Explicit Top 40 Hits

jebsib wrote: While there have been coarse / vulgar hits for decades, does anyone know the first commercial hits that actually had out-and-out swear words?

A Boy Named Sue had no explicit version, just a clean release until the Live album it came from came out decades later unedited. It contained son-of-a-bitch in the lyrics censored. That was 1969.

If I recall the Isley Brothers Fight The Power contained the first true curse word "bullshit", which was censored out for the radio in the 70's but available on the LP Version.

There were other instances of changed lyrics like Lou Christie's Rhapsody In The Rain in the 60's, but if your talking about vulgar/offensive language, I can't recall any before the Isley Brothers hit.

Unless you want to count John Lennon's use of the N Word in his 1972 song, which due to its use of an offensive racial epithet and what was perceived as an inappropriate comparison of women's rights to the oppression of African-Americans, most radio stations in the US declined to play the record.

Either way if you want to discount Bitch go right ahead. Apparently radio was okay with playing Elton John's The Bitch Is Back and Neil Sedaka's Bad Blood without edits. Almost forgot 1976's Hurricane Part 1 by Bob Dylan as a special mention....

Edited by PopArchivist

“Money” by Pink Floyd was from 1973, and commercial copies also
contain the word “bullshit.”

Ironically, I emailed the programmer at Promo Only
yesterday about this song and the huge increase in spins
this week. He initially serviced to POOL the promo [clean]
version, then last night, they uploaded a PO Clean Edit.
Top Hits U.S.A. hasn't even serviced the song at all.

No radio station in my area played that John Lennon song
in 1972.

jebsib wrote: Amazing how the culture has shifted. How long before we get a #1 hit with one of the "Big 2" words in the title?

Well, Cee Lo Green got pretty close with "F**k You!"
(which did have a clean version "Forget You") and Pink had
"F**kin' Perfect", both of which peaked at #2 on the Hot
100 in 2011.