Music

Fuck in music

Records reached the word before films did, because a record could be pressed and sold without a censor hearing it first. The industry has spent sixty years working out what to do about that.

Firsts

• The Fugs (1965): named after Mailer's fug, the New York band recorded frankly sexual songs for the tiny ESP-Disk label, some using the word outright. Small circulation, large influence.
• MC5, Kick Out the Jams (1969): the live album opens with "kick out the jams, motherfuckers!" Elektra pressed a "brothers and sisters" version for radio, a Detroit department store refused to stock it, the band took out an ad telling the store to "fuck you" on Elektra's letterhead, and Elektra dropped them.
• Jefferson Airplane, "We Can Be Together" (1969): "up against the wall, motherfucker", on RCA. Usually credited as the first use on a major label, and the band sang it on The Dick Cavett Show in August 1969, which is often called the first fuck on American network television.
• Country Joe McDonald, Woodstock (1969): the "Fish Cheer" ("gimme an F...") spelled the word out to 400,000 people and, via the film, to everyone else.
• John Lennon, "Working Class Hero" (1970): "you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see". The lyric sheet printed it; the BBC did not play it.

Punk

The Sex Pistols' Grundy interview (see Film and TV) was the word's most important television moment after Tynan, and Never Mind the Bollocks (1977) prompted a prosecution under the Indecent Advertisements Act 1889 over a shop window display, which the band won when a linguist testified that bollocks was an old word for a priest. Punk and its descendants made the word standard in album titles and band names: Fucked Up, Holy Fuck, Fuck Buttons, the Fuck Yeahs.

Hip-hop and the Parental Advisory sticker

In 1985 the Parents Music Resource Center, founded by Tipper Gore and other Washington wives, pushed the US record industry into the black-and-white "Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" label. The sticker did nothing to reduce sales and a great deal to advertise them. NWA's "Fuck tha Police" (1988) drew a letter of complaint from the FBI's assistant director, Milt Ahlerich, to Priority Records, which the group happily publicised; police forces refused to work security at their shows and Detroit officers stopped a performance of the song in 1989. From the 1990s the word became a basic element of the form: Dr Dre, Eminem, Lil Wayne, Kendrick Lamar. "Clean" radio edits, with the word reversed, dropped out or replaced, are a parallel industry.

Britain: the Christmas number one

In December 2009 a Facebook campaign put Rage Against the Machine's "Killing in the Name" (1992), whose climax repeats "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me" sixteen times, at number one in the UK singles chart to keep the X Factor winner off the top. Performing it live on BBC Radio 5 Live's breakfast show, the band had agreed not to swear and then did, four times, before the presenter faded them out. The following year Cee Lo Green's "Fuck You" reached the top ten with a radio version titled "Forget You", and Lily Allen's "Fuck You" (2009) had already been a hit across Europe. In 2022 a chant of "fuck the Tories" from the Glastonbury crowd went out on the BBC, which received complaints and apologised.

Elsewhere in the catalogue

• Ian Dury and the Blockheads, "Plaistow Patricia" (1977), opens with a bare list of swear words, this one included.
• Radiohead's "Creep" (1992): "you're so fucking special", with a "very special" radio version.
• Alanis Morissette, "You Oughta Know" (1995): "are you thinking of me when you fuck her?" reached daytime radio with a cough over the word.
• Green Day, Blink-182, Limp Bizkit: the word as adolescent punctuation, 1994 onwards.
• Amy Winehouse, "Me and Mr Jones" (2006): "what kind of fuckery is this?" put a Jamaican word into the mainstream.
• Kanye West, Cardi B, Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Sam Fender: by the 2020s the word appears in the year's biggest singles without comment, and the Grammys, the Brits and the Mercury Prize all routinely bleep their own winners.