Lorde's hit song "Royals" has been banned by two San Francisco radio stations until after the World Series, where the Giants will face off against the team from Kansas City.
The hit song by the Grammy Award-winning pop star — in which she sings, "We'll never be royals" — has nothing to do with baseball, but the name alone was enough for KFOG-FM and KIOT-FM to blacklist the ditty.
In response to the San Francisco stations' bans, Kansas City's KZPT-FM promised to play the song every hour from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Tuesday, the opening day of the
World Series, according to WDAF-TV.
"I respect the work of Mr. Brian Figula, 96.5 KOIT program director, and his team of broadcast professionals at our sister stations in San Francisco, but we won't let their anti-Royals spirit ruin this moment," Tony Lorino, program director of KZPT-FM, said in a statement. "A few angry San Franciscans who don't have a song called 'Giants' won't rain on our parade."
Though Lorde's hit song isn't about baseball, the 17-year-old has said in interviews that she was inspired by Royals' Hall of Famer George Brett.
"I'd been kinda thinking about writing that song for a while and been pulling together a couple little lines here and there, and I had this image from the National Geographic of this dude [Brett] signing baseballs,"
Lorde once told VH1, according to Us Weekly. "He was a baseball player, and his shirt said Royals, and I was like, 'I really love that word,' because I'm a big, like, word fetishist. I'll pick a word and I'll pin an idea to that. So it was just that word."
She even received a signed jersey from Brett back in March.
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