About a year ago, I was enjoying a search through photo archives, swimming in the warm, evocative feeling of captured digital beauty. You know, I was looking a tad upward while embracing an emerging sunrise when I took THIS photo. When I took THAT photo, I was basking in a spectacular, psychedelic sunset, watching as the descending sun cast prisms of muted light through a cloud-filled sky.
Then there’s the sheer, calming pleasure I derive catching both posed and candid photos of people, of places and of things, whether or not I’m called to a writing task. Sipping my evening tea, I was skimming through a particular set of still photos when my easy, breezy, butterfly thoughts took off in a shivering start, riding the tide of intermittent, screeching sine waves coming from the television.
The incessant, irritating series of high-pitched, WHITE NOISE (150 MHz sine wave) indicated foul language had been dubbed, rubbed and subbed to the point of distraction; commercials provided welcomed, linguistic relief.
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“Bleep, bleep! You bleep, bleeeep, ugly …bleep! Just bleeeeeeep it!”
Edging my way into the living room, I just HAD TO SEE what my dad was watching. The source of audible consternation was issuing from a wailing, thirty-something, bleary-eyed woman on the TV reality show, Operation Repo. If my 88-year-old dad couldn’t HEAR the woman’s choice discourse very well, he could certainly see a gesticulant, personified Tasmanian devil: long, frizzy, neon blue hair flying about her swinging arms, contrasting her monochromatic, deep green-colored chest and shoulder tattoos.
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“You bleep, bleep. You don’t know what you’re doin’, bleep, bleeep, takin’ my car right in front of my bleeep, bleeeppp, kids,” said the woman, bouncing off of the tow truck driver – FROY --who was poised to hitch and run with the compact car. Really, I empathized with the woman, on many counts and I could tell that FROY did too. But don’t mess around with his counterpart (and ex-wife), Sonia.
The cacophonous truth is that both the sine wave BLEEPING and profanity lose something in the translation of evocative reality and pop music lyrics. After my dad died last August, I recycled two TVs. I now subscribe to Netflix. I also listen to radio, but even some of the questionable lyrics to some pretty snappy tunes narrows my preference to s m o o t h j a z z, else I blurt expletives as part of a song playing in my head.
For example, I really like the tune by Mackelmore entitled: Thrift Store Feat. The video footage is satirical. The lyrics and music are pretty good UNTIL the artist peppers the song with thug-like profanity and gestures. Now that I think about it, profanity is profanity -- thug-like or all dolled up like a pig wearing lipstick.
From my own account of ever-evolving vocabulary (especially when I’m angry or frustrated), I’ve PRACTICED remaining silent in the face of…choosing my words…or none at all… until I can FIND SOMETHING calm and dignified to say. Once my statements issue forth, I can’t take them back. My vocabulary, name-calling, sarcasm, jokes, speech, written words, REFLECTS (like a searchlight) directly on me. I’m so FAR from remaining perfectly assured that a slip of my tongue will NEVER occur, I practice speaking in my head. I also practice apologizing, if need be.
I can hurl the very words I love to use as cutting, sarcastic weaponry -- sans the profanity. Therefore, I’m especially careful when I’m in a furious state of mind.
Have you ever conversed with someone who’s emphatic about something or someone, somewhere and four-letter words spring forth like raw sewage from an otherwise handsome or beautiful face? Or perhaps the F-bomb is replaced with a recognizable, less abrasive substitute, like: friggin’, which still sounds like the F-bomb. Really, it does.
For my eleventh birthday (1968), my parents issued formal permission, allowing me to wear white lipstick and black, fishnet stockings (all the rage) on occasion. In celebration, I hosted a slumber party, inviting a dozen of my BFFs. I had a phonograph and a collection of 45 rpm, vinyl records: Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross, Bobby Sherman, Freda Payne and David Cassidy – absolutely NO ELECTRIFIED ROCK N’ ROLL!
My friend, Bonnie, had an older, foxy brother named Richie, who drove her to the party in his bitchin’, loud, vibrating, metallic red, convertible Mustang. She’d borrowed his favorite Steppenwolf album: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steppenwolf_(band)
Actually, she’d smuggled it to the party in her pillowcase. Later in the evening, after all of the generic pizza-eating, cake scarfing and cosmetic ballyhoo --- WHEN we were certain we could hear my parents snoring --- Bonnie gathered all of us into a circle around the record player, gingerly removing the album from the graphic, Flight of the Sparrow, sleeve.
“Richie will kill me if he finds out I took this. He plays it all the time and I think….” Bonnie paused to whisper. “… I think there’s cussing in one of the songs.”
“Well, so what?” chimed Noreen. “My dad cusses all the time. So does my boyfriend, Pauly,” she said, so…woman-like, filing her fingernails.
“Really? You don’t have a boyfriend,” said Liz, a prima ballerina. “Pauly’s your next-door neighbor. He goes to Los Altos High School because he’s on the VARSITY water polo team,” Liz emphasized, blowing and popping the purple bubble gum in her mouth. “You’re just a sixth-grader sprouting boobalas, as my grandma would say.”
“Shut-up, you guys. I think the song is called, ‘The Pusher’,” said Bonnie, carefully placing the album on the turn table.
“My Auntie Claire works for some radio station in New York. She says noooo cussing is allowed on the radio or on TV,” Sheryl offered authoritatively, as if the statement alone would preempt any such thing recorded on the album.
In those days, we had to count the lines on the album according to the songs listed on the label. Song number eight: The Pusher. Count eight lines holding the phonograph’s arm with the needle to place at the exact spot. Scratchy noise momentarily ensued.
“Sssshhhhhh. Listen,” Bonnie instructed, checking volume so as not to cue my parents as to what we were knowingly about to hear: hippie dudes playing hard rock music and singing REALLY BAD WORDS http://youtu.be/M6TvaItYu_M
Take note of the YouTube link (bearing the song) above in that the youthful faces don’t appear a day over 20 years old. In the video, a later album cover shows that SOMETHING’S DIFFERENT about each member of the band. I don’t know what IT is, though.
“Did we hear it right?” I asked my friends, because the moment the singer cursed the Pusher Man, we gasped and giggled, drowning out the music. We repetitively played the song for an hour. We didn’t even know what a Pusher Man was, neither the implication of the dark lyrics. We’d never before HEARD cusswords on our records.
Metaphors and colloquialisms have always had a place in poetry, in music, in literature, in writing. I suppose profanity EMPHASIZES all kinds of things, thoughts, conversation, but its use wholly contaminates a clear point -- the statement one is trying to convey. Its use is also very contagious and knows no bounds. I know this to be true.
Maternal radar is a psychic gift and shouldn’t be underestimated --- EVER. The day after my slumber party, my mom gently asked me what kind of music we had been listening to.
“Uuuuummm, you know…whatever records I have here,” I answered, coyly.
“Okay,” she said, looking directly and lovingly into my eyes. Seconds later, I fessed up. My mom didn’t subscribe to blame or anger; she didn’t even forbid me to listen to rock music.
“You’ll know good, right and true because you’ll FEEL good, right and true to yourself and to others,” she said. “You can decide these things, but I’m always here to guide you. Did Bonnie give the album back to Richie?”
“Yeah,” I answered. Aaargh! How’d she know?
“If I ever hear you use bad words, you’ll be in bad trouble,” my mom said. Trouble is as trouble does, left for another vignette on another day.
