By David Browne, Rolling Stone | This month, ahead of her induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and the publication of the first volume of her memoir, Cher will unveil a new career-spanning anthology “personally curated by the legend herself.” Her most expansive to date, Forever includes Cher’s earliest hits on her own (“Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves,” “Dark Lady”), her Eighties power ballads (“If I Could Turn Back Time,” “I Found Someone”), and unstoppable club hits (“Take Me Home” and “Believe”). A Forever Fan Edition adds in her breakout hits with Sonny Bono, a duet with her late husband Gregg Allman, and more, for a total of 40 tracks.
One hit is conspicuously missing, though: “Half-Breed,” the thumping 1973 story-song about the child of a white man and Cherokee woman who grapples with prejudice on both sides: “The Indians said that I was white by law/The white man always called me ‘Indian Squaw,’” goes one line. A Native American chant rumbles underneath the chorus.
“Half-Breed” made its way onto a Cher retrospective in the Nineties, but we can only speculate why the song isn’t included on Forever; Cher’s camp declined to comment to Rolling Stone. But it’s possible that the deletion may be the latest instance of an emerging trend of classic artists reviewing their back catalogs, set lists, or album covers and deciding that some things just don’t hold up in a far more culturally sensitive era. Contemporary stars like Kesha, Lizzo, and Beyoncé have regularly been revising problematic lyrics — just last week GloRilla altered a line in a song that has yet to be officially released to excise the word “retarded” — but, for the most part, classic artists are just now starting to edit.
In 2021, the Rolling Stones yanked “Brown Sugar” — about that “Gold Coast slave ship” and a slave trader who “knows he’s doin’ all right/Hear him whip the women just around midnight” — from their concert lineup. “Didn’t they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery?” Keith Richards said at the time, adding he was “hoping that we’ll be able to resurrect the babe in her glory somewhere along the track.”
The song has yet to reappear at their shows, though, and apparently isn’t the only instance of the Stones tweaking past possible transgressions. In 1977 . . .
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Read the full story here:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/offensive-songs-cher-rolling-stones-censorship-1235087496/
Photo: Cher | From her Facebook page