Yep...you guessed it...

"Beat It" by Michael Jackson.

Hmmm...never really could quite figure that one out...unless I'm thinking our white-on-rice-cracker SP back then must surely have been a racist!

Anywho...Any other great songs you can think of that the Gestapo wouldn't let you play at your YA Stake dances???

Or so it seems to me...

I think the song was Abracadabra. It had a phrase "black panties with an angel face". I loved it. The stake---not so much.

"Abra-abra-cadabra. I want to reach out and grab ya." Oh wait, I think that was what they said at the veil at the temple.

Whip It.

Okay, I might be dating myself a bit here, but once the Beatles grew their hair out they were taboo. Also, for a while there was a group of Relief Society women who were scrutinizing the devilish lyrics of every popular hard rock band and would pass out copies of the words to the Ward- So we had a long list of forbidden music.

druid Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Okay, I might be dating myself a bit here, but
> once the Beatles grew their hair out they were
> taboo. Also, for a while there was a group of
> Relief Society women who were scrutinizing the
> devilish lyrics of every popular hard rock band
> and would pass out copies of the words to the
> Ward- So we had a long list of forbidden music.


Just what every ward needed -- a couple of old biddies to take the fun out of everything. We had one witch in Hawaii when I was little who was concerned about all the back-masking, as though anything, satanic or otherwise, played backwards on a recording in the midst of heavy bass and drums and screaming electric guitar where it couldn't have been heard even if it could have been understood could ever effect anyone. Then we had Kimball or one of the other old geezers saying that any music that emphasized beats two and four in a measure was inherently evil. I'm surprised they didn't force us to dance to Pat Boone records at stake dances.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/15/2017 12:00AM by scmd.

I'm way old, and I remember Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys and Wild Thing by the Troggs.

Those are from 1966 I think, which is about the last time I went to Church dance.

The first stake dance my husband was the Dj for shortly after we were baptised still makes me laugh. (My husband was a radio DJ at the local station). The powers to be had a fit because he played a silly song "She came in thru the bathroom window", but were OK with "Mellow Yellow". Years later a stake dance was shut down because he played "The Macarena ". Sh

Macarena - too close to what went on in the temple - and that was pre 1990

Beat it was supposedly about masturbation.

In my time puff the magic dragon was taboo. Supposedly about drugs.

The Tennessee Waltz was forbidden too.

That's most likely where the puff theory came from. People imagining what drugs might be like.

I was my stake's DJ for a couple years. Got shut down nearly every time I played "It Takes Two" by Rob Base. Also remember a time that the first counselor in the stake presidency confiscated "Witchcraft" by Book of Love. Noticed it as he walked by and took it without a word. Trust me, it was a totally innocuous song.

That song is a rump shaker!

I like the Whopper.

"Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones was forbidden, not only at stake dances, but at an after-game dance at my high school! Gadfry.

Relax by frankie goes to hollywood was banned, but madonna's 'get into the groove' was okay, apparently.

Relax was banned from BBC radio playlists by the breakfast DJ for it being 'disgusting and lewd' - he stopped it playing after the first verse and apologised to listeners - and it became an instant number one record.

I'd stopped attending by the time 'male stripper' was released but I'm pretty sure that would have been banned too.

Your leaders from 50s & 60s would have a fit if they listened to modern music with all the drugs, violence and sex references. Would Grime as a genre be banned completely today as 'not church standard'? If I remember correctly, they did not like rap and hip hop much over here.

My nephew was a DJ for some of those dances. One song I know he said he couldn't play was "Unbelievable" by EMF. In the chorus it says (What the fuck was that?), I'm sure there was a clean version that played on the radio, but still the song wasn't allowed.

Stairway to Heaven.

I'm sure there were other banned songs, but that's the only one I remember. Whip It was allowed in our area.

Not much of a dance song -- Stairway

For fun once I wrote a list of behaviors that shouldn't be tolerated by Latter-day Saints in the artists they listen to, and hence they shouldn't listen to their music. I then used that logic to ban most of the classical composers:

Mozart - had an alcohol problem

Beethoven - was dishonest and accepted commissions from people when he never intended to write any music for them. (To be fair, the people giving him money knew what was going on. They just wanted to be able to say they'd commissioned something by Beethoven.)

Brahms - was infatuated with Schuman's wife

Wagner - was a huge anti-Semite and was Hitler's famous composer

Berlioz - encouraged satanism (The 5th movement of the Symphony Fantastique is described by him as a witches sabbath)

Tchaikovsky- was very likely gay

Vivaldi - spent all those years in a girls' school and never once tried anything???? Right!

I love classical music. My point was to make the youth leaders follow the same standards they impose on others. Nobody's perfect, and just because music was written a hundred or two years ago doesn't mean the composers were angels. They were imperfect humans like the rest of us (except maybe Bach ...)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/15/2017 01:49PM by bezoar.

Like a Virgin- Madonna

Justify My Love- Madonna

Burning Up- Madonna

Madonna's name, being the Catholic name for the Virgin Mother

All things Madonna!

I loved Madonna.

I think the church was just so envious of her because people paid attention to Madonna unlike the grand church. There was a crackpot sister that started going on and on about some whore that deserved zero attention during F&T. She continued her tirade about not supporting her slutty lifestyle and then I figured out that she was talking about Madonna! This crackpot was too chicken to say her name. I think she caught one of her sons wanking away so this was her LDS Psa.

MORmONs are not the only ones to ban perfectly innocent songs.

I was living down in New Orleans when the song "Alone Again, Naturally" by Gilbert O'Sullivan was the number one hit in the nation on the pop charts. This was 1972, I believe.

We could play that song in stake dances, but where it was NOT allowed was on WWL radio -- the biggest AM station in New Orleans, at a time when AM radio was still bigger than FM.


You see, WWL radio (and also WWL-TV, the New Orleans CBS affiliate) were - and might still be - owned and operated by the Jesuits (an order of the Catholic church).


There is a passage in the song that I never even noticed until the controversy erupted. I can't remember the exact passage but it was something about feeling abandoned even by the father, son and holy ghost.

I don't think most people gave it a second thought -- but the Jesuits who managed the radio station did, and they banned the song.

You could hear it on any other pop tunes station in New Orleans, but not on WWL.

So after that came out, all of us teenagers began to listen to the OTHER New Orleans pop stations especially so we could hear Alone Again, Naturally - and guess what fleeting passage we tuned in especially to hear?

Maybe because it hinted at suicide

Journey - Lovin' Touchin' Squeezin'

Alanis Morissette - You Oughta Know (although I couldn't even imagine how to "dance" to that - more likely to cause bruising or something)

AC/DC - Back in Black

Ted Nugent - the #1 song - Wang Dang Sweet Poontang


Let's leave wrecking balls out of it.

and pogo.

And every time you speak her name
does she know how you told me you'd hold me until you die?
Till you die?!

BUT YOU'RE STILL ALIVE

Kidding about the pogoing, but some songs are meant to be screamed off tune while thrashing about.

Now thats funny. Cant encourage beat it.

Here are a few I heard about as Young Adult rep.

anything Led Zeppelin: The Lemon Song, Whole lotta love.....

AC/DC: Hiway to Hell

Stones: Sympathy for the devil

The Who: Who are you? They say 'who the f*ck are you?' in the earlier version. It was changed for the tv show who used the song.

I remember in SoCal our ward had a list of inappropriate songs. I still recall the following:

1 - Oingo Boingo "I like little Girls"
2 - Steve Miller Band "Abracadabra"
3 - Olivia Newton John "Lets Get Physical"

I wish I could remember more. I was a huge fan of Oingo Boingo and I was strangely happy that they made the list.

In LA the young adult dances were huge in the late 80s early 90s. I think they were the precursor to raves. The young adult ward my ex-wife went to in Hacienda Heights made so much money from the dances they were worried about their tax-exempt status. I wonder if the young adult dances are still popular?

I was at BYU 1981-1982, and Olivia Newton John's "Let's Get Physical" was banned at the BYU Bookstore. A few years later they banned Muppet greeting cards because there were complaints Miss Piggy was showing too much cleavage.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/19/2017 12:14AM by Beth.

Time after time by Cindi Lauper

She was too controversial for the church and was on a banned list but of course the church thought it was pushing the limits when playing select disco era hits in the 1990s.

How in the hell was "Time after Time" banned??!! That seems ridiculous. I can understand "She Bob" but to ban her other songs is stupid.

Not necessarily a SP dance issue, but it shows how stupid Mormons can be. Some elder alerted my mission president about a lot of missionaries listening to satanic heavy metal so there was a giant shake down of every apartment. It was unannounced so it surprised a lot of missionaries. The target was a disturbing band called Enya. He was determined to seize every tape that was corrupting the mission.

Wow. Enya.

I get it, though. There was that "Sail Away" song. That could have given missionaries the idea to leave their mission, on the waters, which were ruled by Satan.

I think banning Enya is an entirely reasonable thing to do on artistic grounds alone.

...as well as humanitarian grounds.

our stake had a stake band that played all the major stake dances.
formed of (IIRC) a quad of quorum mucky mucks from the stake heirarchy, the group had a very limited range of songs, so all stake dances tended be very similar.
i seem to recall that they relied very heavily on John Denver songs
their rendition of annies song is quite memorable. musically it was OK but vocally it was an abomination equivalent to anything outlines in the OT

Back in the 70's Randy Bachman (who's daughter lived here) offered to bring BTO to play at a youth confernz in Lethbridge but the SP thought "undesirables" would likely crash the show and refused to allow it. Kids were some pissed when the word got out.

In California, there wasn't too much censorship on the music. Just don't have a lot of cursing, and most clean versions of hiphop booty movers were played a lot.

If one was banned, a new jam was always available that was just as good.

I'm old....my with my stake it was "I think We're Alone Now", by Tommy James and the Shondells.