A couple of Mondays ago while ranting about the quality of songwriting in earlier, bygone days, I sprinkled a little profanity on my word cereal. Mmm. Profanity.
Some people got upset and asked why I had to do that.
I wanted to take up the question seriously and figure it out. Here’s what I came up with.
Go f*#…. no, wait.
That’s just going for the easy joke. I like to think I’m better than that. I’m NOT…but I enjoy thinking it.
Here’s what I figured out….
I come from a generation where we wanted to shock “The Man.” We shocked with our hair. We shocked with out clothes. We shocked with our music. I feel like it is the same thing that rap music did in the 80s. One of the points of early rap was to scare the heck out of people with language and style and attitude. That “Let’s raise a few eyebrows” is still in we few remaining kids of the 60’s I guess.
Sometimes a curse word is simply a phonetic exclamation mark. It adds a little oomph to the point you are making. Not only to shock. Just to hit the readers eyeballs just a little harder. When I am writing a song I do the same thing with my melodies. I find the words that I want to stress to the listener and I make the melody on those words do something, anything, to draw a bit more attention to them. There’s no melody in blogs so I had to choose between italics, bold font, or saying something naughty.
Sometimes curse words make me laugh. My dear friend Mark Hudson tells me this story:
“I was at a party long ago. John Lennon was at the same party. I followed him around all night like a puppy dog. I knew he knew who I was because he was a fan of The Hudson Brothers. Finally, as the party was drawing to a close he took pity on me. He turned and said “Okay Hudson. You can ask ONE Beatle question!” I blurted out, “In I Am The Walrus when you say I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together”…what did you mean?”
John said “I didn’t mean anything. It just felt good coming off my tongue.”
Sometimes a nice dirty word feels good coming off your tongue.
But I am a songwriter and I make my living with words and rhyme (as the song says) and I have a whole lot of words at my disposal. I’m not going to say that I will forgo working blue for the conceivable future. Just know that if I ever DO let one fly….
It’s either a form of punctuation….or it felt good coming off my tongue….or I’m still trying to p*ss off “The Man.”
Oops. Does “p*ss” count?