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  The Mother of All Inventions

  Frank Zappa was rock music’s closest equivalent to comedian Lenny Bruce: effortlessly fluent and inventive with words and music, and seized with the irresistible desire to provoke and poke fun at all forms of received wisdom and recognised authority. When his 1964 garage band The Soul Giants mutated into something approaching commercial form (albeit only in a twisted universe), he required a more distinctive and compelling name for his fiendish crew.

  The result? The Mothers, which (in a precursor of country stars calling themselves outlaws and rappers claiming the title of gangsta) not only accepted all the random insults that their (for 1965) outlandish appearance and abrasive style were likely to provoke, but trumped them. It was an era when record companies no longer understood what the children of America wanted to hear, or indeed why, and so they were prepared to take risks that would have been unimaginable even a year earlier. Hence the contract offered to Zappa’s crew by Verve Records, conditional on one demand: that Zappa change their name from the Mothers (which, it was clear even to a company executive, was intended to be an abbreviation for Motherfuckers).

  Five years later, with fame and a degree of wealth under his belt, Zappa would probably have told Verve to ‘mother off’. But the prospect of widespread distribution for his uncompromising art was impossible to dismiss, and so he turned for inspiration in his necessity to the dictionary of proverbs – and recalled that necessity was, after all, the mother of invention. Which is why it was the Mothers of Invention who released rock’s first double-record set in 1966, only resuming their original title again in 1971, by which time Zappa and the Mothers were more famous than the word ‘motherfucker’, and their name signified only success, not obscenity.

  Can You Hear Me, Mother?

  A Glossary of M/F-ing Euphemisms

  No matter how much you love your mum, it’s not always safe to tell the world about it – particularly if you’re trying to show an X-rated movie on prime-time TV. Some of the following replacements might prove useful.

  LITTLE SUCKER: from the tame redubbing of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack broadcast on television.

  MONKEY-FIGHTING: ‘I have had it with these monkey-fighting snakes …’

  MONDAY TO FRIDAY: ‘… on this Monday to Friday plane.’ Samuel L. Jackson, as edited for US television viewers.

  MOTHER: simple, basic, but open to misinterpretation, especially at home.

  MOTHERBEATING: compare ‘beating the meat’, not ‘beating (by) your mother’.

  MOTHERBUGGER: a News of the World journalist goes home for the weekend.

  MOTHERCHUCKER: has an allergic stomach reaction to the very idea.

  MOTHERCHUGGER: asks his mom to support a charity.

  MOTHEREATING: not really helping matters: compare MOTHERSUCKER.

  MOTHEREFFER: who are you calling a cow, son?

  MOTHEREM: Rotherham’s red light district.

  MOTHERFEELING: the Oedipal version of foreplay.

  MOTHERFERYER: obscure, until you compare the song title, ‘A Real Mother For Ya’.

  MOTHERFLICKER: the flicker is a bird from North America.

  MOTHERFLUGER: ingenious substitute heard in the TV version of the movie Heartbreak Ridge.

  MOTHERFLUNKER: she failed her Mom exam.

  MOTHERFOULER: as used by distinguished novelist Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man; makes sex sound strangely dirty.

  MOTHERFRIGGER: that’s ‘frig’ in the copulatory rather than masturbatory sense, of course.

  MOTHERFUGGER: Norman Mailer’s father.

  MOTHERFUNKER: as two words, the title of a beer brewed in California.

  MOTHERFUYER: see MOTHERFERYER.

  MOTHERGRABBER: another literary euphemism from the Sixties; immortalised in the song title ‘Temporary Mother Grabber’.

  MOTHERHOPPER: an offspring of MOTHERJUMPER, with no direct sexual meaning.

  MOTHERHUBBER: another ‘clever’ piece of censorship of a Hollywood movie for US TV: Pulp Fiction again.

  MOTHER HUBBARD: as utilised by John Lennon on his Imagine album; from the nursery rhyme, obviously.

  MOTHERHUGGER: like a treehugger, but closer to home.

  MOTHERHUMPER: as used by rock’n’roll star Jerry Lee Lewis in almost every song he’s performed on stage since the 1970s.

  MOTHERING: what mothers do, in every sense of the word.

  MOTHERJIVER: extending the ‘mess-with-people’s-heads’ strand of the F-word.

  MOTHERJUMPER: that’s ‘jump’ as in the charming phrase, ‘I’d like to jump your bones’; several degrees more sexual than MOTHERHOPPER, in other words.

  MOTHERLOVER: direct and to the point, yet at the same time less direct than the full M/F. Who doesn’t love their mum?

  MOTHERLUMPER: for the person too shy to say MOTHERHUMPER.

  MOTHEROO: only suitable if you’re dressed in baby clothes.

  MOTHERPLUGGER: another overt sexual euphemism: plugging the gap, male or female.

  MOTHERRAMMING: and they say romance is dead.

  MOTHERRAPER: a subtlety-free zone, imposing force on an act that might otherwise have been consensual.

  MOTHERRUBBER: at least she won’t get pregnant.

  MOTHERSUCKER: a euphemism that isn’t much of a euphemism at all, but merely varies the plan of attack.

  MOTORCYCLE: usually a ‘bad motorcycle’, as in the minor Sixties hit of that name: ‘I knew by the way he spoke, he was a bad motorcycle.’

  MOTORSCOOTER: as above, but cheaper and easier to control.

  MR FALCON: an ingenious TV substitution for a Bruce Willis expletive in Die Hard 2.

  Up Against the Wall, Mother!

  It was the day after the Woodstock rock festival in August 1969, and talk show host Dick Cavett – a groovy but hardly hippie 32-year-old – had invited survivors of the festival onto his prime-time ABC-TV programme. Members of Crosby, Stills and Nash and Jefferson Airplane mingled with fans who had made the muddy journey back from Max Yasgur’s farm to the heart of Manhattan, and performed material they had aired in front of hundreds of thousands of people that weekend.

  Premiered during the show was a Jefferson Airplane song that had already, three months before its release on their Volunteers album, raised the hackles of their record company. ‘We Can Be Together’ was nothing less than a radical manifesto of revolt against the system, substantially based on a text from an underground newspaper. At the heart of its rousing chorus was a phrase familiar to the counter-culture, but never aired before in the mainstream: ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker’. Perhaps because the song was new, and therefore unfamiliar to both the host and his production team, or because only those under the age of thirty could decipher the Airplane’s lyrics with ease, their live performance continued without hindrance and censorship. Which makes vocalist Grace Slick the first person, as far as anyone knows, to have spoken or sung the F-word on American network TV.

  But where was this wall, and why was the mysterious motherfucker being told to get up against it? Several months earlier, exactly the same phrase had formed the battle cry of the MC5’s song ‘Kick Out the Jams’, recorded live in concert in October 1968. Once again, there was alarm at the record label, who insisted that before they would release the song as a single, the MC5 should re-record the offending line as ‘Kick out the jams, brothers and sisters’. The band were managed by John Sinclair, a political revolutionary from Ann Arbor, Michigan, whose White Panther Party proposed a simple manifesto involving ‘total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and roll, dope and fucking in the streets’. They in turn borrowed the ‘up against the wall’ slogan from their brothers in the Black Panther Party; but it didn’t originate with them.

  Earlier in 1968, a group of anarchist revolutionaries in New York City had taken to signing off their pamphlets and press releases with a defiant ‘Up against the wall/Motherfucker’. As that was usually the only identification on their literature – bar an occasional reference
to the ‘International Werewolf Conspiracy’ – the group became known by that slogan, or as the Motherfuckers for short. The anarchists had previously been known as Black Mask, and their leader, Ben Morea, has since explained that they never intended to be known as the Motherfuckers, but rather operated as ‘The Family’ (though that name never appeared on any statements they issued).

  That spring, ‘Up against the wall motherfucker’ was seen as graffiti on the walls of American colleges, where student protests against oppression and the Vietnam War were rife. Student leader Mark Rudd even delivered the phrase in an open letter to the President of Columbia University in New York. And it was Rudd who let slip the ultimate source for this most durable piece of late Sixties radical rhetoric: a poem by the militant poet and playwright LeRoi Jones (who adopted the name Amiri Baraka in 1967).

  ‘Black People’ was not a poem in the conventional sense, but a prose monologue operating as a rallying cry for Baraka’s fellow African Americans. It juxtaposed white Americans, who owned property and artefacts, with their black counterparts who had nothing: ‘Money don’t grow on trees no way, only whitey’s got it, makes it with a machine, to control you, you can’t steal nothing from a white man, he’s already stole it, he owes you anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall motherfucker this is a stick-up!’ The poem climaxes with a stark yell of rebellion: ‘We must make our own World, man, our own world, and we can not do this unless the white man is dead.’ So that was the wall, the wall against which the firing squad traditionally places its victim; and the white race was the ‘motherfucker’, destined to take its place before the gun as recompense for its crimes. No sex in this definition, then, but plenty of violence.

  Movies for Mother’s Day

  BANANA MOTHERFUCKER (Portugal, 2011): sixteen minutes of comic shenanigans, based around the premise that the deadliest weapon in the world is a banana. Don’t miss the scene based on John Hurt’s stomach cramps in Alien.

  COLONEL KILL MOTHERFUCKERS (US, 2008): ‘Revenge is a motherfucker’ is the strapline for this comedy horror outing. Set in ‘the peaceful town of Strangeville’, it is a cavalcade of over-acting and non-existent effects, shot on a budget so low that you’d put your back out trying to pick it up off the floor. Best seen if you satisfy all the following criteria: (a) you’re under 30; (b) you’re, like, totally wasted; (c) you’re one of the cast.

  MERRY CHRISTMAS, MOTHERFUCKER (Italy, 2005): What is it about the M/F that brings out the horror psychos? It’s Christmas, and a guy who doesn’t believe in Santa Claus kills and eats Santa’s Little Helper (not to be confused with Bart Simpson’s dog). This ten-minute drama was issued on a compilation DVD with such equally enticing shorts as The Lick-It Man, Teenage Bikini Vampire, and Revenge of the Killer Meat. Tasty.

  MOTHERFUCKER: A MOVIE (US, 2007): The changing face of a horrendously hip bunch of Manhattan ‘underground’ socialites, musos, and performance artists, as documented in a movie that is even less fun than attending one of their parties. Worth keeping in the closet in case you have a house guest who won’t leave.

  Embarrassments

  Holy Cock-Up, Batman!

  In the days before the computer and the mobile phone rendered the rest of the world too boring for kids to tolerate, fresh-faced youngsters devoted their time and their parents’ small change to the healthy pursuit of collecting trading cards – from boxes of cigarettes (not quite so healthy) or sugary cereals, packs of bubble-gum, or simply shrink-wrapped sets of the cards themselves. Children would attempt to complete the set, by any means necessary, frequently stooping to petty violence and other forms of criminality to persuade little Johnny in Year 2 to hand over the last remaining card required to fill their album.

  It was an innocent enough pleasure, providing you overlooked the violence, the theft, and the manufacturers’ clever ruse of limiting the supply of a couple of the cards in each set, ensuring that desperate completists were forced to buy more and more boxes and packs in vain pursuit of their grail. And if you also ignore those ultra-violent sets of cards portraying Nazi war crimes and other atrocities that provoked tabloid press outrage, and prompted schools to institute full-body searches to ensure that no five-year-olds entered the playground with an illicit Mickey Mouse card concealed about their person.

  Life proceeded quite smoothly in this way until 1989, when US baseball player Bill Ripken, an infielder with the Baltimore Orioles, posed for his slice of trading card immortality with his bat raised over his right shoulder. This exposed what Americans call the ‘knob’ of the bat, on which were clearly scrawled two words: ‘FUCK FACE’.

  It beggars belief that even in a semi-industrial business like the American trading card racket, nobody at the publishers noticed this unseemly addition to Ripken’s uniform. But the photo was printed, and the card was issued – and suddenly Ripken was more famous for his bat than his batting. Quizzed by a scandal-hungry media for an explanation, he immediately fingered his team-mates: ‘It appears I was targeted. I know I’m kind of a jerk at times. I know I’m a little off. But this is going too far.’

  The publishers worked overtime to withdraw and censor the offending cards, though not before many thousands had been sold. The brouhaha sent demand for the ‘FUCK FACE’ card soaring, and prices with it; inevitably triggering turf wars, more criminality, and heartbreaking stories about first-grade kids being tricked out of their priceless heirlooms by unscrupulous 10-year-olds. To this day, an entertaining website (billripken.com) exists, to track all the variations of Ripken’s card in circulation, and offer some amusing artefacts in a similar vein – cards devoted to such unlikely baseball stars as Dick Pole and Rusty Kuntz, for example.

  Finally, almost twenty years after Ripken’s believe-it-or-not explanation of his mishap, the infielder came clean: he HAD, after all, written ‘FUCK FACE’ on the end of his bat, but only so he would be able to recognise his practice bat if he needed it in a hurry, and it was standing in a crowd of other bats, and he didn’t realise until the picture came out … yeah, right. Still ‘a little off’, Bill …

  I’m Still Swearing

  There are four letters in ‘John’, and four letters in most of the words that escape from the mouth of Elton of that ilk when he embarks on one of his legendary tiara-tossing tantrums. A particularly magnificent example of the species circulates among fans, in the shape of the video feed from a 1992 concert in Argentina. A minor malfunction on his electric piano gradually assumes such monumental proportions that Elton is eventually forced to perform while simultaneously subjecting one of his roadies to the mother of all tirades.

  Elton was in an altogether calmer mood in January 2011, when he appeared on Chris Evans’s Radio 2 breakfast show. Evans (himself no stranger to moments of on-air madness) must have felt that he was on safe territory when he asked his guest how often he played the piano. To help the conversation along, he told Elton that their mutual friend Jools Holland regularly leapt out of bed in the morning in his eagerness to lay his hands on his instrument. ‘Oh, fucking hell,’ Elton retorted, as if he’d just been asked whether it was true that he regularly fried new-born kittens for his breakfast. ‘No, no, no,’ cried his panic-stricken host, ‘we must apologise.’ And so Elton did, in terms that implied that although he had used a naughty word, anyone would have done the same if they’d been asked whether they approached their piano before they’d devoured their freshly fried kittens. After which there was only one song that Chris Evans could play: ‘Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word’.

  Licence to Ball

  The phrase ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ was first applied to the poet Lord Byron, by Lady Caroline Lamb – who overcame this initial judgement of the swaggering young lothario to begin a tempestuous affair with him a few weeks later. But if Lady Caroline had been alive 150 years earlier, she could easily have decided that another poet merited the description even more: John Wilmot, the second Earl o
f Rochester. He was not only a central member of the ‘Ballers’, who sound like the seventeenth-century equivalent of the Bullingdon Club, prone to drunken revels, public brawls and screwing up the NHS; he also did his best to widen the vocabulary of English literature.

  Certainly nobody before him – or for several centuries after – boasted such a long and virile sexual licence. Rochester (as we historians of the poetic art call him) was determined to give his work an immediacy that none of his peers could equal, employing the language of the gentleman (in private) and the common man (in his gutter) as his tool. Yet it is hard to resist the conclusion that the thrust of his poetic impulse was guided as much by his sheer pleasure in being a very naughty boy, as by his striving to erect a fresh pedestal for his art.

  The future Earl was born on April Fools’ Day 1647, into a land scarred by the mortal battle between the Puritans and the loyal Royalists commanded by King Charles. The monarch was separated from his head two years later, but Rochester’s father continued to fight valiantly in the cause of the young man who would eventually be crowned Charles II. Such loyalty did not go unrecognised: when the first Earl died in 1659, and John Wilmot assumed the title, Charles vowed to watch over the lad and safeguard him from those of evil intent.

  By his early twenties, Rochester was already demonstrating a peculiar facility for verse – and especially for verse that flouted the conventions of public discourse. As a result, his work was familiar only to those who heard it read aloud by its author, or who devoured the handwritten copies that were circulated among the aristocracy and intelligentsia of Charles II’s court. None of his most daring work was published in his lifetime, and even after his death, his works were collected overseas rather than in London, where no respectable publisher could put his name to such risqué material.