I know I will not make many friends by saying this, but no subject should be off limits.

Which is to say, there is no topic or treatment you should NOT write about, because it's all part of the human experience.

Which is also to say, you should be very careful who you sing it to. Pick your audience. And if you pick wrong, expect fireworks.

Interestingly, I was just reading on the "Two Magicians" thread that John Roberts and Tony Barrand gave up singing that wonderful ballad because women in the audiences experienced it as a "rape song." Didn't matter that it was actually erotic combat between two shapechangers engaged in a sort of ritual game that arguably was meant to end in fusion -- the casual female listener heard it as a Rape Song, and so the song tanked, and hurt their feelings as well.

I'm all for NOT hurting people's feelings. But "Maid of Australia" is scarcely a rape song except in a very large cultural conquest sense, any more than, say, "Little Mohee" / "The Indian Lass" is. "Maid On the Shore" is a slightly darker example of that sort of thing.

Still it's a song about what happens. It's not saying you SHOULD go on shore and exercise erotic sway over the natives, still less beat them to the ground and rape them. It's a news report, if you will, sort of like an item in the papers, like the Central Park Jogger incident, legitimate news in a musical framework. If you don't want to hear it, turn to the next page, but don't write to the papers and tell them not to report the news.

Traditional and nontraditional song can get very bad, I agree, very loathsome, cruel, the sort of thing you don't want to hear. So don't listen!!! (As has been said to those who complain about the very modest amount of sex on TV, your TV remote has an OFF button.)

There are many such things I prefer not to hear, and I consciously avoid them. But I don't try to erase them from the world.

For a very nasty and hard-to-stomach example, there was, in the 1920s and after (and it still exists today, as virulent though smaller) an audience for Ku Klux Klan songs, and recording these was one of the many small side custom jobs legitimate recording studios did (and do).

Disgusting, no? We'd all like to think this doesn't happen, but it does.

However, I do not think there can usefully be any "shoulds" in creative work, that is to say, in art. For a very well known example, I don't happen to care for fisting photos, but you can look at Robert Mapplethorpe all you wish, and it's not my business to say you shouldn't.

Write and sing what you please. In performing, exercise judgment by all means -- if you don't, you're stupid. Do not needlessly offend. Remember there will always be delicate ears, and think about that. But you cannot make yourself into milk-and-water, because there will always be hypersensitive ears that will be offended at the most innocuous things, and that's ... isn't it? ... their problem.

Another example: I love risque songs but I wouldn't sing them to my fundamentalist friends (even though some might actually dig them, I think that's a chance not to take). Appropriateness is the key. You don't sing "House Of the Rising Sun" at a Christmas chorale -- even if you happen to think it might be improved thereby.

But do NOT self-censor. Do that, and you start narrowing your mind, and a narrowed mind is something we already have way too much of.

(Sigh. I know what I've said will be misunderstood. Please take it that I wish to be chary of other's feelings, that I believe kindness and considerateness are in too short supply and we need more of them, and that public performance is a whole lot different from private songwriting and singing. Take these as givens, but don't self-censor.

And, it goes without saying, try your best, would you, not to censor others or let your anger at a personal offense get in the way of your judgment?)

Oboy. Well, let the arrows fly.

Bob