Listening to rap lately it is unusual to not hear the potty mouth but I wonder…what song (released nationally-not bawdy bar songs) contained the first naughty word. Anyone have any idea?
I thought it may be “Who Are You” by the Who but that is the only one I could think of.
I don’t know if this is the first, but Harry Nillson’s “You’re Breaking My Heart” predates “Who Are You” by about a decade. Not a hit, but it was on his “Son of Schmillson” album in 1972.
“You’re breaking my heart
You’re tearing me apart
So F- you.”
We used to ask freshmen DJs to play it at our college radio station.
The first release of Kick Out The Jams by MC5 had the line:
Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!
That would have been, I believe, around 1968. Sudsequent pressings had a rather pathetic "Kick out the jams <click> brothers and sisters <click>!
Subsequent (arrrgh!) to my first post, I checked the year Kick Out The Jams was released; it was 1969.
Now I think I’ll check some Zappa…
As for as I know, The Fugs were the first band to really get away with raunchy lyrics, with songs like Boobs A Lot, Coca Cola Douche, among others (the lyrics are raunchier than the titles, but it’s been awhile since I listened to them and I can’t quite remember any right now). Anyway, that was back around 1965; they were basically a garage band, not very popular, but were known nationally.
I go with beatle from here Somehow, “motherfucker” is more jarring than words used by the Fugs on their first album in 1968
The Fugs possibly were the first to play national events and sing such lyrics as “river of shit”, but they didn’t get it on wax until they had been scooped by MC5.
Actually, in the song “Girl” by the Beatles (1965), John Lennon admitted that the background vocals in the bridge were actually the word “tit” repeated over and over. However, it’s pretty subtle until you actually listen for it.
Actually, that was their first album on a major label, but their very first album was The Fugs First Album, which came out in 1965. Their major label stuff was somewhat tamer than their earlier stuff. I can’t remember many lyrics offhand, but, for example, the song “Supergirl” starts off with “I wanna girl that can fuck like an angel…”
Would Mozart count? Mozart was a perverted little boy who had lyrics such as ‘I want to like your arse’, But these got changed pretty much instantly. Hopefully the link will work.
So was this too far back?
Lots of jazz and R&B songs had “coded” references to sex - slang terms that listeners easily understood but that outsiders wouldn’t. That may not be explicit enough for the purposes of this question, though.
Little Richard released “Good Golly Miss Molly” in the late ‘50s. “Sure like to ball” seems explicit enough to me, though it seems to have gone right over a lot of radio censors’ heads.
Collectors of 78’s may want to chime in here… There still exist “dirty” records from the 30’s through the 50’s on the “Kicks” and “Fun” labels. Some were just full of risque allusions, while others (like “The Secretary”) had so many “F” bombs and straightforward action narratives that they still couldn’t be played on the air today. To my knowledge, this woulld be the first time anyone said “fuck” on a record, although there were many instances of ethnic slurs going back on records much earlier; “Virginia Judge” and “Black Crows” come to mind —I believe they date from the early 20’s at the latest. And it was no big deal to describe jazz-like or otherwise upbeat music on the record label as a “Coon Song”.
well, IIRC the first song to achieve notirety for its content was “When I’m cleaning windows” by George Formby in the late 30’s. it didn’t have any “rude” words, but the themes and contect “shocked” the UK when it was released. also, IIRC, it was the first song banned by the BBC.
There have been a few compilations in recent years of raunchy Blues music from the 20s, 30s, and 40’s. I used to have a tape of one of them, but damned if I can remember the title. I do remember RAUNCHY lyrics, even by today’s standards. “we was fuckin all night, and then we fucked some more…”. If I can find the album I’m talking about, I’ll post a link. Can anyone help me out here? It on the “Roots n Blues” label, which as far as I can find does not even exist anymore. The album was called “Lollipops and xxxxxxx” (or something to that effect) – a really bad innuendo. “Lollipops and meat sticks” or “hot dogs and lollipops” – you get the idea.
:mad: I hate forgetting things.
Here are a few possible places to find hard -to-find music:
www.aonerecordfinders.com/request_gemm.html
From their archive page:
I have also had good luck on www.gemm.com whiere I foud the link to the above site.
Tudor and Elizabethan songs were known for their bawdy and downright obscene lyrics. But I assume you mean post-1960 songs?
Definitely, those “race” records of the 1920s and 30s were way out ahead in recording obscenity. Nobody else even comes close.
But what about the first time you heard it on the radio?
Could you have played those Fugs and MC5 songs in the 1960s without the FCC revoking your broadcast license? That was a real risk. George Carlin had a field day with his bit about the “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television.” When it was played on the radio, a guy heard it driving his son to school and raised holy hell over it.
I recall driving my car in 1976, listening to WMMS, and was astonished to hear Bob Dylan’s song “Hurricane” (recently made famous by the film of that name with Dylan’s song on the soundtrack), as he sang out over the airwaves:
and thinking, “Can they get away with that?”
A couple years later everybody was hearing Roger Daltrey asking the musical question “Who the fuck are you?”
Any radio examples prior to 1976? I bet there must be.
I guess the original post could have a lot of different answers depending on the original context: I suspect the question was about recorded music, since dirty songs have surely existed since time immemorial. I have a few CDs here of dirty 17th- and 18th-century songs, many of them truly vile, such as the one beginning
As Oyster Nan stood by her tub
To show her vicious inclination
She gave her noblest parts a scrub
And sighed for want of copulation…
That’s on Pills to Purge Melancholy: Lewd Songs and Low Ballads from the 18th Century (Saydisc, 1990); the best track on the CD is Henry Purcell’s “Young Collin, cleaving of a Beam”, which is a round that has polyphonic orgasmic cries in it. Purcell like Mozart liked writing off-colour stuff, causing no end of embarrassment to musicologists; there’s a good selection of his catches on Chansons de tavernes et de chapelles, performed by the Deller Consort; the music, even when the lyrics are as disgusting as in “Young John the Gardener”, is quite excellent.
In another context: in the rather repressed world of mid-century pop songs, it could be a game to see how much innuendo you could slip in. This was a world where Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale” could be unplayable on the radio. I know of one sly attempt at least to slip something by the radio networks: the distinguished songwriter Alec Wilder once wrote a tune called “If You See Kay”. The lyrics are quite innocent, but it took a while for radio announcers to twig to the title. --N
It’s all going to depend on what you consider `naughty’ of course. I mean, a lot of old blues tunes are loaded with double entendres, many of which cannot be read in any innocent way, and some of which were so commonly used that they might as well have been dirty words themselves. But the earliest recording of actual dirty words in lyrics that I’m familiar with is the Clovers’ Rotten Cocksucker’s Ball. But I’m not sure exactly what year that was. I’m thinking it was 1950.
Rhino has also put out a compilation called “Risque Rhythm: Nasty 50’s R&B” that contains some pretty suggestive stuff such as “It Ain’t the Meat” and “Sixty Minute Man”. Not exactly subtle, but I’ll have to re-listen to hear if there’s any actual swearing.
I doubt it was the first, but:
Jefferson Airplane, the Volunteers album, the song We Should be Together, the lyrics said: “Up against the wall, motherfucker.” It got a bit of air play, even back in 1969.
Tris