But it wasn’t well received in the States. Lots of radio stations refused to play it, because there’s a line that says “her boyfriend’s a dick, he brings a gun to school”. It was released on the one year anniversary of the Columbine massacre, and people did not want to dwell on that.
This lyric wasn’t making light of gun violence. It was cancelled in the USA because Americans, as always, were sensitive about scary cultural issues, and we chose to repress discussion of them instead of letting the people who were victimised by these issues speak their mind. Teenage Dirtbag wasn’t saying that bringing a gun to school was a good, fun thing, it was saying that it was a real thing that happened all the time. The lyric was scratched because it was scary. It was scary because it was real.
After lacklustre success in the USA, Wheatus went overseas. They first stopped in Aus, because Aus recognised great music when they heard it. They played massive shows in Aus and Europe, and came back home to quiet applause. Their presence in Aus (and surely therefore NZ) likely influenced our music taste, and, dare I say, influenced the Dunedin Sound. Back home, though, the music scene stagnated, and Teenage Dirtbag didn’t get the praise it deserved for years.
And it was because of this censorship that a generation of American Dirtbags were deprived of the greatest teen angst record of all time. Tragedy befalls tragedy, as they say. Her boyfriend WAS a dick. He brought a gun to school. That’s what bullies in America DO. We see it every week. Pulling that lyric from the song wasn’t going to change a deeply-rooted fascination with guns and violence. If anything, it suppressed discussion.
All of this is to say that American cultural censorship, as American as pumpkin pie, does very little to actually improve the culture. American lawmakers are so quick to soapbox about gun tragedies and make virtue signals like cutting this lyric, and yet they’ve done nothing to fix the actual problem of gun violence in schools. In fact, we have senators speaking on national TV about why guns SHOULD be put in schools, but you can’t have people sing about how scary that is on the radio.
This lyric is STILL censored on Spotify. What’s up with that? Surely now it’s okay to include the lyric, as per the songwriter’s wishes. Unless someone lost the original record, I guess. It’s been ages, so that’s always a possibility. But it’s annoying to know that that little record scratch you hear in the song is a relic of a decades-old, misplaced, ineffective censorship effort by an American regime who say “you can’t sing about guns in schools, that’s bad, but also we’re going to do absolutely nothing to keep actual guns out of actual schools. Go fuck yourself.”
As long as school shootings are a weekly occurrence, censoring discussion of them is pointless, especially in music. It’s a shame that such an iconic song was marred in the crossfire of American political peacocking.