Canon Discontinuity / Music

Canon Discontinuity in music.

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Albums and Songs

• Following the release of Surviving R. Kelly in January 2019, which recounted allegations of sexual abuse and manipulation that surrounded him for decades, several artists who previously collaborated with him removed their collaborations with him from streaming services, including:
  • Lady Gaga removed the version of "Do What U Want" in which he is featured in from her discography, apologized for ever working with him and pledged to remove the song from sale and streaming services. The song was also retroactively deleted from the track list of her 2013 album Artpop. The only version of the song that is now readily available is an alternative one that Gaga had recorded with Christina Aguilera a few months after the Kelly version was issued in 2013.
  • Chance the Rapper pulled his 2015 song "Somewhere in Paradise", which featured Kelly, from streaming services as well, and publicly apologized for ever working with him.
  • Céline Dion had "I'm Your Angel", her 1998 #1 hit duet with Kelly, removed as well. Unlike Gaga and Chance's examples, however, the removal only affected instances where the song was attributed to Dion, such as her album These Are Special Times and greatest hits packages. It remains available on albums that are attributed to Kelly, like his fourth album, R., and his greatest hits albums.
• Tori Amos was embarrased by her debut album Y Kant Tori Read and it was out of print by the time she made her breakthrough in 1991 with Little Earthquakes. Her feelings on the album eventually changed, and she approved its first-ever reissue in 2018. She's also started playing the songs "Cool on Your Island" and "Etienne" in concert.
• Country singer Rodney Atkins has disowned "Honesty (Write Me a List)", the only hit from his 2004 debut album, possibly due to Early-Installment Weirdness that put it out of line with the style he developed by "If You're Going Through Hell" two years later.
• The second album by Bad Religion, Into The Unknown, actually got better reviews than their first album, but was rejected by fans because it explored prog-rock influences and piano melodies. After selling poorly, it was ignored in the discography for years, only being reissued 27 years later (in vinyl only) as part of a box set.
• Bananarama quickly wrote and recorded "The Wild Life" for the 1984 comedy-drama film of the same name. The song appeared on that movie's soundtrack album and was released as a single, which peaked at #70 on Billboard's Hot 100 chart; it was also briefly included on some pressings of the band's second album, Bananarama, but was removed from later versions. The band doesn't seem to have been very fond of the song, as it didn't appear on CD until their 2002 Greatest Hits Album, The Essentials.
• Polish Black Metal band Batushka has a really bizarre case of this: the band was originally the brainchild of Krzysztof "Derph" Drabikowski (who worked on vocals, writing, instrumentals, even the artwork), but in 2019, the band was suddenly hijacked and its name trademarked under former vocalist Bartłomiej "Bart" Krysiuk, seizing the band's social media and hiring session musicians to record new Batushka albums without Drabikowski's involvement. Following a complicated legal battle, there now technically exists two Batushkas: Drabikowski's Batushka (using the Cyrillic spelling, Батюшка), and Krysiuk's Batushka (using English characters), and unsurprisingly, Drabikowski doesn't consider the latter legitimate in any regard, nor does he treat their music as part of his band's discography.
• The Beatles:
  • Paul McCartney clearly considers Let It Be to be this, while John Lennon didn't (George and Ringo were either apparently neutral or didn't make their views on the subject known). The reason for this stems from Creative Differences; the album was recorded during a period of tension between the band, and the recordings were shunted aside until producer Phil Spector was brought in to sort them out and make something presentable of them. However, either through oversight or spite no one actually let McCartney know what was going on, so while Lennon was satisfied McCartney was horrified to hear what had been done to his original songs (especially "The Long and Winding Road") without his knowledge or permission. Let It Be... Naked, released over thirty years after, is generally considered an attempt by McCartney to replace the original.
  • The American Beatles albums are ignored, with the occasional exception of Meet the Beatles. The canon established in the 1980s with the CD releases and re-mastered in 2009 includes only the UK albums, except for Magical Mystery Tour, which was never a proper album in the UK, just two EPs. For a long time, the live album The Beatles At the Hollywood Bowl went unreleased on CD until 2016 due to its awful sound quality^{For Reference...}Since the album was recorded during Beatlemania, where their live shows were infamous for the deafening screaming, you can recreate the experience of listening to the album for yourself by listening to Please, Please Me while sitting next to a white noise machine, and the early bootlegs The Star Club Tapes were actively suppressed by the Beatles for the same reason.
  • The album A Collection of Beatles Oldies is a greatest hits album released by EMI to fulfill the Beatles contractual obligation of releasing two albums a year and to be the perfect Christmas present for Beatles fans. The result was an album that diehard Beatles didn't want since they had most if not all of the songs already and the lone album exclusive song was a cover, people who didn't like the Beatles were actively avoiding an album that appealed exclusively to Beatles fans (who were still mostly teenage girls at this point), and casual Beatles fans weren't even that particularly interested due to the album's... interesting cover turning them off. When you add the fact that Greatest Hits collections for bands that were still active weren't the most popular types of releases in the UK at this time^note It did end up doing pretty well as an import in the U.S. you get a commercial and critical flop that has been stricken from the Beatles main canon/catalogue that is nowadays best remembered for it's front and back cover images being an impetus for the "Paul Is Dead" conspiracy theory.
• Boarcorpse broke up when Jim Rohrer was arrested for possession of child pornography in 2019, and the rest of the band was so disgusted by him and his actions that they deleted their entire catalog from Bandcamp, destroyed all unsold albums and merch, and even deleted live videos from YouTube.
• Bomshel seemed to quickly ignore the fact that Buffy Lawson was ever one-half of the duo (the other half being Kristy Osmonson). The Lawson/Osmonson pairing recorded a three-song EP, from which all three cuts charted, and a song for the soundtrack to Evan Almighty. After Kelley Shepard replaced Lawson in 2008, the new lineup quickly tossed aside three of the four songs from Lawson's tenure, keeping only "Bomshel Stomp", before disbanding in 2013.
• David Bowie, having been active for the better part of half a century, had a number of works that he preferred to forget:
  • Official reissue campaigns hardly ever include material before Space Oddity, with both his debut album on Deram Records and his 1964-1966 non-album singles being ignored. In fact, neither Bowie nor his estate ever tried to reclaim the rights to that early material. The only official acknowledgement of the pre-1969 songs came in the form of Nothing Has Changed (which included "Liza Jane", "You've Got a Habit of Leaving", "Can't Help Thinking About Me", and "Silly Boy Blue") and Toy (which consisted mostly of re-recorded '60s cuts).
  • His early novelty song "The Laughing Gnome", also from the Deram years, is generally acknowledged as something that should not and should have never existed. He was extremely embarrassed when his old label reissued the single in 1973, during the height of his Ziggy Stardust-era fame, and it made the top 10 in the UK. When Trolls hijacked a fan vote for what songs he should play on a tour so that it came high up, he scrapped the poll altogether.
  • While Never Let Me Down is often considered his worst canonical album, even by Bowie himself, it still sees plenty of reissues if only both for historical purposes and because it was still commercially successful back in 1987. However, one song on it, "Too Dizzy", was permanently banned from reissues at Bowie's request, with biographers citing its unintentionally disturbing lyrics (being a song about unrequited love that ended up sounding like a Stalker with a Crush's anthem) as the most likely contributing factor.
• After the Garth Brooks-as-Chris Gaines movie was cancelled, the album Brooks recorded in the role was effectively deleted from Brooks' catalog. It wasn't included in his second Limited Series box set nor the digital bundle he offers of all his other non-Christmas albums, has remained out of print, and there's no mention of Gaines on his official website.
• Brooks & Dunn seemed to take the stance that their 1999 album Tight Rope never happened, despite producing a Top 5 hit in "You'll Always Be Loved by Me". The album was their worst-selling and least successful on the charts, was derided by critics for its tired sound, and had none of its singles appear on their second Greatest Hits Album in 2004. Making this omission more egregious is the fact that said Greatest Hits album does feature "South of Santa Fe" from the album immediately before Tight Rope, which has the dishonor of being their only single not to hit Top 40 on the country charts! (By comparison, their second lowest charting single is "Beer Thirty" from Tight Rope, which still got to #19.)
• Cheap Trick released the non-album single "Up the Creek" in 1984, which appeared on the soundtrack of the film of the same name. But despite the fact that it cracked the top-40 on the Billboard Mainstream Rock chart, it didn't appear on any Cheap Trick compilations until 2015. Both drummer Bun E. Carlos and songwriter/guitarist Rick Nielsen have derided the song in interviews.
• For years, The Clash's final album, 1985's Cut the Crap, was completely written out of their history. Westway to the World, an official and otherwise comprehensive documentary on the band from 2000, stops when Mick Jones left the band in 1983. Likewise, several biographies on the band either glance over the album entirely or give it a brief, begrudging mention, and for years, none of its songs appeared on the band's hits collections. While the album still has a rock-bottom reputation, a reprieve had been given to its well-regarded lead single "This Is England" by the time the new millennium rolled around. It appears on the 2003 The Essential Clash compilation, the 2006 Singles Box set and the 2007 The Singles greatest hits album.
• Destruction has their mid-late 90's "Neo-Destruction" era, consisting of two extended plays and one studio album. Since reacquiring lead singer Schmeir (absent on these releases), the band has more or less completely buried them, do not list them anywhere as part of the band's discography, and they the only significant releases in their discography unavailable on digital outlets.
• Devo has generally ignored the entire Enigma Records discography, and their last Warner (Bros.) Records album, Shout. While they acknowledge their existence, good luck hoping for a re-release, or hearing anything from it performed live again.
• The Divine Comedy's first album, Fanfare For The Comic Muse, is very firmly this; it's been long deleted, and nobody - least of all Neil Hannon - seems to want it rereleased.
• Gaetano Donizetti hated the opera Buondelmonte because of the bowdlerization it was to his Maria Stuarda. In fact, he pulled Buondelmonte after a few ill-received performances and refused to stage it elsewhere.
• The Doors have never reissued their two post-Morrison albums, Other Voices and Full Circle, even in the supposedly Complete Studio Recordings boxed set. These had at one time allegedly only seen CD release in Russia, and those discs are unauthorized. Both albums eventually became available on iTunes and later reissued as a 2-CD set by Rhino.
• The Bob Dylan album Dylan was released without his approval by Columbia Records after he jumped ship for Asylum Records, pieced together from some dubious outtakes. After he returned to Columbia several years later, it was quietly buried and largely has remained so ever since.
• Eminem's debut album, Infinite, was a complete commercial failure, and has never been reissued. The songs featured a very young Eminem performing in a painfully earnest lyrical-miracle-spiritual boom-bap style he would never revisit, and none of the material has reappeared in any form, except for a remastered digital release of the title track in 2016. (While his second release, The Slim Shady EP, has also never been reissued, most of the material was either repeated or remade for The Slim Shady LP.) He does, however, reference it in Recovery song Not Afraid:
  "From "Infinite" down to that last "Relapse" ^note (Relapse: Refill) album..."
• If Genesis had their way, their debut album From Genesis to Revelation would be out of print, but they don't own the rights to it, their then-manager Jonathan King does. Genesis also likes to pretend that the widely panned album ...Calling All Stations... (featuring Ray Wilson on lead vocals) never happened either. No songs from that album were included on the 2006-2007 reunion tour. The band's official documentary Genesis: Together and Apart mentions their debut album, but ...Calling All Stations... and Wilson are completely absent from it. However, ...Calling All Stations... is included with the Genesis 1983-1998 box set released in 2007.
• Goo Goo Dolls started as a Hardcore Punk band, evolving into a Pop Punk sound that produced both their major label debut Superstar Car Wash and their commercial breakthrough album A Boy Named Goo. The follow-up, Dizzy Up the Girl, introduced a ballad-oriented folk-pop sound that brought them even greater commercial success. They no longer perform/discuss the old material for obvious reasons. Their 1987 debut First Release has been out of print since... 1987, and when asked what the chances of them ever playing the pre-Car Wash material again were, they said "take the highest number you can think of and multiply it by three".
  • The band did relent slightly and included "There You Are", from 1989 release Hold Me Up in the live set for their Dizzy Up the Girl Anniversary Tour as a deep cut.
• Guns N' Roses grew to regret "One in a Million", an extremely controversial song on their GNR Lies EP that featured racist and homophobic language. The band included the entirety of the EP on their extensive 2018 box set for Appetite for Destruction, but "One in a Million" was nowhere to be found.
• Both the fans and Helloween themselves agree that there's no such thing as Chameleon in their discography. It was the last album with Michael Kiske on vocals, and the most Lighter and Softer of them all. Nowadays Pink Bubbles Go Ape has fallen here as well, despite that the band played some of that album's songs, like "Mankind" and "The Chance".
• Robyn Hitchcock disowned his second album Groovy Decay: He pulled it out of print a few years after its release and replaced it with Groovy Decoy, which featured the original versions of four Groovy Decay songs but mostly consisted of demos from the same period. The original Groovy Decay album can still be found in its entirety on the box set Gravy Deco though, and the album even got a 2007 remastered re-release with bonus tracks, although it was only released as a digital download.
• The Human League:
  • The single "Boys And Girls" was an unfinished song rush-recorded and released to fulfil record company demand, and has never been performed live after the tour it was released during. It is available as a bonus track on the Travelogue CD and the A Very British Synthesizer Group Boxed Set, but has never been on a Greatest Hits Album.
  • The 4-track EP "Dignity of Labour", an instrumental Concept Album about Yuri Gagarin, has never been played live and has been rarely mentioned by the band overall, besides being included on A Very British Synthesizer Group and the Reproduction CD.
  • The single "I Don't Depend On You", by a re-naming of the Human League known as "The Men", has been mostly forgotten as a Disco track which is rarely mentioned by the band outside of its inclusion on the Travelogue CD.
  • Their 1990 studio album Romantic? is the only one of the Virgin-era albums to be excluded from the band's remastering campaign in the early 2000s. The album represented the band's career at its nadir (which the band themselves commented on in "The Stars Are Going Out?"), generated only a modest UK hit in "Heart Like a Wheel", and undersold, leading both the band and Virgin to ignore its existence (outside a couple Japanese reissues) until its inclusion in the 2022 Boxed Set The Virgin Years.
• The Internet didn't seem to indicate the existence of any Imagine Dragons EPs older than 2009, until some songs from a 2008 EP called Speak to Me appeared on Tumblr in December 2014. (A few other websites acknowledged the existence of the songs, but not the EP itself.) The band's manager, Mac Reynolds, explained that since only one of the members featured in those tracks — Dan Reynolds — remained with Imagine Dragons afterward, the band didn't really consider Speak to Me one of their own works.
• Jean-Michel Jarre:
  • The musician started his discography with the 1976 album Oxygène for decades. In fact, he had had several releases the previous five years already, including the album Deserted Palace (1972) and the soundtrack album Les Granges Brûlées (1973), but also singles with more or less corny music that Jarre released under a number of pseudonyms in order to not be associated with that stuff. Since none of this material had been officially reissued, and much of it still hasn't, the original vinyl releases became sought-after and highly expensive collector's items, and even what bootlegs were made of them cost a fortune.
  • After Jarre and his long-time publisher Francis Dreyfus who still owned Jarre's entire back catalog went separate ways, Dreyfus re-released Les Granges Brûlées 30 years after its original release to cash in on Jarre's older material and the fans' longing for it.
  • Eventually, Jarre himself, now in possession of his own music again after Dreyfus' passing, released a double compilation album named Essentials & Rarities with one CD containing a selection of pre-Oxygène rarities including both sides of Jarre's rare first single, La Cage/Erosmachine, as well as the previously unreleased 1969 recording "Happiness Is A Sad Song".
• Jethro Tull has rarely acknowledged A or Under Wraps in its discography and omits both on their 2001 "Best of" collection. J-Tull dot com is also omitted from the album, but more likely because of its release a few years earlier.
• Billy Joel:
  • While "Just The Way You Are" is still one of his best-known hits, he stopped performing the song live in 1986 because he wrote it for his first wife, whom he later divorced in 1982. He wouldn't start performing it again until the 2000s, albeit jokingly parodying the lyrics in the chorus as "She got the house. She got the car"
  • Subverted for "Uptown Girl". He also wrote it for an ex-wife, Christie Brinkley, but the reason he stopped performing it is because he feels he can no longer pull off the Frankie Valli-style falsetto the song requires. He remains friends with Brinkley, and he usually only performs the song in concert (in a lower key) when she's in the audience.
    • Completely averted in recent years, as "Uptown Girl" has opened the encore of most of his live shows.
  • He also has the distinction of being the only artist to decanonize a specific version of one of his songs in another of his songs: "The Entertainer" contains a scathing look at the music industry that forcibly edited "Piano Man" to make it fit on the radio.
  "It was a beautiful song, but it ran too long
  If you're gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit
  So they cut it down to 3:05."
• Similarly with Elton John, a UK top-5 hit in "Passengers" has seemingly been discarded since its release in 1984, and in its lifetime was only ever performed at a handful of UK concerts in 1985 (and omitted from the remaining dates from that year's tour). It has been suggested that John never cared for the song in the first place (has has also stated in various interviews and commentaries that he has often disagreed with his record labels as to which songs from new albums should be released as singles).
• Judas Priest seems to have all but forgotten about the era of Tim "Ripper" Owens now that Rob Halford is back. In fact, a 2012 box set called The Complete Albums contains the band's first two albums (the first release on CD endorsed by the band) but ignores both albums with Owens.
• The KLF did this to their entire back catalog when they left the music business in 1992. Well, specifically they pulled all of their albums out of print to make it clear that their retirement wasn't just a stunt to sell more of their back catalog. Only in the UK, however; one can still buy copies of their American Arista releases. The American releases (and remaining UK copies) have been in high demand with British fans since the band retired.
• Autobahn is Kraftwerk's first album — officially, that is. The not-too-electronic ones made before it, Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk 2 and Ralf und Florian, seem to not exist nowadays. Of course, they were made, but when Kraftwerk went fully electronic, Ralf Hütter disowned them, and they've never been reissued.
• Neither of the two original videos for Madonna's first single "Holiday" from her debut Madonna, which featured the pre-MTV, pre-Lucky Star singer dancing in a production studio (featuring an observer dressed in a nightgown in the background), have been included on any of her official video releases. This included 2009's Celebration DVD collection, which collected almost every other music video she ever released (including a live performance of "Holiday", shot at the same time as the videos). Notably, both versions featured poor production values. In the same vein, the original music video for True Blue (which didn't feature Madonna in it) has never been acknowledged either, due to it being helmed by an amateur director who won an MTV "Make My Video" contest in 1984. Madonna has also refused to play the song at most of her concerts, as the song was written about her (abusive) ex-husband Sean Penn, after they divorced in the late 1980s.
• Megadeth and Risk; almost all of the material on it has gone unacknowledged. It didn't help that the album was produced by Dann Huff, a former hair-metal guitarist known primarily for shifting to country music.
• Metallica seems to take the stance that St. Anger never happened, as songs from it are almost never played in concert. It was recorded in the midst of immense personal difficulty for the band, featured a heavier, solo-less style, and lacked Jason Newsted's bass work on account of him having quit beforehand (producer Bob Rock instead fills in for him).
• Al Jourgensen completely disavows the first Ministry album With Sympathy, calling it an "abortion." The album's New Wave style sounds nothing like the metal/industrial band they would become, and Jourgensen has claimed that his record label made the band record the album in that style even though they had moved past it at that point. This was also a period of time when Al sang in a faux English accent for reasons he doesn't even know/remember. He does still acknowledge the single "Every Day Is Halloween" that came out some time after the album. While also a poppy yet gothic dance number, it remains a fan favorite with Al and company making an acoustic reworking of it decades later.
• Both Alanis Morissette and Björk have embarrassing early albums they don't acknowledge as part of their discography; Björk's was an LP of covers recorded when she was a child, while Alanis' were teen pop which won her fame in Canada but failed to chart in the US.
• For a long time, New Order refused to play any Joy Division songs, wanting to avoid comparisons between them and their former incarnation. Once they felt they'd developed a musical reputation in their own right, they started doing songs like "Transmission" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart" in live shows.
• Country Music singer Joe Nichols has an album titled III. It was his fourth album. The one that was excluded from the chronology? His obscure 1996 self-titled debut on a small indie label — although none of its singles charted in the US, one got to #74 on the Canadian country charts, and all four had music videos.
• Ads for Jerrod Niemann's 2014 single "Buzz Back Girl", the third single from his third album High Noon, seem to take the stance that the preceding single "Donkey" never happened. This is most likely due to "Donkey" being a highly polarizing Double Entendre-laden novelty that completely self-destructed on the charts, dying at #43 only a few weeks after the album's lead single "Drink to That All Night" hit #1.
• Ozzy Osbourne has deleted the live albums Speak of the Devil, Just Say Ozzy, Live and Loud and even the studio album The Ultimate Sin from his catalog, and they are no longer being made (although The Ultimate Sin is available on streaming services). The deletion of The Ultimate Sin most likely has something to do with the legal troubles with a former band member over songwriting credits. At the time it was released (1982) Ozzy made no bones in interviews about hating Speak of the Devil passionately; he did it only because he was contractually obligated to do a double live album with a lot of Sabbath classics at the time (and the shows in question were recorded mostly after Randy Rhoads' sudden death, not a good time for Ozzy). It helped him out a lot because his versions were a lot better than what his former bandmates served up on Live Evil. It's not a great surprise that as soon as he could put it out of print, he did so. Meanwhile, removing The Ultimate Sin from the canon probably didn't raise too many brows, since it's widely considered to be Ozzy's weakest solo studio album by a longshot, due to its heavy glam influence. The album's title track has made a couple appearances on subsequent greatest hits albums, but "Shot in the Dark", the album's lead single and one of his biggest hits, hasn't appeared on a compilation since 1990.
• Following Chris Benoit's death in a double murder and suicide, Our Lady Peace refuse to play "Whatever", the song they wrote as his intro, ever again.
• For Pantera and their fans, their first album was 1990's Cowboys From Hell, ignoring the previous 4 albums a.k.a. their hard rock/glam era.
• Punk band Pennywise doesn't acknowledge their 2012 album All or Nothing at all; the songs on that album are never played in concert and the discography page on their website doesn't even list it. Coincidentally(?), it's the one album without Jim Lindberg on lead vocals.
• Katy Perry's website doesn't mention any of her Christian albums recorded under her real name, Katy Hudson.
• While The Final Cut still exists in the mind of Roger Waters (who still performs its material live), the album was shunned by the other members of Pink Floyd, who had very little input in the disc. David Gilmour in particular was disgusted that Roger would not only fashion a new album out of rejects from The Wall, but have the nerve to credit Pink Floyd as mere sidemen on his 'requiem for the post-war dream.' Just one of the album's songs, "The Fletcher Memorial Home", has appeared on subsequent greatest hits albums.
• Poison released the power ballad "I Won't Forget You" in 1987, and it hit #13 on Billboard's Hot 100. Despite its success, the band dropped it from their setlists the next year. They seemed eager to forget it; they didn't play it live again until 2003, a full 15 years later.
• R.E.M. came to hate "Shiny Happy People" so much that they deliberately left it off their Greatest Hits Album In Time. Their attitude toward it has softened a little since. When they released the more comprehensive Part Lies, Part Heart, Pure Truth, Part Garbage greatest hits album in 2011, "Shiny" was included on it.
• REO Speedwagon had a top-ten hit with "Keep the Fire Burnin'" in 1982, but they appear to have no love for the song. They notably left it off their 1988 greatest hits album, and it's been a relative rarity in their live setlists ever since.
• Radiohead's discography is available digitally except for the non-album single "Pop Is Dead", which was quickly disowned by the band; the music video is also unavailable on YouTube.
• Don't except Red Hot Chili Peppers to play material from the 4 pre-Blood Sugar Sex Magik albums the band did for EMI Records in The '80s (with the probable exception of "Me And My Friends") or the One Hot Minute album live. They'll only tease the songs by doing a little, less than 30 second instrumental portion, and that's it. The I'm With You and The Getaway albums have pretty much also got this treatment as well due to John Frusciante returning to the band, but they didn't tease anything from those albums on the Unlimited Love tour.
• Scooter:
  • Their first single "Vallée Des Larmes" has been all but ignored. HP Baxxter introduced his signature rapping/singing style on their second single "Hyper Hyper", which was successful. "Vallée Des Larmes" was not included on an album and its only recognition by the band since is the inclusion of a remixed version on the 1998 compilation Rough and Tough and Dangerous. It appears on the bonus disc, as the remix was a B Side. The reason for them ignoring "Vallée" is because it's an instrumental, it wasn't successful and it was recorded at a time when Scooter were meant to be a one off project. Its main B-side "Cosmos" appears on the band's first album And the Beat Goes On, however. In later years, they have acknowledged the influence they had on Scooter and the band have done the odd darkwave inspired song since. They have admitted that it was more financially viable playing Scooter's style of music.
  • Sheffield is definitely the Oddball in the Series and they aren't fond of its lead single "I'm Your Pusher". The second single from the album, "She's the Sun", is widely regarded as one of the band's best songs, but it doesn't really fit in with their repertoire these days. No tracks from the album were included on the UK version of their Push the Beat For This Jam compilation, but they have been on all others.
• Shakira released two albums as a child before her breakout album Pies Descalzos, however, they were critical and commercial failures and aren't listed on her official discography.
• Taylor Swift does not perform any of the singles off her debut album, except for an occasional performance of "Our Song" in a more pop style.
• They Might Be Giants' first-ever music video was for "Rabid Child," created around the time of the song's debut on their 1985 Demo Tape. The band very reluctantly allowed a brief fragment to be shown in their Gigantic documentary in 2002, but will refuse any discussion concerning a full public release. No one knows why.
• Van Halen III, the group's only album with Gary Cherone is not mentioned on VH's official website nor do songs from it appear on any Greatest Hits Album.
• Squeeze, the final album by Velvet Underground, was never reissued to CD or MP3 format and has been out of print on vinyl since the early 80s. It also sounds very unlike anything else by The Velvet Underground due to the absence of Lou Reed or anyone else associated with the band aside from Doug Yule. It is also the only album left out of the otherwise retrospective compilation Peel Slowly and See. The only reason anyone tried to call it canonical in the first place was Executive Meddling. Doug Yule wanted to release Squeeze as a solo album.

Song Lyrics

• Only the third verse of "Deutschlandlied" is part of the German national anthem. Verse 1 was already being questioned for its apparent belligerence and imperialism before it was co-opted by the Nazis. It also doesn't help that the borders described in the stanza are now part of other nations, and part of getting four-power assent to German reunification was dropping claims to Silesia, Pomerania and East Prussia. Verse 2 is jingoistic self-aggrandizement that is... a bit awkward now, to say the least. Verse 4 was a Nazi invention, so... yeah.
• The British national anthem "God Save The King":
  • The third verse is now discarded as it is deemed too belligerent:
  O Lord our God arise,
  Scatter his enemies
  And make them fall.
  Confound their politics,
  Frustrate their knavish tricks,
  On Thee our hopes we fix,
  God save us all.
  • The very dated verse six, which makes reference to George Wade and his "rebellious Scots to crush" has also been omitted.
• Only one verse of Maryland's state song, "Maryland, My Maryland," is commonly used today, because the song was originally a Confederate war song that referred to "Northern scum" and called Lincoln a "Yankee despot."
• The third stanza of "The Star-Spangled Banner" is often omitted in official renderings, because it mocks the British military as "hirelings and slaves". Of course, Britain is now a key ally of the USA, making the verse very outdated.
• The original 1944 anthem of the Soviet Union had a line about Joseph Stalin. The lyrics were later changed to omit any mention of him during de-Stalinization. (Which itself is another form of Canon Discontinuity where the USSR removed most of Stalin's legacy after his death.)

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