Abstract: As a signifier, motherfucker, which had heretofore been used to denote a specified and mutually-acknowledged (between speaker/writer and reader/audience) referent, has in recent years suffered a diminution of meaning as people been using the motherfucker in ambiguous fucking contexts.
The celebrated places and objects of this decade often find themselves described as motherfuckers. An artist attempting to excite his fans advertises “Brand New Motherfucking Music!” A fan who viewed Stars Wars: The Force Awakens posts online that he “enjoyed the shit out of that motherfucker.” A young man tells his good friends upon arriving at their crib, “Droopy-Gee in da house, motherfuckers.”
However, the linguistic fate of this formerly vivid concept demands a closer examination.
In Ice Cube’s seminal “We Had To Tear This Motherfucka (sic) Up,” (1992) the motherfucker referred to, though not named, is undoubtedly Los Angeles, or the parts of it within reach after the ”Not Guilty” verdicts in the Rodney King police beating trial. It is harrowingly depicted as a motherfucker truly worthy of tearing up.
When Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules Winnfield asks Brett in Pulp Fiction (1994), “English, motherfucker, do you speak it?” the referent, Brett, who has repeatedly and inexplicably ignored the admonition not to say “what” one more motherfucking time (and who has, we later learn, treated Marsellus Wallace like a bitch), is clear.
Even a decade later, when Mr. Jackson says he’s had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane, the antecedents are patent; we have seen the plane, we had seen the motherfucking snakes.
In 2005, songwriter Martha Wainright, in the plaintive “Bloody Motherfucking Asshole,” is candidly upset with the lyrics’ target, her father, Loudon Wainwright III. The word has weight, impact.
But in the current decade, motherfuckers referred to in song, cinema and art have become harder to pin down, a confusion fed by a creeping vagueness in the concept of “motherfucker” itself.
In a contemplative pictorial meme, Winnie the Pooh asks Piglet what day it is. The two friends sit on a section of log. Piglet squeals in reply, “It’s the day we burn this motherfucker to the ground.” (Internet, 2016)
No motherfucker is specified. Is it the log Piglet and Pooh are sitting on? No, the log is already on the ground, albeit not burnt and therefore, one may infer, burnable. Is the motherfucker the idyllic 100 Acre Wood? If so, why would it be a good or admirable thing to set it on fire? Was Roo beaten to within an inch of his life by Christopher Robin for leading him on a high-speed chase? There’s no indication this is so.
Consider Mark Ronson’s song “Feel Right” (feat. Mystikal, 2015). Ronson raps, “Feel right in this motherfucker, feel good in this motherfucker.” And later we learn, “My whole hood in this motherfucker.”
Is the motherfucker a building (one pictures a dance hall) containing his whole hood? Why, with all of one’s companions in a congenial space, would that space be a motherfucker?
Listen to The Game’s “Married To The Game” (2014):
Sittin’ on a hill son, carrying this motherfucker
Red guts, popped a cherry in this motherfucker
I got that White boy, Barry, in this motherfucker
Is the motherfucker in The Game’s case a favorite weapon (“carrying this…”) or a vehicle (“popped a cherry in this...”)? If so, why the expletive?
One can, with very little difficulty, picture snakes as being motherfuckers. The same with a justice system that has scorned evidence and exonerated the guilty. But why should a room/nightclub in which one feels good and feels right, or a comfortable car with Barry White playing on its presumably expensive stereo, be a motherfucker? Suddenly, the act, the object, is unequal to the indictment. The listener is no longer confident that he or she can picture the actual motherfucker.
This is a recent complaint. One tries in vain to imagine Gary Lewis singing, “This motherfucker doesn’t shine for me any more,” (Liberty Records, 1965), or the Drifters warbling “This Motherfucking Moment” (Atlantic, 1960). The diamond and the moment were admirable, beloved, reasons for living, for celebration.
What, then, is one to make of a Facebook friend captioning a photograph, “Home fries, motherfuckers!”
A turning point in the loss of motherfucking meaning may be traced to the party song “The Roof Is On Fire,” (Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic Three, 1984), late in which (4:20), the rowdy celebrants chorus:
The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire
We don’t need no water,
Let the motherfucker burn.
Once the singers have specified “the” roof, not “a” roof, listeners in the mid 1980s realized with a jolt that they were cheering the destruction (by fire, cf. Piglet) of the roof over their own heads.
In its time, this recklessness was invigorating. Scott’s version went to #5 on the Billboard Hot Dance Music/Maxi Singles sales charts; a lively, spunky curiosity. Only a decade later, when the sentiment was covered and sampled (Bloodhound Gang, 1996; Coal Chamber, 1997; Bizzy Bone, 1998; The Chemical Brothers, 1999), amplified and repeated, did it become a cultural commonplace, to the point of eliciting a parody in The Onion and in film scenes about excitable partyers ignoring the peril of real conflagrations.
But what realignment of affect drives these contemporary partyers? Ice Cube’s 1992 urban listeners imagined venting righteous anger on a city that had betrayed them. Jules Winnfield wanted the motherfucker Brett to stop saying “what.” Whence now this rhetorical fury from men and women enjoying their movies, their club music, their cars, guns and Instagrammed potato dishes? Has the rage become the purpose and subject? Lacking a spark, has it begun to feast on its own bad self?
It may profitably be asked, if we call our homes and nightclubs and online friends motherfuckers, what is there to do when we encounter real motherfuckers in the world? When the #1 translation for “turn this mother out” on WikiAnswers is “to totally rock some shit” (the shit rocked being left as unspecified as the mother turned), things have truly fallen apart, the motherfucker cannot hold.
One notes with some relief that cocksucker has not experienced a comparable dilution of meaning, referring today, as it did three decades ago, to persons and things best avoided because they are, at root, total cocksuckers.
But one hopes the foregoing will serve as a cautionary note to those seeking to press the stamp of the new into old clay: abandon meaning at your peril, for you will be defined in later years by the terms you allow, and payback is a motherfucker.
Next week: “Turning a bitch out” – no longer just for hoes?
Photo by Amy
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