Filthy English, page 26
His first book was published in 1935. It was considered so obscene, so scandalous that it had to be ‘privately printed’ in Paris. Even the nature of the contents was heavily masked by its title: Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary. The title page carried an equivalent of a parental advisory sticker: ‘Circulation restricted to students of linguistics, folk-lore, abnormal psychology, and allied branches of the social sciences’. It was a limited edition of 75. My (facsimile) copy is No. 61 and, like all of them, is signed in Read’s clear, generous hand. Published in 1977, it has a new title: Classic American Graffiti. ‘No emanation of the human spirit is too vile or despicable to come under the record and analysis of the scientist,’ he wrote in his introduction. His tongue was often to be found reaching for his cheek. To him, graffiti was ‘folk epigraphy’. A later student of the same subject, Alan Dundes of the University of California, Berkeley, called it ‘latrinalia’.
Mostly, Read collected his graffiti from toilet walls in tourist parks, taking his ‘evidence’ from ‘that part of the United States lying west of the Mississippi and that part of Canada in the Rocky Mountain area’. He found little geographical difference between states but added, with typical dryness, ‘perhaps warmth of climate has an influence’. He found ‘the most virulent examples’ in inland California, in two areas in particular. In the ‘torrid sections’ of California’s San Joaquin Valley – which, by happy coincidence, is where the 1973 movie American Graffiti was set. And in El Centro, a small, very hot city about 100 miles inland from San Diego and 50 feet below sea level. It’s Cher’s home town. There, in an outhouse on 27 June 1928, Read found this:
Ashes to ashes dust to dust
If it wasn’t for your cock my prick would rust
The spirit of Lucille Bogan.
It wasn’t Lucille Bogan herself, of course, who caused ructions in China. It was the Rolling Stones, who had taken for themselves her most assertive line, the one about making a dead man come. Which was fair take by the Stones, to my mind anyway. They’re as much part of the rhythm’n’sex tradition as she was; just as familiar with the time-honoured manner of constructing a song the same way you prepare a bride’s outfit – something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. The way they did it on ‘Cocksucker Blues’, for example. A song written by Mick Jagger, he recorded it alone, singing and playing acoustic guitar, in May 1970, at his country house, Stargroves, then finished it at Olympic studios in west London. It was then presented to Decca records as the Rolling Stones’ next single. It’s the story of a young man alone in central London and despairing at his lack of sexual activity.† Its chorus runs: ‘When will I get my cock sucked? When will I get my ass fucked?’ It was the Stones’ way of getting out of their Decca contract and enabling them to start Rolling Stones Records (with the man to whom the Clovers sang ‘The Dirty Rotten Cocksuckers’ Ball’ – and who made the Stones themselves change ‘Star Fucker’ to ‘Star, Star’). It still hasn’t been released – though it was used, as ‘Schoolboy Blues’, in the stage show The Trials Of Oz and the Stones themselves rehearsed it for their 1978 tour but never actually played it in public. Its title was also borrowed for the Robert Frank film of the Stones’ 1972 American tour. There are also at least three cover versions available, including one by a tribute band, the Rolling Clones. I have it on excellent authority that the composer royalties find their way home to Jagger/Richards.
The Stones took that dead-man-coming line of Lucille’s for ‘Start Me Up’, one of their most profitable songs. Microsoft licensed it from them for the launch of Windows 95. The Chinese authorities weren’t so keen on it, though. When the Stones came to play their first show in China, to an audience of eight thousand at the Shanghai Grand Stage on 8 April 2006, the local censors stepped in. Five songs were banned altogether. ‘Start Me Up’ wasn’t banned. They started the set with it, in fact. But there was no dead-man-coming in Jagger’s singing. The power of Lucille’s cock was still too much for China.
By then, Lucille Bogan’s best work had been compiled, packaged and sleevenoted – an odd afterlife for a drunken, exuberant moment in 1930s Manhattan. Called Shave ’Em Dry, the Bogan collection was put together in 2005 by Lawrence Cohn, the Sony records executive who had previously turned Delta bluesman Robert Johnson into a posthumous million-seller. It was put up for an award, too: Historical Blues Album of the Year at the 26th annual W. C. Handy Blues Awards. The ceremony itself was a $100-a-plate bash at the Cook Convention Center Ballroom in downtown Memphis, sponsored by Gibson guitars and Baldwin pianos. Lucille didn’t win, though. Her record lost out to Hound Dog Taylor’s Release the Hound, a male take on the same old human genital itch’n’scratch that Lucille sang about so eloquently and gleefully.
The words she sang, though, they’re no longer recorded secretly, hidden away and passed from excited hand to excited hand. They’re everywhere in popular music nowadays. I searched iTunes and found 3824 fucks. The list started with ‘Fuck Her Gently’ by Tenacious D, movie star Jack Black’s band, and ended with the 2006 album Fuck MIDI! by the Casiokids, a ‘Norwegian electro-troup’ who are swearingly anti-digital – MIDI is the acronym for Musical Instrument Digital Interface.
I flicked through this iTunes fuck list, casually looking out for names I recognized. I found Amy Winehouse (‘Fuck Me Pumps’), Arctic Monkeys (‘Who the Fuck Are Arctic Monkeys’), Babyshambles (‘Fuck Forever’), John Lennon (‘When in Doubt, Fuck It’), P. J. Harvey (‘Who the Fuck?’), the Super Furry Animals (‘The Man Don’t Give a Fuck’), Martha Wainwright (‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’), Ryan Adams (‘Fuck the Universe’), the Dead Kennedys (‘Too Drunk to Fuck’ and ‘Nazi Punks Fuck Off’), Portishead (‘Music to Fuck To’) and Eric Idle (‘Fuck Christmas’).
From this brief selection, I make that seven anger fucks to four sex fucks, plus one that could be either – John Lennon. A soul-singer, four rocksters, five punks, three singer-songwriters, a trip-hop trio and a comic. Eighteen men, four women. There’s a seasonal novelty (‘Fuck Christmas’) and a daughter’s view of her father, in which the usage is factual rather than metaphorical (‘Bloody Mother Fucking Asshole’).† Seven English tracks, one Welsh, one Canadian and three American. (In 2004, the FCC fined Eric Idle $5000 for saying fuck on an American radio station. He responded with a Noel Cowardish song, ‘Fuck You Very Much’ – a title shared with the similarly jaunty 2008 ringtone chart-topper by Lily Allen.)
There were an awful lot more Americans than that in iTunes, only they were all hip-hoppers and rappers. Again, I just picked out some familiar names. Dr Dre’s ‘Fuck You’, Snoop Dogg’s ‘I Wanna Fuck You’, Eminem’s ‘Just Don’t Give a Fuck’, NWA’s ‘Fuck tha Police’, Lil Wayne’s ‘Fuck the World’, Peaches’ ‘Fuck the Pain Away’, Young Hot Rod’s ‘I Like to Fuck’, Missy Elliott’s ‘They Don’t Want to Fuck wit Me’, Jay Z’s ‘Can I Get to Fuck You’, 50 Cent’s ‘We Don’t Give a Fuck’. Six anger fucks, four sex fucks. Ten men, two women. Plus Tila Tequila, a porn star, whose contribution to the Young Hot Rod track includes her promise to perform oral intercourse ‘until I hurl’.
Not that far from Jelly Roll in a brothel to Snoop watching that woman winding and grinding up on that pole, is it? As Dr Dre of NWA once remarked: ‘niggganigganigga fuckthisfuckthat bitchbitchbitch suckmydick’. If hip-hop and rap have often done well by sex and dirty words, that wasn’t the case in the early days. There’s just a single swear word on all three CDs of Kurtis Blow Presents The History Of Rap (1997), on Biz Markie’s ‘Vapors’, and that’s bleeped over so effectively I can’t figure out what the word is. One of the first rap tracks to be consciously sexual (which, in the world of hip hop invariably, sadly, means misogynistic) and use the word ‘fucked’ was Schoolly D’s 1985 track, ‘PSK What Does It Mean?’ Still, the big fuss came with NWA’s 1988 hit, ‘Fuck Tha Police’. In 2004, the British charts were topped by Eamon’s ‘Fuck It (I Don’t Want You Back)’ which was then knocked off that spot by its answer, Frankee’s ‘Fuck You Right Back’.
Mostly, the iTunes fucks were in song titles but there were fuck performers, too. Fuck are an indie quartet from Oakland. Fucked Up are a fairly famous Canadian band. Holy Fuck are an experimental outfit from Toronto – they were nominated for the local equivalent of the Mercury Prize. Fuck Room is a real 2009 album by The Condo Fucks, a fictional group from the fictional ‘underbelly of the Connecticut rock scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s’, created by the Hoboken, New Jersey indie rock band Yo La Tengo. Fuckly is a rapper from Guadeloupe. I even found some fuck labels: Fuck Hitler! (of Columbus, Ohio) and Fuck You Pay Me Records (of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania).
Next, I searched for cunts. I found 222, starting with ‘Absolute Cunt of a Day’ by Kevin Bloody Williams, an Australian comic (of sorts) and ending with ‘Rhythm Intoxication (Cunt-a-pella)’ by Rosabel, a version of a 2006 US dance chart number one. No hip-hoppers or rappers here, of course. There’s no cunt in hip-hop, only pussy. Even more than fuck, cunt is a favourite of noisy indie bands: Anal Cunt, Howling Willie Cunt, Selfish Cunt, Shat’s The Cunt Chronicles, featuring Cunt Flavoured Lollipops.
These, of course, are just the fucks and cunts that appear on the label or tracklist. The iTunes search engine doesn’t find deliberate misspellings – Kunt and the Gang of Basildon, Essex, for example. Nor does it find lyrics. So no ‘Arseholes, bastards, fucking cunts and pricks’. No ‘fucking peasants’. And no ‘Bitches Ain’t Shit’, either in its hip-hop original by Dr Dre or its quiet, reflective piano-led recasting by Ben Folds. No ‘are you thinking of me when you fuck her?’ from Alanis Morissette’s ‘You Oughta Know’. There is, though, Liz Phair’s ‘Fuck And Run’, if nothing from ‘Flower’, another track on the same album, with the lines ‘I’ll fuck you like a dog’, and ‘I’ll fuck you till your dick is blue’.
The spirit of Lucille Bogan lives on.
† Jimmy Davis went on to become two-time governor of Louisiana. Each time his Republican opponents brought up his recorded history. He beat them both times, mostly on account of another of his songs, ‘You Are My Sunshine’.
† The same joke is in the video for Katy Perry’s 2008 chart-topper, ‘I Kissed A Girl’, which has her sitting on satin-sheeted bed stroking and fondling a small cat.
† Pedantically, it should really be ‘Sex Pistols’. There was no definite article in the name.
† I interviewed him at the midpoint of his sex change operations when his new breasts had begun to form. He chose to wear a diaphanous night-dress for our meeting.
† Punk: whore, 1575; catamite, 1698; passive homosexual, 1904; worthless fellow, 1917; amateur, 1923; young person, 1926; coward, 1939; ‘My girlfriend … said they were a mediocre punk band with a singer who thought he was Mick Jagger, but wasn’t’, Rag magazine, 1971.
† Shakespeare’s other big hit, ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’, is an eleven-syllable pentameter, with an unstressed final syllable. If he can have that, then Ian Dury can have a nine-syllable pentameter. Much as John Lee Hooker can play 13-bar blues.
† At the same session Peer also recorded Fiddlin’ John Carson’s ‘Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane’, the tune that ‘launched the country music industry’. Four years later, in Bristol, Tennessee, Peer made the first recordings of Jimmy Rodgers and the Carter Family – pretty much laying down the second two of country music’s three foundation stones in that day’s work.
† Her surnamesake Millie Jackson did exactly that forty years later. The 1970s soul singer consciously created a determinedly sexual public persona, in contrast to her private, business-like self. There was Millie Jackson who sung about sex and infidelity, exemplified by her ‘Phuck U Symphony’. And there was Mildred Jackson the businesswoman who knew that singing about sex and infidelity was a time-proven business model – also exemplified by her ‘Phuck U Symphony’.
† At the Library of Congress sessions, Jelly Roll also recorded ‘The Murder Ballad’, a seven-part, thirty-minute narrative of jealousy, killing, prison and lesbian sex. ‘Bitch, I’ll cut your fucking throat and drink your blood like wine.’
† Bill Adler, music business veteran and something of a pop historian added some context to who was flirting with whom in that Philadelphia studio. ‘Jackie was a certified sex maniac and there were persistent rumors that he didn’t mind jumping the fence on occasion.’
† ‘This was the period when schoolboys would hang around the railings around Piccadilly Circus waiting to be picked up,’ said my informant. ‘Certain people from Rocket Records were rumoured to be regular customers.’
† This bloody mother fuckin’ asshole, Loudon Wainright, also had a son called Rufus. When Rufus was little, his father wrote a song about him, ‘Rufus Is a Tit Man’ – a jealous song about breast-feeding.
Chapter Eight
Around the World†
It was a Tuesday morning in north London. I was having breakfast with my friend Isabelle in an Italian café. Isabelle is a gr. own woman, a university lecturer, with a book to her name, on a French neo-Marxist philosopher – who I find quite impenetrable. (Though I’ve never dared tell her this, till now.) To my knowledge, she is fluent in at least two and a half languages – the English of her adulthood, the French of her childhood home and the Québécois that was the lingua franca of the city she grew up in, Montreal. She’s not French Canadian but Canadian French. A small but significant difference: her family were immigrants from France and spoke metropolitan French rather than Québécois, the local variant of French that was once described to me as sounding less like a language than a tongue disease. You can get the sense of that slur from the way Québécois itself is pronounced: ki-bi-kwa. Very nasally.
Isabelle was telling me about a visit to her father. He’d been doing what she tells me he always does when he sees her. He was giving her a hard time about what a terrible daughter she was and always had been, in French. ‘So I told him he was an asshole.’ In English? ‘In English. It felt great.’
I’ve thought a lot about that exchange between an ageing, traditional French father and a middle-aged daughter. About the rebellion that still stirs in her. But more about the way that she switched to English to swear at him – so easily, so naturally, so deliberately, so unselfconsciously. She could have sworn at him in his language, called him un con or some such. Or she could have used Québécois, which has such a distinct and rich repertoire of cursing that it has its own name: Sacré (sacred). Middle-class Montreal metropolitan French-speakers – i.e. people like her – often use Sacré in private conversation. It adds intimacy, a sense of opening up, being honest.
Sacré harks back to an earlier God-fearing existence. Its words are exclusively religious. Its most powerful swear is the three-word phrase, tabarnac, sacrament, calice! – i.e. the cabinet which contains the sacramental wine and wafers! the central rite of the Catholic faith! the communion goblet! A Québécois who doesn’t give a fuck is en crissé – i.e. Christed (possibly in reference to crucifixion). Viarge is a common and nastily meant insult: it means virgin and refers specifically to the Virgin Mary. You can intensify it further by adding trou de cul de – i.e. you tell someone that they are, in your considered opinion, Jesus’s mother’s arsehole.
If you don’t know Sacré, you can’t really start to understand Québécois culture. And, of course, nor can you learn to use Sacré without first understanding Québécois culture. Not properly anyway. The fine details of any culture’s swearing make it just about impossible for anyone to be capable of more than the basic usage of swears they didn’t grow up with. In kosher company, I always hesitate before using shmuck and would never venture shlemiel or tochis. I’d sound silly, I know, like Yankee Doodle Dandy thinking that feather in his cap made a peacock of him. Partly because swears evolve, thrive and prosper in the private rather than the public arena, their particulars are so particular as to defy even the most dedicated student. I’ve yet to meet an American who had more than a very rough grasp of the various tonal and rhythmic potential of ‘wanker’ – let alone the when and who of its usage. As with all swears, it’s a deeply cultural matter. There’s no US equivalent of Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner so how can Americans be expected to grasp the fine-grained details of wanker?
Yet Isabelle used neither French nor Sacré, neither the language of her own childhood, not the one of the children she grew up amongst. She swore at him in English. American English, to be precise – despite the fact that she’s lived most of her life in London academia and has the accent to go with that. And despite the fact that her father is also a fluent English speaker.
Why? Was it because of the sound of the word?
Ass. Hole.
Is it just the right-sounding thing to call someone when you feel you’ve reached the limits of normal language?
Asshole.
Was it because French is just not a good language to swear in? Is French too concerned with precision and elaboration ever to feel fully comfortable with such direct, earthy insults? It’s certainly true that English swearing is full of words that studies show are perceived as quick and harsh. Phonetic symbolism, it’s called. There are lots of monosyllables, trochees (long or stressed syllable followed by short or unstressed one), short vowels and stop consonants (e.g. k and g). Cock, cunt, dick, cocksucker, motherfucker, fag, kike, gook, paki, nigger. Where French has the softness of baise and bite, for example, English has fuck and prick.
Ass-hole.
It’s also certainly true that English-language swears mostly come from the Old English part of our linguistic heritage – while the French part of it tends to the academic, the professional, the erudite, the abstract. Motherly is English, paternal is Frenchish. English in the sitting room, French in the parlour. English in the bedroom (though not in the boudoir), French when we’re being educated (but not when we’re taught). We feel in English but discuss and analyse our emotions in French. As we grow up, we move from the potty to the urinal, from peeing and pooing to micturating and defecating, from the homeland to the globe. And nothing is more basic than the holy (or unholy) trinity of holes that sit at the base of so many swear words. The shitting one, the pissing one, the fucking one. The excretory one, the urinating one, the copulating one.
