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For anyone who's recently played their kids the 1978 Queen classic “Fat Bottomed Girls” and then while pondering the lyrics stopped to ask themselves huh, how is this still ok? we have an answer — apparently it's not. The legendary rock band's hit song was dropped from the band's new greatest hits collection designed for younger listeners on the audio platform Yoto.
How you feel about the decision probably depends on where you stand on the political spectrum. Outlets from the right like Fox News are already vomiting up their favorite buzzwords “woke” and “cancel culture” ad nauseam. But before they get their gender-normative panties in a bunch they should try to remember that this is solely for the very niche children's audio device the Yoto, a plastic simplistic music player (think a viewfinder but whose insertable cards play songs) which it's safe to say is not the general public's primary form of audio consumption. There are still plenty of ways and devices on which to listen to Queen's Fat Bottomed Girls.
Republicans should also try to realize the irony in their faux-outrage over a censorship issue when Gov. Ron DeSantis' favorite pastime these days is censoring Florida textbooks while badly losing fights to Disney.
Further irony stems from the fact that the far right is inadvertently defending a song by a gay musical icon who died from AIDS, Freddie Mercury, a perfect maelstrom of subjects the Republican party generally tries to steer clear of (including in DeSantis' notorious “Don't Say Gay” bill).
Nevertheless, haters gonna hate, so Fox News contributor Joe Concha weighed in on the controversy on Fox & Friends First on Monday. Talking with anchors Todd Piro and Carley Shimkus, Concha criticized the omission as “utterly ridiculous,” adding that the band “took chances” and pushed the envelope with their original and “politically incorrect” music.
“To say, ‘All right, that song never existed’ is utterly ridiculous. And, by the way, the boomerang effect will be more people downloading that song than they ever would've before 40 years later,” Concha said.
He then added in a meandering Trump-ish conclusion, “This is just another example of ‘go woke, go broke,’ but I guess you can't go broke [since] they have made millions upon millions.” Wow, talk about a censored mic drop moment, Concha.
But for those who do feel there is legitimate grounds to be offended by the song's exclusion from any compilation of the band's greatest hits, regardless of the outlet, let's take a closer look at the lyrics of Fat Bottomed Girls, shall we? Here's the first two stanzas:
Are you gonna take me home tonight?
Oh, down beside that red firelight
Are you gonna let it all hang out?
Fat bottomed girls, you make the rockin' world go round
I was just a skinny lad
Never knew no good from bad
But I knew life before I left my nursery
Left alone with big fat Fanny
She was such a naughty nanny
Heap big woman, you made a bad boy out of me
If Republicans want that song included on their young children's musical devices, they should totally go for it — but the hypocrisy is ballooning out from every which way like a muffin top (by which I mean the actual food, of course!).
Perhaps a more right-wing friendly form of censorship in this case would be giving the song the Kidz Bop treatment. Kidz Bop, everyone's favorite grammatically incorrect musical juggernaut that covers songs until they're completely sanitized and family-friendly enough to make parents in the audience's souls fully wither and die, would have a field day with this one. Let's help them out by rewriting the first two verses:
Would you consent to having a play date with me tonight?
Oh, down beside your favorite nightlight
Perhaps we should wear something comfortable like pajamas?
Friends of all shapes, colors, genders and sizes, you make the rockin' world go round (assuming you believe in science and the Earth's rotational axis).
I was just a skinny lad (not because of body-shaming or Ozempic but due to my natural metabolism and genetic makeup)
I was unfamiliar with society's moral code
But I received valuable real-world practical life skills even before I left my nursery
Left alone with plus-sized, body-positive Fanny
She was my colorful caretaker
A larger-than-life female role model, whose insight into the ways of the world provided valuable life experience as I ventured out on my own.
You get the idea. Sure, Fat Bottomed Girls was a product of its time, and would probably have to be reworked if it were written today. But saving adult language and themes for audiences older than young children hardly equates to censorship. Although these days any sort of creative suppression, regardless of where you stand politically, is a slippery slope — and one which we're all prone to slide down at the same speed, regardless of the size of our bottoms.
