I hate to break it to Tom

Fresh from the Roald Dahl controversy, I’m wondering whether it’s about time we thought about sensitivity readers for music. There’s so much hanging fruit. A few exploratory nibbles have already been made. 

The Sun Has Got His Hat On was recorded in 1932 by Ambrose and his Orchestra, and the Henry Hall BBC Dance Orchestra. The song is a light, infectious ditty but contains a problematical line:

He’s been tanning n…… out in Timbuctu

Now he’s coming back to do the same to you. 

The fact it was recorded by the BBC Dance Orchestra illustrates how socially acceptable it was in 1932. Times changed, to a degree at least. Jonathan King released the song in 1971, changing the line to ‘He’s been tanning Negroes.’

Stephen Fry played it safe in his 1984 revival of Me and My Girl by changing it to ‘He’s been roasting peanuts.’ The ditty last made the headlines in 2014 when a BBC local radio DJ unwittingly played the original Ambrose version on his show and was forced to resign. 

Cliff Richard’s sixty-year-old Living Doll has the immortal lines: 

I’m gonna lock her up in a trunk so no big hunk 

Can steal her away from me

Got myself a walking, talking, living doll.

Disgraceful!

But it gets worse!

The Stones with their Under My Thumb

Under my thumb

It’s a squirming dog who’s just had her day

Under my thumb

A girl who has just changed her ways

As with the Stones, the Beatles: Run for your life is another song where it's hard to pick out a verse  any 

worse than the other. But in verse three, for example, we have:

Let this be a sermon

I mean everything I’ve said

Baby, I’m determined 

And I’d rather see you dead

followed by the jaunty chorus:

You’d better run for your life if you can, little girl

Hide your head in the sand little girl, 

Catch you with another man 

That’s the end little girl.

 And back to the Rolling Stones again with their Brown Sugar now ‘resting’ from their concert set lists.

Brown Sugar, how come you taste so good, babe?

Ah, brown sugar, just like a black girl should, yeah

Subsequently, Jagger changed a line ‘I hear him whip the women just around midnight to ‘You should have heard him just around midnight.’ This wasn’t enough for the music critic Tom Taylor who in 20221 declared that the song: ‘does not offer one considered thought to the subject matter that it sings of (and) the atrocity of the slave trade, rape and the unimaginable suffering therein should not be adorned with gyrating, glib lyrics, guitar solos and no redeeming features in the way of discerned appraisal.’ Umm, I hate to break it to Tom, but that’s not really the purpose of rock music. 

What muddies the waters farther is that after the song was written. two black women fought over who the song was about: Marsha Hunt, Jagger’s girl friend at the time, and a former Ikette, Claudia Lennear who was also dating Jagger at the time. Presumably, they saw something in the song that Tom Taylor didn’t, and it goes to the heart of the issue. 

All of these songs reflect the insecurities, the shallowness and the fantasies of male adolescents. It is what rock music was and is about. Today, with women playing an increasing role in Rock/Grime/Rap music you’re seeing parallel examples of misandry reflecting the same angsts and bravado of earlier male performers. 

 Back in 1966, Under My Thumb would strike a chord, one of wish fulfilment in many a pimply youth who had just been dumped. Run For Your Life is very much the mid 1960’s macho Liverpool swagger reflecting the fear of being dumped, and Brown Sugar is over-heated fantasy touching upon heroin, sadomasochism and hot sex—with an irresistible beat.

What can we say about Living Doll? Much tamer stuff, the fantasy of a nice middle-class boy crowing over having found the perfect girl who he’ll turn into an idealised 1950’s housewife. 

As for The Sun Has Got It’s Hat On, it perfectly illustrates a central fact about history: people were recognisably the same but essentially different. It’s not the job of the historian to  judge. Their job is to observe and understand.

The central question must always be why? You’re studying people, movements and ideas, not judging them by our standards, but accepting them as products of a specific time and culture. The biologist doesn’t tut-tut and wag their finger at an errant microbe or a mutant strain of Ebola. It’s studied for what it is, where it came from and why. It’s much the same for the historian or was until recent times. 

And now, because the contrast is interesting, 'Under My Thumb' played by ageing men. Creepy? or a knowing/naughty homage to the past.