Seven More Songs You Shouldn’t Sing Anymore

Some songs get remembered. Others get forgiven, quietly, by an audience that never actually reread the words. Last week’s list tried to interrupt that forgiveness, and the comments section responded with everything except a counter-argument. They were less a rebuttal of any specific lyric than a general discomfort at being handed one back.

What the backlash did produce, alongside the outrage, was homework — a stack of reader nominations (mostly from women, interestingly) for songs that weren’t mentioned. Seven made the cut — some hiding in plain sight, others simply hiding.

Under My Thumb by The Rolling Stones (1966)

Lyrics: Mick Jagger

Under My Thumb doesn’t dress up its subject in metaphor the way plenty of its era’s songs did — it states it outright, in the title, and then spends four verses cataloguing exactly what control looks like from the winning side.

The woman who “once had him down” is systematically reduced across the song: first to a “squirmin’ dog”, then to a “Siamese cat”, language that strips her of agency by degrees until she’s simply a pet who’s learned to behave. Domestication isn’t a metaphor here — it’s the explicit goal.

What makes the song uncomfortable rather than merely dated is the satisfaction in the delivery. Jagger doesn’t sing this as a cautionary tale or an ambivalent power struggle; the tone is triumphant, savouring lines like “the way she talks when she’s spoken to” as evidence of a job well done. Meanwhile he reserves the freedom to “look at someone else”, a double standard the song never questions, only enjoys.

Decades of classic-rock airplay have mostly treated it as swagger rather than substance, the strutting riff doing enough heavy lifting that few people stop to register what’s actually being celebrated: one person’s total submission, framed as romantic victory.

Suggested by Bridget Cougar

Mellow Yellow by Donovan (1966)

Lyrics: Donovan Leitch

Mellow Yellow has spent decades being filed away as psychedelic whimsy — banana skins, flower-power nonsense, a “quite rightly” refrain too silly to interrogate. That reputation has done most of the song’s hiding for it.

Behind the giggling wordplay sits a verse where “Saffron” is quietly swapped out for “fourteen”, the narrator declaring himself “mad about” a specific numbered age with exactly the same lyric structure he’d used for a woman’s name.

Donovan didn’t soften that ambiguity when performing it live — he sharpened it, singing outright about being mad about 14-year-old girls who are supposedly mad about him too.

The “electrical banana” mythology, since confirmed by Donovan himself as a nod to a vibrator ad rather than a hallucinogenic banana peel, adds another uncomfortable layer once you know it’s there — the song’s central hook carrying more explicit sexual content than its innocent nursery-rhyme melody ever let on.

None of this stopped the song becoming a chart hit and cultural artifact of the Summer of Love. It’s a reminder that novelty and nonsense have always been effective camouflage, letting genuinely troubling content hide in a chorus catchy enough that nobody thought to ask what it actually meant.

Suggested by BO Face

Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon by Neil Diamond (1967)

Lyrics: Neil Diamond

Girl, You’ll Be A Woman Soon hides its discomfort behind one of Diamond’s most straightforwardly pretty melodies, which is exactly why the lyric rewards a closer look. The narrator isn’t singing to a woman — he’s singing to someone who isn’t one yet, framing her impending adulthood as the precondition for the relationship he’s already pursuing.

“Soon you’ll need a man” isn’t tenderness; it’s a countdown, positioning her maturity as something happening on his timeline, for his benefit.

The surrounding verses do the rest of the damage. Every objection — “he’s not your kind”, “the boy’s no good” — gets folded into a persecution narrative, the disapproving adults recast as the real villains rather than people flagging an obvious problem. “Don’t let them make up your mind” isn’t encouragement toward independence; it’s a man isolating a girl from exactly the people equipped to protect her.

Pulp Fiction’s use of the song only deepened its unease, pairing it with Mia Wallace’s near-fatal overdose — a moment of a young woman in genuine danger, scored by a song already about a girl being pushed toward something before she’s ready. Sweetness, on inspection, doing quite a lot of uncomfortable work.

Suggested by Louise Hurd

Clair by Gilbert O’Sullivan (1972)

Lyrics: Gilbert O’Sullivan

Clair survives on biography rather than text — and biography is doing an enormous amount of unpaid overtime here. Knowing the real Clair was three, that O’Sullivan was her babysitter, that the whole thing was a thank-you note to her parents, retroactively rescues a lyric that otherwise reads, verse by verse, like a love song to an age-inappropriate romantic partner.

“To me you’re more than a child”, “why in spite of our age difference do I cry”, “will you marry me, Uncle Ray” — none of that language distinguishes itself from adult romantic pursuit until the babysitting reveal arrives to explain it away.

Which raises the real question: does the true story actually fix the problem, given nobody hearing it on the radio has access to that story? A song is judged by what it communicates, not by a fact sheet its writer can produce afterward.

Most listeners weren’t told about Gordon Mills’ daughter (Mills was o’Sullivan’s producer/manager at the time); they heard a grown man addressing a “girl” in the vocabulary of infatuation. Context can explain a lyric. It can’t retroactively change what several generations actually heard playing at full chart strength on daytime radio.

Suggested by Cameron Cross

Boom Boom (Out Go The Lights) by Little Walter (1957)

Lyrics: Stan Lewis

Boom Boom (Out Go the Lights) has spent decades disguised as a good-time bar-rock anthem, which is what makes it worth a second look. Walter’s original and Pat Travers’ guitar-driven remake 20 years later both share the same uptempo swagger, the same call-and-response hook — but strip away the arrangement and the lyric is unambiguous: a man hunting his partner down after she’s left him, with the promise of violence rendered as a jaunty, singalong refrain.

“Boom” is the punch. “Out go the lights” is her losing consciousness. It isn’t metaphor doing any lifting here — it’s assault, set to a riff catchy enough to survive on classic rock radio for 50 years.

What makes it more troubling than simple period tone-deafness is how deliberately the discomfort gets smoothed over. Travers introduced his live version by calling it a “party song”, inviting crowds to shout the punchline back at him — actively recruiting an audience into cheering for domestic violence without anyone involved seeming to register it as such.

That’s the song’s real problem: not that it depicts abuse, but that 50 years of arrangements, hooks, and stage banter have worked overtime to make sure nobody notices.

Suggested by Joseph Dixon

Christine Sixteen by Kiss (1977)

Lyrics: Gene Simmons

Christine Sixteen doesn’t bother hiding its subject behind coded language the way its predecessors did — Simmons names the age, names the school, and names the intent, all in a chorus built for arena singalongs.

Where Chuck Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen or Ringo Starr’s You’re Sixteen at least leave room for a charitable reading, Kiss removes the ambiguity entirely: the narrator watches Christine leave school and immediately decides he “must have” her, no metaphor required.

What makes the song worse than simple bluntness is the specific detail it reaches for to reassure itself — “she’s been around, but she’s young and clean” — an oddly clinical line that frames a 16-year-old’s body as inventory to be assessed rather than a person to be respected. It’s predation dressed as compliment, delivered with the same swagger Kiss brought to songs about groupies twice her age.

That the track still gets airplay, however restricted, on the strength of its arena-rock hook says everything about how easily a driving chorus can smuggle a genuinely indefensible premise past an audience more interested in the riff than the words they’re shouting along to.

Suggested by World As One 4PEACE

Every Breath You Take by The Police (1983)

Lyrics: Sting

This might be the most successfully misheard song in pop history — a track Sting himself has called “nasty”, “sadistic”, and “rather evil” that spent eight weeks at №1 and somehow became a wedding-reception standard.

The gap between what it says and how it’s been used is the whole problem. “I’ll be watching you” isn’t devotion; it’s a threat, repeated so often across the song it functions less as a hook than a stalker’s mantra. “You belong to me” isn’t romance — it’s a possession claim, made explicit, not implied.

What makes the misreading so persistent is exactly what Sting has admitted he built into it: a comforting minor-key melody smuggling genuinely disturbing intent underneath. He’s described watching people perform it lovingly on television, laughing at how thoroughly they’d missed the “sadistic” lyric they were singing.

Fifty years of wedding DJs later, the song remains the clearest case study in how melody can completely override lyrical content — proof that audiences will hear “love song” long after the writer has told them, repeatedly, that it isn’t one.

Suggested by David Volk

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Related reading

Six Songs You Shouldn’t Sing Anymore