing spree in Hungerford, England that had occurred in 1987.
• "Teenage Dirtbag" by Wheatus contains the line "Her boyfriend's a dick / And he brings a gun to school". However, the single was released around the time of Columbine, and so the clean version had "gun" bleeped out along with "dick". Of course, if you hear the clean version on the radio or somewhere these days it can be a source of confusion.
• In 2009, the Capitol Steps released a song online called "We Arr The World", featuring an impersonation of Michael Jackson as one of the famous personalities. He died the same week, and was quickly replaced by Cher, then Christine O'Donnell, then finally after enough time had passed, he was put back in as "back from the afterlife".
• Doug Supernaw's 1995 single "What'll You Do About Me" was subject to this. The song, originally written in The '80s, had a Stalker with a Crush theme that likely played more innocently at the time... but in the wake of the O. J. Simpson controversy, some felt that it was too sympathetic toward the stalker. The label tried to appease this by editing the lyric "I'm on the porch with a two-by-two" to "I'm on the porch with dinner for two", but this still wasn't enough: some stations still refused to play the song, and one in Terre Haute, Indiana banned the song after a local woman was murdered by a stalker. The pushback became so severe that the song plummeted off the charts and his label dropped him.
• Busted changed the title of what would become their first UK Number 1 single from "Crash and Burn" to "You Said No" after the Columbia disaster in 2003, deeming that the title would be "inappropriate" as a result. The track's title on the album would retain the original title until its reissue later in 2003.
• The famous opening lyric of Kesha's "Tik Tok" ("Wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy") suddenly became extremely awkward after he was accused of a wide-reaching range of abuse in November 2023. Kesha's subsequent live performances of the song would replace the line with "feeling just like me".

Concerts

• Subverted with Jean-Michel Jarre's mega-concert Rendez-vous Houston. It was scheduled to take place in Houston, Texas on May 5th, 1986 to celebrate Houston's and Texas' 150th anniversary and NASA's 25th anniversary. Of course, the planning phase of such a huge event started in 1985 already. The show was to also feature Jarre's newest album, Rendez-vous, to be released in early 1986. Both on the album and at the show itself via live video link, the astronaut Ron McNair was planned to play a piece specifically written by Jarre for him on his saxophone aboard Challenger. After the shuttle exploded, Jarre wanted to cancel the entire concert, but NASA and McNair's friends and relatives convinced him to carry on and also make the concert a memorial for the victims of the disaster. The already heartfelt "Ron's Piece", the saxophone played by Kirk Whalum at the concert where it was the last number but one, became even moreso by leading it in with Ronald Reagan's eulogy for McNair projected on a skyscraper and the piece itself being accompanied by photo and video footage of Ron McNair as several-hundred-feet-high projections. To lift the spirits up again, Jarre continued with a projection of Kennedy's "We choose to go to the moon" speech and concluded the concert with the happy "Fourth Rendez-vous" which he even had to repeat as an encore. By the way, the Texans didn't mind Jarre going ahead with the concert so soon after the disaster: He broke his own audience world record with more than 1.5 million live spectators.
• Following Ray Rice's removal from the Baltimore Ravens for domestic abuse, a Rihanna performance that was slated to kick off the 2014 NFL season was scrapped (CBS feared having a domestic abuse victim perform at the NFL opener in the midst of the ongoing NFL domestic abuse scandal would put Rice's crimes at the forefront). Needless to say, Rihanna was not amused. Rihanna would later have a performance at Super Bowl LVII in 2023 to make up for it.

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