10 Perfect Rock Songs That Were INSANELY Controversial

The entire purpose of music is to keep the audience engaged in some way. It's called the entertainment business for a reason, and the goal is always to leave the audience satisfied after seeing something they can't get anywhere else. Some might try to make it a positive experience, but it's more fun to try and mess with the audience when you can.

As far back as the '50s, rock and roll was already pushing the boundaries of what was allowed in the mainstream, from profane language to drug use. While we can laugh at some of them nowadays, some of these also ended up getting popular for all the wrong reasons, being fodder for parents about how rock music is corrupting the youth and is meant to brainwash people. If you look at the songs on here, you can see why some people were upset.

Across every one of the tracks on here, the mainstream media began to pull back on these really hard, either not stocking the album in record stores or just refusing to play the song on the radio. That didn't stop the fans though, who would always end up finding the songs somewhere and blasting them behind their parents back.

After all, rock was designed to be music to piss your parents off with, and more than a few feathers were ruffled once these found their way onto the air.

For all of the controversial songs that come and go in rock music, how the hell did the Beatles manage to find themselves onto a list like this? While they might not have been the most wholesome people behind the scenes, this was the kind of happy go lucky boy band that made rock and roll okay for people to listen to. That was before they started dropping acid, and the media got a little too worried when the age of psychedelia started on Sgt. Pepper.

Being one of the few albums by the Beatles without any mainstream singles on it, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds is one of the trippiest experiences that the band had ever released, as John Lennon weaves together images that feel like they're ripped out of Alice in Wonderland. That didn't stop the people looking for problems, and they sure got one when someone pointed out that the main words in the title spelled out LSD.

In this case though, most of the media had their minds in the gutter, as John had taken inspiration from a drawing that his son Julian had made in school about one of his classmates named Lucy. That wasn't a good enough explanation apparently, with most radio stations refusing to play it for fear that it would lead to kids dropping acid. John can offer as many defenses as he wants (and they might even be true), but the kind of music that the Beatles were making definitely suggested some chemical enhancements going on outside the studio walls.