The soul singer Cee-Lo Green has a new album coming out. How's this for art: His first desperate single is titled "F—- You."...The entire song is obscene. It's stuffed with 16 uses of the F-bomb in under four minutes, erupting on average once every 14 seconds. It also has 10 uses of the S-word, and even two uses of "nigga." (Don't tell Dr. Laura Schlessinger.)
As Cee-Lo says, "ain't that some shit."
It's touching that Brent Bozell is only concerned about Laura Schlessinger's use of the word "nigger" now that it can be used as an insult at an actual black person (Cee-Lo is gloriously R&B-singer-black). Also, his song "Fuck You" is glorious. It is absolutely the song of the summer, something that Bozell says only makes the song worse: "The fact that the song is catchy and bright only heightens the offense. It's a Motown melody inserted into a manure pile."
The only appropriate response to Bozell is, of course, "Fuck you." The obviousness of this response in no way should reduce its necessity. If I were not so into the brevity--it being the soul of wit and all--I would expand it into the gleefully profane response from last year's In The Loop: "I've come across a lot of psychos, but none as fucking boring as you. You are a real boring fuck. Sorry, sorry, I know you disapprove of swearing so I'll sort that out. You are a boring F, star, star, cunt."
Pardon my language (the guy in In The Loop is British, so it's not as bad as it reads on the page). Language scolds who wish they could be more racist just make me pissy, As we saw with Laura Schlessinger, they divide into two camps: the first, who decries all the rudeness in the world and just wishes that people would go back to their 1950s world where anyone who swore was pushed out of polite society, and the second, people who just wondering why Cee-Lo gets to say "nigger" but they get in trouble when they do. You go into the comments on that Bozell piece and you get a bunch of people who are still angry that Imus got in trouble for saying "nappy headed hos."
These are people who don't understand the power of words--how words mean different things when different people use them. Personally, I think you should be allowed to say almost anything. I think we should be allowed to talk about the use of profanity without having to be children saying "the F word" and "the N word" and "the π word." I have to be careful about this, because I realize that being a straight white guy, insisting I can say racial, sexist, and homophobic slurs without being a racist, a sexist, or a homophobe is a complicated position that people can misunderstand. However, the problem with these people--that is, Bozell, Schlessinger, Beck, Coulter, and other shitheads like that--is that they mean these things when they say them. They don't want to just say these words. They want to call people these words, which, as long as we're using British slang here, makes them total gobshites.
Regardless, when Cee-Lo sings "fuck you. oo ooo oooo!" it is glorious. The song is sung primarily to the guy who stole his girl by being richer than him, is filled with a wonderful sublimated anger at the woman who left him. He can't quite express his anger at the girl directly--perfectly expressing the pain of anyone who's been left who blames the guy rather than the girl doing the leaving. It's hard to hate the person you loved, even when it is totally their fault, and so you blame the person they're with now. Occasionally, the song lapses into addressing the woman directly, culminating into a wonderful wail of "I still love you," which quickly subsides back into anger at the cuckolder. The song is catchy and wonderful and deep in ways beyond how any pop song needs to be. It's a shame that the radio edit will change it only to "Forget You."
Moralistic fucksticks like Brent Bozell miss out on shit like this. Their humorlessness leads them to unsatisfying lives with pitched angry faces--they can see how everyone else is enjoying life so much more than them, and it makes them angry. Rather than trying to enjoy it themselves, though, they just work to make everyone's lives incrementally worse. Calling other people names, demanding that they turn down their jungle music, or just pissing and moaning--these are the only weapons they have.
