ON THE VERGE OF BEING OBSCENE

Some recent discussions with a friend about whether I curse too much when I write lead me to this stream-of-consciousness swim through a stream of epithets...

Of course, every other word out of Little Richard’s mouth was obscene, but this was obscured by his scat scatology (“A wop bop a lu bop, a wop bam boom!” indeed).

Louie Louie

“Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” is nice and pithy. It’s a shame the MC5 didn’t have the songs to go with it.

The Stones didn’t get really down and dirty on official releases until Exile, near as I can tell. But then each of the first two songs had a bomb in it (“Plug in, flush out and fire the fuckin' feed” and “Well they're gonna hold some shit for me”), although both occurrences are pretty slurry. The “Got to scrape the shit right off your shoes” stuff in Sweet Virginia, however, is articulated and repeated.

Pink Floyd’s Money and its “Don't give me that do goody good bullshit” used to be a litmus test for just how progressive your local FM station was. If they were, you know man, cool, they played the “bullshit” version—if they were tools of The Man, they played the “bullBLEEP” one…

The Steve Miller Band’s Jet Airliner was another benchmark for this. If you heard the Casey Kasem approved “Funky kicks going down in the city” instead of the “Funky shit going down in the city” well Lance, it was time to spin the dial.

For some reason I always contrasted Aerosmith’s “And all the things you do, motherfucker, come back to you” in the live version of Dream On with Zep’s Bilbo-baiting “Does anybody remember laughter?” tomfoppery from the live Stairway. Aerosmith always looked better in the light of that contrast.

It’s really hard to top the “Fuck this and fuck that, fuck it all and fuck the fucking brat” explosion in Bodies.

Um, Prince, was that “funk” or “fuck” that you sang 136 times in Erotic City?

And then the next thing I knew, Tipper Gore was masturbating in a hotel lobby with a magazine, and the whole obscenity thing got freighted with the PRMC and stickering, and cursing was well on its way to being codified...