Everyone loves a good curse word, right? Especially the ever reliable and versatile "fuck." Sure, it could be argued that overzealous use of the word comes across as immature and unimaginative. Yet, sometimes, a single perfectly-placed "fuck" can increase the emotional impact of a song tenfold, creating an unparalleled moment of catharsis. Other times, it's just really fucking fun to say and no ulterior motive is needed. So here are ten of my most favorite uses of the word in song - or at least the ten I most instantaneously remembered upon conceiving of this post.
10. Tilly and the Wall - Too Excited
Listen, this song isn't exactly subtle or sparing in its use of expletives, but that's half the fun. Because sometimes there's truly nothing better than stomping around screaming curses at top volume for three minutes straight. The rest of the fun lies in melodies so bold they'll bludgeon their way inside your head, particularly the delightfully bratty call-and-response chorus ("Well, I say/BOOHOO!/And I say/FUCK YOU!"). There's also the fact that it's cacophonous, garage-y grunge-pop that employs a tap dancer in place of a drum set, which isn't something you often get the chance to say. In fact, I'd wager a bet that there aren't many songs in that niche not by Tilly and the Wall. Anyway, get the fun out of your system now because it's basically all turmoil from here on out.
I'm going to burn this motherfucking party down!
Listen, this song isn't exactly subtle or sparing in its use of expletives, but that's half the fun. Because sometimes there's truly nothing better than stomping around screaming curses at top volume for three minutes straight. The rest of the fun lies in melodies so bold they'll bludgeon their way inside your head, particularly the delightfully bratty call-and-response chorus ("Well, I say/BOOHOO!/And I say/FUCK YOU!"). There's also the fact that it's cacophonous, garage-y grunge-pop that employs a tap dancer in place of a drum set, which isn't something you often get the chance to say. In fact, I'd wager a bet that there aren't many songs in that niche not by Tilly and the Wall. Anyway, get the fun out of your system now because it's basically all turmoil from here on out.
9. The Dresden Dolls - The Perfect Fit
Can't you just fix it for me? I'll pay you well. Fuck, I'll pay you anything if you could end this hell.
My relationship with Amanda Palmer's public persona is complicated at best, but there's no denying her skill as a songwriter. Sometimes I think the Dresden Dolls, Palmer's punk cabaret partnership with drummer extraordinaire Brian Viglione, are solely to credit for my having survived adolescence. Their music is melodramatic and almost too earnestly macabre, but it's also undeniably affecting. Atop the hauntingly childlike jangle of toy piano, Palmer obsessively measures her strengths against her weaknesses, ultimately crumbling under the pressure of too-high expectations: "I used to be the tight one, the perfect fit/Funny how those compliments can make you feel so full of it." From here, the song descends into a heavy, rumbling finale of drums, piano, and Palmer's raspy, wearied wail, which turns every syllable into a slap to the face.
8. Laura Marling - Master Hunter
Wrestling the rope from darkness is no fucking life that I would choose.
Laura Marling has truly got the art of the cruelly biting one-liner down to perfection, and this is one of her most relentlessly claws-out tracks. There's no steady build-up; instead, it's blistering, aggressive, and insanely cathartic from the start. However, it reaches its frenzied peak in the bridge, where Marling takes to task in one fell swoop critics who have accused her of appropriating sadness and men who have objectified her as a prototypical sad girl, demanding, "Is this what you think I do in life when I'm not being used? You say, 'You're not sad, you look for the blues.'" "I have some news," she snarls in response before hurling herself headlong into the above invective. It's a powerful moment for every woman who has ever had the validity of her feelings unfairly questioned or denied.
7. The National - Demons
When I walk into a room, I do not light it up - fuck.
Matt Berninger is particularly adept at using vulgarity in all the right places, and while he has plenty of intensely emotional and darkly hilarious lines to choose from, the sheer subtlety of "Demons" is what makes its brief moment of unfiltered profanity so devastatingly honest. The song plods along clumsily, its monotonous melody reflective of the numbing effect of depression on the narrator's day-to-day life, despite his best efforts to overcome it ("I wish that I could rise above it, but I stay down with my demons"). This struggle comes into clearest focus two minutes in, when the instrumentation and vocals seem to brighten. Berninger sings of a desire "to see the sun come up above New York," but just as potential relief is in sight, "the sunlight dims," resulting in a muttered admittance of defeat.
6. The Antlers - Bear
All the while, I'll know we're fucked and not getting un-fucked soon.
Even without the surrounding context of the rest of Hospice, this is an incredibly sad song. It revolves around the difficult decision a young couple must make in the face of an unplanned pregnancy, subject matter made even more uncomfortable by the juxtaposition of the lilting, delicate melody and Peter Silberman's soothing croon against the brutal honesty of the lyrics, which are full of further contradictions. At the same time as the potential child is affectionately revered ("There's a bear inside your stomach/A cub's been kicking from within"), it is also deeply, almost violently unwanted ("He's loud but without vocal chords/We'll put an end to him"). No matter the eventual outcome, the narrator is aware that the relationship is irrevocably altered and voices this realization with eloquent if soul-crushing vulgarity.
5. Los Campesinos! - We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed
We kid ourselves there's future in the fucking, but there is no fucking future.
Gareth of Los Campesinos! deserves wider recognition as a songwriter; his lyrics are a high-wire act, teetering precariously between overwrought adolescent melodrama and deeply meaningful reflection without ever losing their balance. They're quick-witted and hilarious (they have to be to keep up with the band's inexhaustible store of youthful energy), but their sarcastic nature masks a deeply unsettling core. This song, especially, bursts at the seams with existential crisis. Every fresh hook is accompanied by another wave of anxiety, the above sing-along couplet only outdone by the frantically verbose exclamation that soon follows: "I cannot emphasize enough that my body is a badly-designed, poorly-put-together vessel harboring these diminishing so-called 'vital' organs/I hope my heart goes first!"
4. Tori Amos - Northern Lad
He don't show much these days; it gets so fucking cold.
It hasn't escaped my notice that Tori Amos has been on every one of these lists so far, but her catalog is so vast and my appreciation so enduring that it's hard not to instantly think of her. This song has been singled out by some fans as the beginning of her descent into inoffensively pretty blandness, which is an unfair characterization. Sure, it's a tender, sweeping ballad, but it's got sharper edges than most. This is no more apparent than in the second verse: Amos unleashes a darkly muttered expletive that's as surprising as it is resentful, driving home the narrator's frustration at her lover's constant absence. The song also serves as a showcase for Amos' vocals, which I think have often gone under-appreciated due to their perceived "weirdness" - here, though, they're nothing short of miraculous.
3. Rilo Kiley - Spectacular Views
Indifferent but distanced perfectly, projected endlessly - it's so fucking beautiful!
There's something especially satisfying about the simultaneously coy and wicked half-growl Jenny Lewis gets in her otherwise pristine voice when she curses. It would have been easy to choose a song like "A Better Son/Daughter" or "Jenny, You're Barely Alive," where the anger in every "fuck" is so palpable you can taste it like acid in the back of your own throat. But why wallow in angst when the word can be re-appropriated as an awestruck expression of pure wonder? Over loosely expansive rock instrumentation, Lewis praises the beauty of the everyday. "You never knew why you felt so good in the strangest of places," she sings, "like in waiting rooms or long lines that made you wait or mall parking lots on holidays." These lines flip the apathetic relationship with life's mundane realities expressed in "Pictures of Success" on its head, instead choosing a far brighter outlook.
2. Fiona Apple - Get Gone
Fucking go. 'Cause I've done what I could for you, and I do know what's good for me.
This is quickly just becoming a list of my favorite songwriters, isn't it? Fiona Apple is an old pro when it comes to intensely poetic break-up lines, but sometimes a girl's got to cut straight to the point. "Get Gone" is a fuck-off anthem of the highest order, Apple's staccato piano-playing and accusatory growl all it requires to come alive with raw passion. By the time Apple asks halfway through the second verse, "How many times can it escalate till it elevates to a place I can't breathe," the answer is already clear. Her frustration, at both herself and her soon-to-be-ex-lover, soon boils to the surface in a deadly two-word command. Finally equipped with the confidence to do what's best for herself, she ends on a threatening note: "It's time the truth was out that he don't give a shit about me."
1. Sufjan Stevens - I Want to Be Well
I'm not fucking around.
The chaotic electronic experimentation that defines The Age of Adz reaches its peak in "I Want to Be Well," its glitchy synths and vocals countered by flutters of woodwind and choral background vocals. The song strips itself down and builds itself back up many times over according to two separate mantras, first the tender and vulnerable "I want to be well" then the brash and self-empowered "I'm not fucking around." This last is initially a shock, as before Adz, Stevens' music had been rather linguistically (if not thematically) pure. Yet his abrupt loss of inhibitions makes sense in context, when it becomes clear how tightly woven his own struggles are into the album's more impersonal narrative touchpoints. Before releasing Adz, Stevens suffered a mysterious and debilitating illness, which likely means the moment is as poignant and cathartic for him as it is for listeners.
