Every angst-ridden 12-year-old understands the basic power of profanity. You could win over the cool girl with a blistering blaspheme. Land yourself in detention for a single unkind utterance. Or, later on, your neo-spazzcore folktronic Rush coverband could smash up a kegger with a clavicle-shattering cuss. And hearing profanities actually speeds up a person’s heart rate, like a pop of adrenaline. There is no doubt that this can be an effective means to getting yourself heard. This could account for its seemingly ubiquitous nature in rock music.
Profanity finds its roots in religion. Blasphemy, sacrilege and taking God’s name in vain were the beginning. Later on, sexual and scatological terms were added to the list. Lately, terminologies of hate (by which I mean racist, sexist and so on) have become obscenities, but the artistic merit of these phrases is highly arguable (just look at Eminem). So where does artistic expression come into all this?
Throughout the history of art and expression, swearing has held a solid foothole as a means of characterization and establishing realism. Geoffrey Chaucer couldn’t have constructed “The Canterbury Tales” without his finely crafted mock-ups of both upper and lower classes, which involved heavy usage of indecent language and dirty jokes. And if I learned anything from my Pre-1800 lit courses, it was that the lower classes connected with (or at least were fond of using and hearing) profanity. Shakespeare played with the profane both discreetly and obviously, letting both the upper and lower classes wallow in the joy of dirty language.
And it is in a musical genre that is itself a slang term for sex (Rock ‘n’ Roll, y’all) that profanity is most important (as well as most commercially acceptable to the mass public; a great example of this is Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” which relied almost too heavily on its profane chorus to rally admiration).
Although early rockers were well-versed in immersing their listeners in sexuality (the hippity-swagger of the young Elvis Presley and the repressed and combustible sexuality in the lyrics of such tunes as the Troggs’ “Wild Thing”), it wasn’t until the ’60s when the nascent attitude that would eventually fuel punk rock in the ’70s took hold of cursing as a legit aesthetic practice.
In 1968, The Motor City Five (better known as MC5) threw down history every night at Detroit’s Grand Ballroom. It was their immortal powerchords and unstoppable energy that slaughtered hippie idealism and (almost) brought the f-bomb to Top 40 radio. When their ferocious live anthem “Kick Out the Jams” was pressed onto vinyl, and when an edited version (which was easy to do, since the curse wasn’t actually part of the song, but a rally cry to ignite the crowd at the beginning) started hitting heavy rotation on select radio stations, the band completed their goal of musical revolution and, alongside the likes of the Stooges and a select other few (not to mention thousands of no-name, semi-talented garage rockers pure with intrigue and inexperience), invented punk rock. The MC5 are given tribute constantly, one of the best being a “Kick Out the Jams” cover by the Bad Brains with Henry Rollins on the “Pump Up the Volume” (the best painfully-shy-nerd-turns-pirate-radio-god flick, and the movie that taught me everything I ever need to know about the Federal Communications Commission) soundtrack.
In 1976, Sex Pistol Steve Jones swore on Bill Grundy’s television show after Grundy badgered him into spewing out his “true” opinions about the popular British television host. And the resonance is still being felt, if not overtly in the crumbling restrictions on what can and can’t be said and shown on TV.
But the only reason that the Pistols’ display of vulgar disorder and true punk grit worked so well was because of the very real purity immersed within their songs. They might not have known how to play their instruments, but when John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotton) declared England a fascist state, he meant it. And millions of other people, around the world and scattered all across the spectrum, felt the same way. Maybe not about England, but about France or Tennessee or Mrs. Fulkem’s eighth-grade bio class. Whatever it is and wherever you are (or whenever, because the feelings melted in between those words are unrestricted by temporal confinements), the sense of restraint and the urgency of rebellion are not diluted and will retain their strength for quite some time. So even the most vulgar can have significant impact; there just has to be merit behind the anger (or crassness) of the artist.
This is especially relevant today, when book burning has transformed into something much less visible and much more dangerous. Corporate censorship keeps important artists and films out of big-box stores, which means far enough away from a large portion of the public to have drastic effects. And media outlets are structured in such an ineffective way (by utilizing more professional sources and fewer actual reporters) that voices are not getting heard. Disaffected youth is a lie that, once you buy into, you’ll have trouble getting out of, because it’s cool to be a slacker, a rebel without a cause and all that. But that too-cool-for-school attitude and façade of numbness won’t protect you from the Patriot Act infringing on your First Amendment rights, or the blaring non-thought and benign similarity of single-thought consolidated media. It’s what isn’t on the shelves and what isn’t in your local paper that will hurt you the most. It’s time to kick out the jams.
