“This sh– is bananas” edition
Driving home in the car listening to the radio, we heard Gwen Stefani’s song about bananas. There’s a bit of swearing in it. Primarily the word “sh–.” You know this because it is edited out. You get the “sh” sound, but nothing else. It is so ridiculous the censoring/editing does nothing but attact attention to the absence of the profane word. The editing of the word doesn’t erase it, but, rather, draws attention to this. While the Stefani song is good – in the same way that Will Smith’s “Get Jiggy Wit It” is good – in rush hour and snow and when the CD player has overheated and stopped working, in the grand scheme of things, objectively speaking, it isn’t that great. In the recent history of swearing in songs it isn’t all that notable.
And, come to think of it, “sh–” isn’ t that bad of a word. It certainly isn’t the worst word out there. No, the worst word isn’t “bitch” (you can say that one all you want on the radio and tv, including in one of the most censorious countries in the world, the United States). The word that really proves that “this sh– is bananas” is the word “fuck.”
For me, it isn’t the word as such – it doesn’t really mean anything at all – that I like. Rather, the word is, as the Althusserians say, so overdetermined that it can only be funny regardless of context, but especially when it is absent (c.f., the episode of The Office where Michael says that he likes to watch “Queer as F—“). A song with the word “fuck” in it can only refer to the fact of its imminent censorship; it can only be used self-consciously and ironically.
While no song that I can think of reaches the eloquent heights of N.W.A.’s “Fuck Tha Police” [mp3] (or, for that matter, the less than eloquent heights Jay and Silent Bob bring to the same), I nonetheless put forward the following for consideration:
- Joel Plaskett Emergency: “The News of Your Son” [
mp3] (“When you broke your leg he took the crutch, but lately he don’t remember it all that much. He just thinks about lying in the frozen grass. His body cold and wet down by the overpass. You know he never meant to come across so fucking crass. But love is like that.”), “Down at the Khyber” [mp3] (“I’ve been away and I’ve been traveling. I’ve been lost, I’ve fucked around”), “Non-Believer” [mp3] (“My friends and family call me up and say, ‘You’re alright, but what the fuck?”), and “Work Out Fine” [mp3] (“Now the cops showed up, the cops showed up. I never thought that they’d catch me. The cops showed up. What the fuck? They’re trying to turn me into a patsy.”) - Archers of Loaf: “Fat” [
mp3] (“what do you fucking care for me?” and “why should I fucking care for you?”), “Power Walker” [mp3] (“why don’t you just fucking run?” indeed), “Greatest of All Time” [mp3] (“he was out of luck because nobody gave a fuck”). - Pavement: “Range Life” [
mp3] (“I don’t understand what they [Smashing Pumpkins] mean and I could really give a fuck”) - Be Your Own Pet: reversing the man-fuck relation put forward in the previous songs, one last song, by both the youngest contributor (she and her band are teenagers – or were when it was recorded and released) and the only female – “Bunk Trunk Skunk” [
mp3] (“I’m an independent motherfucker!”)
Next week: either something louder or ‘jazz flute.’ (Oh, and in honour of Matt Calarco’s first post to Long Sunday on animals: Be Your Own Pet “Wildcat!” [mp3])
8 Comments
I don’t quite understand the logic or criterion for the “fuck” songs you single out here (though multiple references to AoL brings a twinkle to my eye). There are just so many “fuck” songs, and none of the ones listed here would have received (non college) airplay regardless of the ‘fucks,’ no? And off the charts, there are really too many “fuck” songs to name.
On the charts, or just veering from them, Neil Young went so far as to shoot and release a music video for “Fuckin’ Up” and The Tragically Hip’s “Can’t be Nashville Every Night” charted w/ the opening lines, “He said fuck this and fuck that/And this guy’s the diplomat.” (a song against American jingoism inspired by Toby Keith, I’m told).
Peaches’ “Fuck the Pain Away” is brilliant and was on the high-selling Lost in Translation soundtrack.
While outside the mainstream there is Palace’s “If I could fuck a mountain/Lord I would fuck a mountain/And I’d do it with a woman in the valley.”
And The Fall’s “The Classical” is right up there with the greatest songs of all time. “This is the home of the vain!/ Where are the obligatory niggers?/Hey there fuckface!!/Hey there fuckface!!”
Also “the kill him/fucking kill him/kill him just fucking kill him” of Shellac’s “Prayer to God.”
Lots of NoMeansNo. “If every fourth animal in the world is a beetle/Maybe every fourth person is a DUMB FUCK.”
I could go on!
Fucked up the italics there, I see.
The logic was primarily limited to what I had immediately accessible and what immediately came to mind. While swear words was something I was thinking about during the week, it never occurred to me to actually make note of anything worthwhile. Hence, what I could either download quickly, what I could find on CD in the house and rip, or what was already on the computer.
Me, I get a good nostalgic feeling from Dinosaur Jr’s “Freak Scene”: “So fucked I can’t believe it.”
On YouTube, natch.
Craig, that makes sense. I like your music Fridays and appreciate your effort in uploading mp3s. I’d never heard of the post-rock stuff you posted last week, but I’m very taken w/ a lot of the Chicago T&G and stuff (Tortoise, etc).
I’ll try to download/rip the songs mentioned above and put links to the mp3s (or, when available, YouTube videos) later in the weekend.
With regard to your first comment, Andrew, I’ll note that in addition to hearing Will Smith and Gwen Stefani on what is quite possibly the second worst radio station in Ottawa (viz., Hot 89.9; c.f., Live 88.5; note, both are owned by the same company), we also heard a song from Joel Plaskett’s recent DVD on Bob FM (I assume you have that bastard format where you live under the varying names of Bob, Jack, Joe and, in the Niagara region, something sounding like “Che”). He didn’t use the trademark, “WTF?,” however.
Warning: the following post is rated MA. It contains frequent coarse language and sexual references. It is recommended for Mature Adults only.
“Fuck” is nothing and the continued censoring of it is a farce. As you perfectly put it, “A song with the word “fuck” in it can only refer to the fact of its imminent censorship”. But I have to disagree that it can only be used ironically; it’s far more frequently used cynically, as the perfect ingredient to help a song on the way to the top of the charts.
Take Eamon’s “Fuck It (I Don’t Want You Back)” and Frankee’s, “F.U.R.B. (Fuck You Right Back)”, the former an elegy for a broken relationship (“You questioned, did I care?/You could ask anyone, I even said your were my great one/Now it’s over, but I do admit I’m sad/It hurts real bad; I can’t sweat that, ‘coz I loved a ho’”) and the latter “revenge” (“Fuck what I did was your fault somehow/Fuck the presents, I threw all that shit out/Fuck all the cryin’ it didn’t mean jack/Well guess what yo, fuck you right back”) for the former. Both songs did considerable time at the top of numerous national pop charts, despite the fairly frequent use of the word “fuck”.
So, if it turned out that the whole thing was a sales gimmick, would it have surprised anyone? Would anyone have even cared? Or wasn’t the whole thing in any case — and as even Frankie seems to recognise — simply a sales and marketing ploy which thrived on the controversy and the publicity?
In that context, it sometimes feels that the only mildly interesting use of the term “fuck” is not simply when it is absent by virtue of the censoring device, which draws attention to its present absence, but rather when it turns out that it was never there in the first place, only present in its expectation, and hence not entirely absent either, as in The Cure’s “Doing the Unstuck”. [The transcription doesn't do it justice, but here it is anyway: "it's a perfect day for doing the unstuck/for dancing like you can't hear the beat/and you don't give a further thought/to things like feet/let's get happy!]
“Cunt”, on the other hand, remains controversial. “Cunt” retains a kind of offensiveness for many people that just can’t be ignored or tolerated. I find it very hard to imagine a song with “cunt” in the title that could possibly go to number one. Songs with the word “cunt” in the lyrics cause an outcry even on fairly “liberal”, “youth”-oriented radio stations that play a wide variety of “alternative” music. For example, Australian radio station Triple J, which regularly plays uncensored songs (albeit with a language warning) and whose audience voted Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer [a.k.a "I wanna fuck you like an animal"]” as one of the top 50 songs of 1994, was flooded with complaints when it started playing the Herd’s “77%”, which contains the lines “It’s time for you to/Wake up – this country needs a fucking shake up/Wake up – these cunts need a shake up”. The “cunts” really offended the cunts.
“Cunt” makes “fuck” seem as offensive as “shit”. It’s tempting to say that “cunt” is the new “fuck”, but it’s not. The problem here is that the people who, in the aforementioned case, found “cunt” offensive were not your usual culturally conservative grandpas and grandmas. In fact, it was largely women who largely thought of themselves as “feminist” who objected to the word, because it is “derogatory”.
There’s a lot that can be said about that fact, but perhaps it should be saved for another time….
I enjoyed this post a lot, but I’m not sure the generalization is exactly right : Unlike, say, a TV show, ‘song’ is neither a medium with a built-in context nor one haunted by a typical context even when it is removed (“even we couldn’t say THAT on TV, but wait till you see the DVD\feature-firm!”…) or redefined (HBO, I guess, as far as censorship goes) or rejected.
Radio is just not strong enough default for songs for its etiquette to be the mold all practices are measured as adhering to or deviating from.
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