After the horrific terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 a list of nearly 150 inappropriate songs was circulated over the internet. The inclusion of some songs like John Lennon’s “Imagine” are bizarre (that song was about peace!). Other songs like Judas Priest “Some Heads Are Gonna Roll” seemed like a very appropriate (response) to me.

Many individual stations did play songs from the list; conversely many stations also refrained from playing songs not on the list, due to lyrical content or simply because the music’s tone or style seemed inappropriate. As the list apparently had no official status within Clear Channel, it also had no expiration date or retraction, and stations gradually returned many songs to their playlists.

None of the songs on this list were written about 9/11 specifically, but many contained words like plane, fly or falling, the Wikipedia article notes.

Were these songs inappropriate or was it being sensitive to victims families and others by not playing these songs in the days following 9/11? Whatever your perspective, somehow I think this is the kind of thing the terrorists had hoped for as part of the attack on 9/11 and, that too, is very sad.

Personally, I’ve tried to stay away from writing about this topic in any significant substance here, avoiding it altogether in 2003 and mentioning it once in 2004: Three years after 911 is Osama Bin Laden dead or alive? As I re-read that piece, I believed Bin Laden would be captured by the 2005 anniversary of 9/11. That’s only a scant few months away and I’m not as hopeful today as I was then.

My wife and I were in Vegas vacationing when that awful moment in our nation’s history happened. We spent most of the time worrying about how or if we would get home and our children who were not with us at the time. Once the flight ban had been lifted, we were on the first plane headed out of Vegas to Seattle.

Where were you when 9/11 happened?

Did this post make you go hmm?

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