A controversial line in Spice Girls' 1997 hit song "Spice Up Your Life" has now been removed by BBC Radio in the UK.
The Sun reports that executives at BBC Radio 2 decided the lyric, “Yellow man in Timbuktu. Colour for both me and you,” was offensive, and chose to play a censored version of the song removing the word "yellow."
A spokesperson for BBC Radio 2 told the tabloid that the station did not make the edit to the song and simply played an amended version that has been used by other radio stations.
However, an unnamed music insider told The Sun that the decision was "baffling."
“The [band] are singing in celebration of people from all walks of life," the source says. "It’s clumsy but not insulting. There haven’t been calls to change it so it’s odd they have decided to do so.”
While there may not have been calls to remove the song, controversy surrounding the song and that particular lyric is nothing new. In writing about the song, both the Irish Times (in 1997 no less) and later on The Guardian called the lyric "woeful." Even the Girls themselves acknowledged it was a dated reference when they reportedly discussed changing the word "yellow" to "happy" for their 2019 reunion tour. In the end they decided to leave it, however.
As Metro points out, the lyric was muted when it was used in the 2023 episode of Doctor Who called "The Giggle," in which Neil Patrick Harris dances and lip-syncs to the song while comically killing a number of British officers.
You can hear all about the "woeful" lyric and the story behind the Spice Girls hit and their rise to global domination in this week's episode of Encore: The Stories Behind The Songs You Love. Listen to it below.