“They don’t write ‘em like they did in the old days”—certainly a true statement, but in some cases that may really be for the best.

Here’s a top-ten countdown of songs with sketchy lyrics or themes related to (Hebephiliac to Ephebophiliac) relations with minors that probably wouldn’t make the cut for acceptability in 2015. Through the backward lens of modern social and moral definitions of appropriateness, these ten tracks err on the side of “not.”

Some of these songs are merely cringeworthy in hindsight. Some are downright scary. Yet each of these songs was either a hit single or a fan favorite on a hit album. In today’s social climate it would be career suicide for a mainstream artist attempting to release a song with lyrics like the ones on this list.
 

 
10. Aerosmith “Walk This Way”

This song of young lust does specify that the narrator is a “high school loser,” but “Walk This Way” makes the ten spot for what is certainly one of the sleaziest lines ever uttered in a (really popular hit) rock song: “I met a cheerleader, was a real young bleeder, oh the times I could reminisce.” Gross, dude. What was she? Twelve?
 

 
9. Ringo Starr “You’re Sixteen”

“You’re Sixteen” was originally a hit for Johnny Burnette, but we’re putting Ringo’s version on this list because A: It was a huge hit, B: Having a Beatle on the list is interesting, and C: Ringo was 33 years old when he originally recorded this song about a sixteen-year-old paramour.
 

 
8. Rolling Stones “Stray Cat Blues”

I can see that you’re fifteen years old. No I don’t want your I.D. You look so restless and you’re so far from home. But it’s no hanging matter. It’s no capital crime… You say you got a friend, that she’s wilder than you. Why don’t you bring her upstairs. If she’s so wild then she can join in too. It’s no hanging matter. It’s no capital crime.

On the live version of the song from the album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, Mick changes the lyric to “I can see that you’re just thirteen years old.” No, Mick, it’s no capital crime—but it will get you five to twenty-five.

 
7. Oingo Boingo “Little Girls”

I love little girls. They make me feel so good… Uh oh (uh oh), the little girl was just too little. Too little, too little, too little, too little.

To be fair, Danny Elfman has since stated that his intentions were to write “in jest” from the perspective of “various disreputable characters, ” and that he was “out to offend everybody.”
 

 
6. KISS “Goin Blind” / “Christine Sixteen”

We’re giving KISS two songs for their entry in the countdown, both about sixteen-year-olds, both sung by Gene Simmons. “Goin Blind” is a love song sung to a young girl from the perspective of an elderly ninety-three-year-old.  “Christine Sixteen” contains a fairly ghastly spoken breakdown: “I don’t usually say things like this to girls your age. But when I saw you coming out of the school that day. That day I knew, I knew. I’ve got to have you, I’ve got to have you.” Gene, stop hanging around school-yards. That’s fucked up.
 

 
5. Ted Nugent “Jailbait”

There’s no mistaking pants-shitting, draft-dodger Ted Nugent had a “thing” for younger ladies. When he was 30 he famously had a seventeen-year-old’s parents sign over legal guardianship to him so that they could be married.

Well, I don’t care if you’re just 13. You look too good to be true. I just know that you’re probably clean… Jailbait you look fine, fine, fine…It’s quite alright, I asked your mama. Wait a minute, officer. Don’t put those handcuffs on me. Put them on her, and I’ll share her with you.

The Republican “family-values” crowd LOVES that guy. Go figure.
 

 
4. Benny Mardones “Into the Night”

She’s just sixteen years old. Leave her alone, they say. Separated by fools who don’t know what love is yet.  But I want you to know.

“Into the Night” makes it high on the list mainly for the stalker-vibe of the video. Watch this thing and then wonder “what the fuck were they thinking?”
 

 
3. Jethro Tull “Aqualung”

This song, like the Oingo Boingo song above, is certainly a (sympathetic?) portrayal of a nefarious character. Still, although this song remains a “classic rock radio” staple, could you imagine a hit song being released in 2015 containing the lines: “Sitting on a park bench eyeing little girls with bad intent… Drying in the cold sun, watching as the frilly panties run”? Thought not.
 

 
2. The Knack “My Sharona”

The Knack’s Doug Fieger wrote this song for Sharona Alperin. “I was about 16 or 17 at the time,” according to Alperin. “He was nine years older than me. And within a month or two later, he told me that, ‘I’m in love with you, you’re my soulmate, you’re my other half, we’re going to be together one day.’ And I was madly in love with my boyfriend at the time, and so it took a year for me to leave my boyfriend.”

Never gonna stop, give it up, such a dirty mind. I always get it up, for the touch of the younger kind.

 
1. Gary Puckett and the Union Gap “Young Girl”

This one is just so oogy it bears reprinting almost the entirety of the song’s lyrics. There’s an implied dread in the line “get out of here before I have the time to change my mind.”  Yeah, they definitely don’t write ‘em like this anymore.

Young girl, get out of my mind. My love for you is way out of line
Better run, girl. You’re much too young, girl

With all the charms of a woman you’ve kept the secret of your youth.
You led me to believe you’re old enough to give me Love.
And now it hurts to know the truth, oh

Young girl, get out of my mind. My love for you is way out of line
Better run, girl. You’re much too young, girl

Beneath your perfume and makeup, you’re just a baby in disguise.
And though you know that it is wrong to be alone with me,
That come on look is in your eyes, oh

Young girl, get out of my mind. My love for you is way out of line
Better run, girl. You’re much too young, girl

So hurry home to your mama. I’m sure she wonders where you are.
Get out of here before I have the time…
To change my mind

 

Gary, why don’t you have a seat next to those cookies.
 
This list, perhaps, warrants a longer think-piece on the cultural reasons why popular songs of this nature aren’t “OK” today. I don’t profess to have the answers. There’s been a paradigm-shift over the past 40 years in American society’s attitudes toward teen sexuality. Only three generations back it wasn’t uncommon for people to be married under the age of seventeen. Today, such a thing would be considered unusual and probably gross.

There are undoubtedly several factors at play influencing the current mores and attitudes toward the sexual representation of teenagers in art and music. Possible factors may include a more well-informed public on issues of consent and control. At the other end of the spectrum may be the influence of something comedian George Carlin described as “child worship,” a nouveau style of protective “special snowflake” parenting (it may be no coincidence that songs like “My Sharona” or “Into the Night” went the way of the dodo around the same time “free range” kids stopped being allowed to run, unsupervised, around their neighborhoods all day and go out trick-or-treating for Halloween).

Additionally, the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and the competition among media outlets for audiences, ratings, and advertisers has resulted in a world that appears to be far more frightening than the world we lived in when these songs were popular. Whether the world really is more scary is debatable, but when we have Nancy Grace hammering us over the head nightly with the latest facts in the disappearances of young girls from Vermont to Oregon (cases that we may have never heard about in an earlier, simpler, less-connected time), or when we see that Chris Hansen can easily lure dozens of disgusting perverts out of the woodwork every week, we begin to (justifiably) feel as though predators are lurking everywhere.

Add to this mix the history of television advertising—the first generation who grew up with it became adults in the 1970s. TV ads have traditionally glorified youth, and for the generations who have been bombarded with these images, there’s been a subconscious mass desire to look, act, and stay young—and as such youth becomes something to be deified, protected at all costs, and extended into the years that prior generations would have considered “adulthood.”

The anxiety we, as a society, experience as the result of this constant media bombardment produces an overwhelming need to try to somehow circle the wagons in an effort to protect the children. It may be the case that we really do have to keep the kids inside for their own safety, or it might be safer outdoors than it is indoors on a keyboard. Either way, by all means, keep the kids away from Gary Puckett and Benny Mardones.

Our society today is more open to discussing power-dynamics and condemning predatory behavior, which we should all agree is a good thing.  One would like to think that the days of famous musicians (or anyone for that matter) having fourteen-year-olds as secret mistresses are a thing of the distant past.

There’s no one clear, definitive reason why songs like “Christine Sixteen” would be considered taboo in 2015 but merely “racy” in 1977—but it’s for the best that we can now collectively say “Gene, that’s pretty fucked up.”