Talk:Games Without Frontiers (song)

Controversial lyric
I've always thought it was "piss on the goons" not "piss on the coons." As "Peter Gabriel lyrics Games Without Frontiers goons" gets 10 times as many Google hits as the same criteria with "coons" instead of "goons," I have changed it. Patricia Meadows (talk) 15:18, 16 August 2008 (UTC)
 * After listening to it repeatedly I have concluded that, to my ears at least, it definitely sounds like "coons" and not "goons"; however, given the controversial nature of the word, I will not change it until official confirmation is forthcoming.N^O^el (talk) 02:28, 12 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Per his official website, 1 it's GOONS. I have corrected the article, and added a reference. CarpetCrawler (talk) 17:39, 20 March 2009 (UTC)


 * if you want to here it in the clear, register and download the remix pack from Realworld remixed. It gives you all the tracks as separate wav or mp3 files. You can then remix it and submit it.

BTW - it sounds like goons in the clear. The file name after extraction - MainVocalBridge.wav Wamnet (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 17:26, 13 June 2009 (UTC).

Well BTW it sounds like coons to me and on the original recording of the song - currently available on 'youtube'! (June 2010).

The song makes no sense unless the lyric is 'coons' in any event - and there is nothing controversial about the word 'goons' which would have caused any censor to get upset when the track was originally released.

I daresay, that given the politcally correct atmosphere in which we live today, and the likelhood of the meaning of the phrase in the context of the song being misinterpreted, Gabriel or most likely his website creators may well wish to (officially at least) distance themselves from the original lyric.

Here is my personal interpretation of the lyric - I don't claim this is definitive.

"Whistling tunes" (ie, going about our day to day business) "we" (meaning 'we' the developed nations - portrayed in the song as spoiled middle-class children) "piss on" (ie, exploit/desecrate/degrade) "the coons" (in a broad sense the aboriginal/tribal cultures of the world) "in the jungle (ie, the Third World). So in total meaning, "we in the developed world exploit and degrade the aboriginal cultures of the third world". The unexpected choice of the words "piss on" and "coons" in the lyric is designed to unsettle - adults would be more guarded in their language but mischievous children might use such phrases in conversation. In doing this the writer intends to shock the songs (predominantly) middle class audience out of their complacency about this issue.

Still today the lyric is powerful enough to cause people to feel uncomfortable.

—Preceding unsigned comment added by Johnpretty010 (talk • contribs) 13:50, 6 June 2010 (UTC)


 * "Goons", not "coons"! Deb (talk) 19:52, 11 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I've gone ahead and changed it to "goons" as per Peter Gabriel's website citation. If someone can provide a reliable source that says it's coons then we can change it back. Personally I think "goons" could equally refer to the Vietnam War but that's only my opinion. ~ Brother William (talk) 10:29, 14 December 2010 (UTC)


 * The controversy in the lyric wasn't due to "goons", it was "piss on" - at the time (1980) it was too strong to feature on the family friendly BBC Radio 1 or Top of the Pops. Deadlock (talk) 16:27, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Goons - as I remember (from an interview Peter Gabriel gave to support the album - over thirty years ago!) it was a reference to a scene in a book about the Vietnam war (possibly Dispatches by Michael Herr - it was the first time I'd heard about that book). 78.86.170.22 (talk) 14:57, 24 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Just a heads-up, I reverted the recent unsupported change from goons to coons here. The belief that the word sounds like "coons" appears to be common when searching the internet, but the primary source did in fact have "goons", and if you obtain the very high quality original unmixed audio track from petergabriel.com (registration required) you can (at least this native English speaker editor can) clearly distinguish the hard "g" sound (original research warning). Although the discography URL is now dead and not archived, one can also see "goons" in the lyrics for the official video version here. -84user (talk) 13:14, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

The "Chiang Ching" Reference
When Peter is singing "Chiang Ching" (even though he mispronounces the surname with a long "i" followed by a short "a"; you know, "CHY-ANG" as opposed to "jee-AHNG"), is he referring to either Chairman Mao Tse-tung's wife, Chiang Ch'ing, or to Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek?

WikiPro1981X (talk) 21:41, 20 December 2009 (UTC)

Music Videos
There appears to be two version of the music video for the song. The one featured on the main Peter Gabriel channel "itspetergabriel" appears to be a later version than this version. Do we have any information as to why there are two versions? There is some indication that the earlier version was "banned" but this is only hearsay at the moment.

206.248.160.226 (talk) 01:44, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

During pre-release publicity for "Play", the 2004 DVD collection of Peter Gabriel's music videos, Gabriel said that he himself had requested the creation of the modified version of the Games Without Frontiers video. He felt that aspects of the original (mainly the scenes set around the dinner table) were extremely dated, to the point that he almost felt embarrassed by them, and since he had editorial input to the DVD, he preferred to excise them by covering them up with the replacement footage, which IIRC was from a pre-existing film by a conceptual artist. Unfortunately I can't link to anything that would act as a cite. Suffice it to say that the original video was not "banned" in the generally-understood sense. 213.132.48.105 (talk) 10:52, 12 October 2013 (UTC)

Cover art
Who designed/painted the cover shown in the article? Burraron (talk) 14:49, 6 September 2020 (UTC)