8 Radio Edits That Completely Changed The Song's Meaning

4. Lady Gaga - "You & I"

The Song You Heard On The Radio: "You & I" is essentially an ode to a past love, a sort of farewell to her former beau that also celebrates the experiences she had with him. This can be heard in her repeated declarations of love for Nebraska, her ex's home state. It's one of those little details we don't always get from Gaga that adds some personal significance to the song. Way to go, Gaga. Keep it real.

The Edit: And then there are the other dozens of versions of the song where Gaga switches out Nebraska for a different city/state so that she could apply that "personal touch" to every zip code in the United States. All totaled, there are at least 9 versions of the song, with odes to New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, Florida, Texas, Cleveland, Wisconsin, and California.

There are likely dozens more that you'd only hear if you were listening to the radio in a particular city or state. And now "You & I" is no longer a personal story about the history she has with her ex-boyfriend. Now it's a desperate marketing technique to dupe her fans into thinking she just sang about their residence, omg how do we even contain ourselves after something so wild and cool!?

3. D-12 - "Purple Pills"

The Song You Heard on the Radio: It's about traveling the world, right? It's hard to say, exactly, but they do mention colorful hills an awful lot, so they might be rapping about Scotland.

I've been so many places I've seen so many faces But nothing compares To these blue and yellow purple hills

See? Eminem and company are just retelling some old travel stories. What a fun bunch of jet setters they must be.

The Edit: This song is about taking copious amounts of drugs. The only reason you might not know that is because all traces of drug references are wiped away for the radio. For instance, that verse up top? That's not how the song begins in the unedited version:

I take a couple uppers I down a couple downers But nothing compares To these blue and yellow purple pills

That's how it actually begins. And it only expands from there, detailing their encounters with Valium, shrooms, coke, Xtasy, acid, mescaline, and possibly even some recreational drugs that hadn't been invented yet. But none of that appears in the clean version.

Instead, they overlay some nonsense words or vague sexual innuendos. Or, in the case of one particularly lazy edit, they simply swap out the "bad" drugs for the "good" drugs: Tums and Ex-lax.