Cee-lo Green caught some heat over the weekend for daring to change the lyrics to John Lennon's Imagine during NBC's New Year's Eve celebration in Times Square, with the Twittersphere all a-twitter about it. Whew! For a minute there, we were afraid people whose opinions mattered were unhappy.

Wearing a fur coat and a giant gold watch, Green changed the line "nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too" to "nothing to kill or die for, and all religion's true." (Watch the performance below.) That doesn't even make any sense. So anyway, folks freaked out and started calling for Cee-lo's head on the micro-blogging site. Green responded with a tweet that read, "Yo I meant no disrespect by changing the lyric guys! I was trying to say a world were u could believe what u wanted that's all." He also argued with some folks, Rolling Stone said, but all of that has been deleted, underscoring the increasing impermanence of our cultural discourse.

Some people had fun with it, though. Comedian Colin Quinn tweeted, "Cee Lo covered Imagine but at least he 'cleaned it up a little.' I did the same thing when I changed NWA to 'N-word' WA." That's more the spirit with which we think this should be treated. But hey, at least we could kick off 2012 bright and early with a silly not-a-scandal.

[Photo: Getty Images]

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