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A fucking blog about fucking swearing

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Lily Allen’s new album comes out on Monday. It includes, to nobody’s great surprise, lots of swearing. There’s even a song called Fuck You. The fact that it’s a song about how terrible George W Bush is, released just after he left office, amid a general global consensus that he was the worst American president for generations, perhaps indicates how subversive saying ‘fuck’ is these days.

Is there anyone still out there who’s shocked by swearing on pop records? I have been wondering this ever since I heard Peaches’ last album, Fatherfucker, which begins with her shouting “I don’t give a fuck! I don’t give a fuck!” for ages. It’s funny for about 20 seconds, but she might as well have been shouting ‘I’m not really fussed!” for all the impact it has. Even Peaches’ most famous song, Fuck The Pain Away, feels relatively tame now. I like the version sung by Miss Piggy though…

Kurt Cobain - despite being a poster boy for adolescent rage, frustration and disappointment - seemed to understand the redundancy of swearing years ago, which should be a lesson to teenagers everywhere. One of Nirvana’s most haunting moments is the really loud bit on Scentless Apprentice, when Cobain howls a tearful, anguished “Go away!” It grabs you, oddly, because he doesn’t swear. The obvious, contrived rock thing to say would be ‘fuck off”, so this felt serious. And it was. A few months later he was dead.

Next to Kurt, Peaches sounds like a six-year-old shouting “bum”, which is almost always tiresome. I remember seeing Rage Against the Machine at a festival once, singing an angry political song about rebellion that went “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” again and again. The band told the crowd to sing along and hundreds of people did, which I thought was a bit ironic. I decided not to join in, figuring it was more in the spirit of the song to ignore them and go buy a taco.

These days, when I hear that a band has called themselves Fucked Up, or Holy Fuck, or whatever, I just find myself sighing resignedly. My ears perk up far more during those easy listening radio moments where the fuck stands out like a sore thumb - like the Beautiful South singing “Don’t marry her, fuck me” (the radio version goes “Don’t marry her, have me”, but you’d be surprised how often DJs play the wrong one). In the context of a sugar-sweet drivetime ditty the line is deliciously dirty, like catching Richard Briers at it with Penelope Keith. In a similar vein is my personal favourite pop fuck, Goodbye Little Boy by the Triffids, a quiet but bitter break-up song that ends with the weary, barely audible words “I’m so tired, I’m so fucking tired.” It’s beautifully done, a signal that any further attempt to maintain the song’s relationship, or even talk about it like grown-ups, is pointless. There’s an argument that Lily Allen is in that tradition. Much is made of the fact that she swears in a ‘butter wouldn’t melt’ girlish voice, as if this, in itself, makes the swearing more shocking - the idea that ‘nice’ girls don’t normally do that sort of thing. Which is naive, bordering on slightly misogynistic.

Actually it doesn’t strike me that Lily Allen is trying to be shocking at all. It feels to me like she swears for the same reason that she publicly slags off other pop stars - she is just one of those people who can’t help saying exactly what she’s thinking, the moment she thinks it. And in real life, as opposed to the self-conscious, asterisked world of the media, when people speak without thinking they swear. Lily, if anything, is normalising swearing, another example of the way she admirably cuts through all the insincerity and self-censorship that plagues pop music, not to mention music journalism. Good for her. (Unless, of course, it is all a cleverly contrived act, in which case… good for her, because it might just be the cleverest cleverly contrived act ever).

Of course, the best argument for swearing in pop is that it’s funny. I’ve always been fond of Stigmata by Ministry, which goes: “Fuck me! Fuck you! Fuck everyone! Fuck the church! Fuck Jesus! Fuck Mary! Fuck the Jews! Fuck the Buddhists! Fuck the Hindus! Fuck George Bush! Fuck his ugly wife!” Etc. Every time I hear it I think of a friend of a friend from London, who used to hum the saxophone solo from Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street, really loudly, each time his train pulled into that station. I thought that was hilarious. Why? Because, while doing this once would probably be a bit childish and not that funny, doing it every single day, without fail, was so audaciously, shamelessly childish that it was practically performance art.

I love the fact that Ministry seem so angry about Buddhists, of all people.

Andrew

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