I had a bit of a kinda sorta epiphany the other day. A friend was playing for me the new Slayer album. I was having a good chuckle over the “fuckin’ fuckety fuck fuck” lyrics of a couple key songs, and remarking how much Kerry King’s poetic aspirations make him seem like an angry stunted teenager.
Well, my friend took great pains to remind me that one of my favorite records does indeed end with Al Jourgensen firing off a full magazine’s worth of “fucks” at all and sundry. And he did also take pains to remind me that this tour and record essentially inspired me to go intern for the record label of the guy who pounded away at the drum skins as this unprecedented “fuck-fuck-fuck” blitzkrieg took place.
So, here I am now, just wondering what the qualitative difference is between curse word overkill “back in the day” and in the present. It’s no secret that I’m getting old by the standards of pop music, and maybe my increased irritability at cursing comes simply from the fact that I’m increasingly irritable about everything.
On the other hand, I’d like to think that what really ruffles my feathers is that profanity is everywhere but being spoken as if it still has any kind of edge to it. As much as [url https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_City#.22Broad_Fucking_City.22_t-shirt_incident]the folks behind Broad City might think otherwise, It just doesn’t feel like a challenge to any kind of authority anymore: anybody can very easily dig up the footage of Bush and Cheney thinking they were off mic when calling the fellow from the New York Times a major league asshole.
I’m curious to know what the rest of the gang thinks here…does cussin’ still have some creative potential or constructive uses at all? What’s your personal profanity protocol?
I swear like crazy, and I don’t trust anybody who doesn’t.
Tells me they are probably a pretentious cunt.
Maybe. But you and I may have different ideas of what pretension is. If what you mean by “pretentious” is something like “poseur,” i.e. somebody who puts conformity and social status above all else, then I disagree.
Pretension, to me, means people daring to rise above their station even if that costs them dearly in the social approval department. I think there wouldn’t be very much cultural evolution without pretension, honestly.
Now, I love things like, say, GG Allin banter or Tommy Lasorda’s infamous red-in-the-face press conference rants (“Garvey needed a fuckin’ oar to hit the fuckin’ ball tonight…and those cocksuckers get away with that fuckin shit, those mother FUCKERS!!!”)
But it’s entertaining not because he’s swearing literally every second word: more so because he’s having a childish breakdown over something of little long-term consequence. Totally random words or phonemes could’ve been coming out of his mouth at the time, and it’d still be quite the performance.
Somebody who doesn’t swear is probably somebody who listened to everything their parents and teachers told them to do. Somebody who listens to their preacher.
Perhaps that’s a juvenile assertion on my part, but words are just words. Only pretentious people try to prescribe obscene meanings to certain words and attempt to dictate what can and can’t be said in mixed company.
I don’t just cuss like a redneck every five seconds and I try to speak in a fairly formal and clean manner in any professional setting or when meeting new people. But if I’m hanging with homies and such, yeah, I don’t mind getting some profanity in there.
I do find it embarassing and near unlistenable sometimes when movies or cable-programs too obviously force too much profanity just for the sake of being “edgy” or getting them a tantalizing “adults only” rating on TV.
As long as the swearing is natural or natural sounding, then so be it.
I am always intrigued, though, by what different sources and networks decide to censor. The Bravo network, as an example, has everyone and their mother babbling about screaming orgasms, enemas, blow jobs, you name it . . . . but they’ll bleep out the word “retarded”.
And it’s easier to get f-bombs on TV then it is to find an audible “nigger”, regardless of what the context is. When I was growing up, we were all taught properly not to say or call anyone the n-word, but it didn’t get censored from movies or documentaries and such.
And I really like creative and stupid overdubbing of profanity when movies are played on network TV. “Jackie Brown” was great for that. It took me a while to figure out why they kept referring to “Maryland Farmers”.
Once I cussed like a sailor because I had been in the Navy and was trained properly on how to do so. These days I can usually get my point across without swearing…but I don’t mind cutting loose now and then.
On Saturday night I was playing some video poker at Palms right after the Judas Priest concert. I hit a $1500 jackpot and shouted out, in reaction, “OH, FUCK YEAH!!!”
There was a man about 12 feet away playing another machine and a lady next to him a few machines down. I saw them perk up and immediately apologized for my little outburst. “I’m sorry. I got a little overexcited.”
The guy stands up to stretch around see what I got . . . “OH, FUCK YEAH!!!” he shouts at me.
I laugh. “Oh, right, see . . . I knew it was an appropriate ‘fuck yeah’ moment.”
I used to have a really major problem with it, but ultimately excessive swearing kind of shows a lack of intelligence if you find yourself using it purely in a noun, verb or adverb sense more than you realize.
I have, however, noticed more usage of the word “cunt” in my daily routine.
Somebody who doesn’t swear is probably somebody who listened to everything their parents and teachers told them to do. Somebody who listens to their preacher.
Perhaps that’s a juvenile assertion on my part, but words are just words. Only pretentious people try to prescribe obscene meanings to certain words and attempt to dictate what can and can’t be said in mixed company.
All of this!
Words are innocent. it’s the context in which they are used that makes them good or bad.
I used to have a really major problem with it, but ultimately excessive swearing kind of shows a lack of intelligence.
That’s some shit my dad says, but I say fuck all that noise. I’m smart as fuck and know a plethora of other words, but I find them boring and fuckin’ stupid.
I don’t think there is any such thing as bad words. It’s the context/tone in which you use words that make any words good or bad.
Random points somewhat related to other folks’ very thoughtful postings:
There was an ‘Onion’ editorial once done by some prude-ish old lady, the title of which was something like “Why does there always have to be so much profanity in pornography?” She was disappointed at the fact that the participants always had to be swearing at each other, and couldn’t just say things like “Oh! My word!!!” when excitable.
Grmpy you asked earlier about who decided when “fuck” became a dirty word. There’s a whole documentary movie with the same title which clears that up well enough, although:
some pretty heavy-hitters in the neurology community think that words like that got their aggressive character because of their similarity to words like, say, “rock.” They bring people back to some primal period in human development where the vocal sounds associated with things were supposed to represent those things as accurately as possible (so, making a “hard” phoneme to match with a “hard” object.)
If nothing else, I think that explains why “fuck you” is still something that makes people want to throw fists at each other. If you think about it, “burn you” would be more aggressive in the suffering it wishes on an enemy, but “fuck” just has the sharper and meaner sound of those two word choices.
And I really like creative and stupid overdubbing of profanity when movies are played on network TV. “Jackie Brown” was great for that. It took me a while to figure out why they kept referring to “Maryland Farmers”.
Yippee kay ay, Mister Falcon!
Lololol “Maryland Farmers” ?! That is the most Molten Fudge-ing funny thing I have heard this week. Clearly they got the idea from the intro to the classic MC5 track of the same. “It’s time to…KICK OUT THE JAMS, MARYLAND FARMERRRRSSS!!!”
And in a roundabout way, that reminds me of my perverse enjoyment of the sanitizing techniques used to make “clean” versions of “explicit” records back in the day. My favorite was the backwards-masked edit of the swear word in which it would come out jumbled like “man, I don’t give a ufck!”
My brother and I used to run around the house calling each other mother ufckers and isht heads, but of course we couldn’t get away with THAT either…my folks would just shut us down with “I know what you really WANT to say to each other, so stop it!” Parents just don’t understand…
Does anyone have a copy of Nirvana’s Walmart-packaged “In Utero” with “WAIF ME” on it? I’ve only heard reference to it in various documentaries and such, but don’t even know if that was just the writing on the tracklisting that was changed or if they really recorded a version singing “WAIF ME!!!”
I don’t say it aloud so much, but since I’ve been making a bunch of goofy Glenn Danzig pictures I’ve been typing “motherfucker” and “motherfucking” a lot more lately.
Here I am, Motherfucker! Just typing some more motherfucking profanity, Motherfucker!
