Skip Navigation

Data is Beautiful @mander.xyz

Blaze @reddthat.com

5 mo. ago • 96%

When the fuck did we start singing "shit"?

Source: https://chrisdallariva.substack.com/p/when-the-fck-did-we-start-singing

40 comments

I'm gonna focus on listening to piss songs, it's a disappearing genre that needs to regain popularity.

54
- Golden age seems to be in the late 2000s, curious to see who was the cause
  
  23
  
  golden
  
  I need to shower after reading this...
  
  21
  
  … a girl I dated had a dog who peed on people, the dog was named R Kelly.
  
  Probably unrelated.
  
  4
  
  Blink-182
  
  3
- It's wrong that the piss graph is not yellow.
  
  9
- Hey if youre looking for fart and poop rap, better catch Ice Spice before her album flops and everyone moves on ...
  
  5
  
  Thanks for the tip!
  
  1
- ... But shit, it was 99 cents!
  
  4
Wait... Mr Hanky was introduced in 1997. Don't you tell me that is just a coincidence!

19
- Shut your fucking face, uncle fucker
  
  21
  
  You’re the one who fucked your uncle, uncle fucker!
  
  14
I have some fun etymological trivia related to that.

Late Proto-Indo-European had a root typically reconstructed as *kakka-. It means "to shit" or "shit". It's imitative in nature so not exactly a "fancy" word, right off the bat; more like a "child-friendly vulgarism".

That root is still present in Armenian (k'ak'), Russian (kakat'), Lithuanian (kaka), the Romance languages (cacare/cagar/etc.), the Iranian languages (kaka/kakā/kake/etc.), and other Indo-European languages. Still ranging from childish to vulgar.

A word that stops being used is not inherited. If that root was inherited by so many languages, it means that it kept being used, from ~five millenniums ago to now.

Obligatory musical reference: this goliardic song. "Oh, how beautiful it is, to shit [cagar] in the mountain, where the grass tickles you in the hole of the butt". It's just keeping up with a 5000yo tradition.

16
- Thank you, as always
  
  6
  
  Side note/off-topic: I'm glad to see that this comm grew really fast!
  
  3
- And for some reason, "kakka" is de facto word for excrement in Finnish, which is from the Uralic family.
  
  It is very weird seeing it here, because it's like THE word.
  
  kakka is more like "poop" and the rougher word "shit" has a different word (paska[Learning about the homophone-y Pascal is always a knee-slapper])
  
  2
  
  I think that it's a parallel development. It's unlikely to be a borrowing from some PIE descendant because
  
  Proto-Germanic shifted PIE *k into *h (Grimm's Law), so the word would end as *hahha. Plus a direct descendant of the word isn't even attested in Germanic languages [see note].
  
  Proto-Balto-Slavic and its descendants show a single consonant in that word, as PBS *kākā́ˀtei (see Latvian kakāt, Russian какать/kakat'). The result would be *kaka or *kakaa. (A double consonant often becomes single, but the opposite is rarely true.)
  
  *NOTE: before someone mentions German "kacken", it's likely a borrowing from Latin "cacō" I shit. Now that's some borrowed shit!
  
  2
Curious about pussy...

16
- Aren't we all?
  
  21
- I was too! But somewhere between 1975 - 2000 that sorted itself out ;-)
  
  12
- 2LiveCrew was my first
  
  5
Cant wait for the rise of piss songs!!

13
does it corelate with how you consume music? i'd guess swearing becomes more common when you can wear earphones and not blasting it to the whole house from your living room gramophone

11
- The guy at the gas station blasting his shitty rap music begs to differ
  
  2
Seems like a bad graph? It feels like there is an obvious sudden upward trend sometime before 2000, the most important trend on the graph, and you cant tell what year it starts! Could be 80's could be 90's. Idk maybe I'm missing something or lacking some graph display info.

9
- I think the graph runs from 1950 to 2025, with gridlines every 25 years. The upward trend looks to be around 3/5ths of the way between 1975 and 2000, which would be around 1990.
  
  1
It looks like hell took a dive right around 2020. I like to think the music industry collectively said "there's enough hell in the real world right now so let's sing about nicer things"

6
Well. I blame grunge rock and alternative. Prove me wrong ;-)

4
Seems like it exploded more and more as physical releases with "parental advisory" stickers became less prevalent. But I think its also part of a broader trend as the internet has completely desensitized people.

3
There seems to be a correlation between Ass and Fuck for awhile. But then we see an upward trend of Shit following behind Fuck and Ass. Once we start seeing Shit become more pronounced, we see a temporary decrease in Fuck followed by a recovery and an large increase in Fuck while Ass doesn't see a corresponding increase.

What does it mean?

3
I was hoping there'd be one that was somehow there the whole time.

2
Tom Cardy

1
I’m actually impressed that hell and damn are so low.

1
Strange how it tracks with the quality of music according to my social circles.

Maybe profanity is a symptom of a lack of imagination, not only in discourse, but in song as well.

-4
- Mozart enjoyed Scatological humor and even wrote a piece with a title that translates to "lick my asshole"
  
  3

You've viewed 40 comments.