http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/01/cee-lo-green-changes-imagine-lyrics_n_1178313.html?ref=mostpopular#s583246
Our tradition is to have an all night tv/movie marathon with the kids, which we put on pause from 11:50 to 12:10 to watch the ball drop and call family and friends. We have always done that with Dick Clark, though I usually make the rounds of a few other channels just to see what is going on. I watched NBC right up to a few minutes before midnight (ABC has like a million commercials between 11:50 and 11:57). I literally turned the channel back to ABC just as they introduced Green, and said to my wife and son that I could not stomach whatever abomination he was going to make of one of the great songs. I fell asleep around 3:30 this morning, about half way through season 2 of "Arrested Development" (my wife and son had both never seen it - the two older girls are now 21 and over, and off on their own on NYE). I spent most of today sleeping and watching the NFL. I thought nothing more of Green until just now, surfing around HuffPo, and seeing this story that he actually changed the words of the song - as the story puts it "from "Nothing to kill or die for, *And no religion too*" to "Nothing to kill or die for, *And all religion's true*." WTF? A few weeks ago there was a post here that made incidental reference to the Stones "Start me up", which had the "you make a dead man come" part censored at the Super Bowl. I am going to assume this bowdlerizing of Lennon was not requested by NBC, or Carson Daly, but was Green's idea (sounds like it from the comments he made on his twitter account, as noted in the linked article). I am wondering if anyone knows if this has ever been done before, on television, to this particular song, or did Green come up with it all by himself? I remember when this song came out in the early 70s the pastor at my church preached a series of sermons for a month railing against it. I don't remember a young Cee Lo Green sitting in the pews with me, but I guess he heard some similar sermons. I put this up with replacing the word "nigger" with "negro" in some current versions of Huck Finn for being the most offensive bowdlerizing I have ever heard of. ** -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
