It’s a different beast writing with hits in mind. There’s always the pressure to make something safe for the pop market now and again, but if they’re pushed too far into a box, most artists will end up with songs that either are too faceless to go anywhere or sound too much like what they already did. It’s important to evolve, but for some reason, the bands here released songs and killed their momentum before they even got off the ground.
Sometimes it’s for the right reasons, like changing lyrics around now and again or throwing in an extra verse to clear up some things, but there are always the occasional snafus that bands run into as well. No artist can keep their hot streak forever, and despite them having the wind at their sails, it’s easy for some artists to cough it up and deliver songs that seem to go against every fibre of their being.
So whether it was an abject betrayal of the fans or some horrible miscalculation behind the scenes, it didn’t take these artists long to realise that they had made a terrible mistake. Given their circumstances, though, they should be considered lucky. Most artists aren’t able to walk away from a miss like this, but everyone here lived to survive another day, even if the road was a bit bumpy.
‘Woman is the ****** of the World’ – John Lennon
John Lennon was never a man to mince his words. If it was how he felt, it wasn’t off the table for him to throw it into a song, and some of the greatest moments in his career involve him saying what’s on his mind, even if it might upset some people. And while ‘Revolution’ and ‘Power to the People’ went over well as brilliant protest songs. But sometimes Lennon crossed a line, and it was easy to see why some fans wanted no part of the lead-off single to Some Time in New York City.
Lennon had enough sense to speak about the ongoing problem with women’s rights, but projecting a racial slur onto their problems was never going to help his case. To be clear, Lennon wasn’t intending to be racist with the slur, and had even been interviewed in magazines talking about how black artists changed his life, but there were always going to be people who took issue with throwing one gross slur on top of someone else’s issues.
While Yoko Ono coined the phrase, it was enough for many people to stay far away from the album before it even hit shelves. The song eventually earned itself a spot on his compilation album Shaved Fish, but no amount of stellar melodies and glorious saxophone breaks would ever make anyone more comfortable with a former Beatle singing a form of hate speech.