The Fuck-You
Lineage

On the twentieth of November, 1955, Ed Sullivan booked Bo Diddley to sing “Sixteen Tons.” This was the fastest-selling record in the country that fall, a coal-mining lament by Tennessee Ernie Ford (a name that will mean something to about nine of you, and I salute you), and the plan was that a Black man from Chicago with a rectangular guitar would perform the white hit of the season on the biggest stage on television.¹ What came out of the speakers instead was “Bo Diddley.” The Sullivan show’s own website tells the story two ways, which I appreciate: in one version he told the bandleader before the cameras rolled that he’d be playing his own song, thanks; in the other he misread the cue card, which said BO DIDDLEY / SIXTEEN TONS, and played both, in that order.² Either way he was cut off, and either way Sullivan banned him from the show, reportedly telling him he wouldn’t last six months. He lasted another fifty-two years. He also sold his song rights early and said for the rest of his life that nobody ever paid him.³

I want to start there and not with Kurt Cobain, because Diddley is the cleanest specimen of the thing this piece is about. Not a hairstyle, not an attitude, not the vague and portable anti-establishment posture that gets sold back to us every eighteen months with a new font. A specific man, a specific song, a specific instruction, declined in front of the largest audience in the country. The refusal had an address on it. And the address was not a church or a senator. It was a cue card.

Here is the argument, and then here is the part where I admit what I don’t know. For most of the twentieth century, American rock and the blues it came out of carried a defiance you could point at — a “fuck you” with a return address — and the address was almost never a moral authority. It was the machinery. A record catalog. A jukebox route. A cover-version license. A television camera. A department store’s record department. A service fee. The pulpit got the sermon; the loading dock got the fight. Nirvana sits at the end of this line as its best-timed peak: not the loudest refusal and not the first, but the one that happened at the exact moment of maximum distribution, aimed at a target nobody before them had the nerve to name. The rest of this is the receipts.

What I’m not claiming: that any of these people were strategists. Most were broke and improvising and would have taken the money, and several of them did. I am not a musicologist. I am a guy with a spreadsheet, fifty-seven acts, twenty-four earlier beats, and a rule that every date in here links to something you can check. Where the good story isn’t true I say so, because the good stories in this subject are mostly not true, and a reader who catches one fake will stop believing the real ones. (See CROSSROADS, below.)

The word for the ghetto was “race records,” and Okeh coined it in 1922 as a marketing term.⁴ What it meant in practice was a separate catalog, a separate sales force, a separate set of stores, and a ceiling: you could be the highest-paid Black entertainer in America, which Bessie Smith was, and still be sold through a channel built to keep you off the other chart.⁵ Ma Rainey sang open desire for women to Black audiences and Paramount put it in the ad, with a cop watching from the corner of the illustration.⁶ Lead Belly got refused a room in Washington, D.C., in June 1937 and put the capital of the United States on trial in twelve bars.⁷ Billie Holiday asked Columbia to record “Strange Fruit” in 1939 and Columbia said no, out loud, because of Southern retailers and CBS affiliates — a corporation stating its reason for the record — so she cut it for Commodore on April 20 and it became her biggest seller.⁸ None of this was aimed at the sheriff. It was aimed at whoever decided what got pressed, shipped and played.

Then the fifties arrived and the machinery got a new part: the cover. Big Joe Turner cut “Shake, Rattle and Roll” for Atlantic in February 1954 and took it to No. 1 on the R&B chart and No. 22 pop. Bill Haley re-cut it four months later with the lyrics laundered, took it to No. 7 pop and sold a million.⁹ Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” spent seven weeks at No. 1 R&B in 1953 and sold, by her label’s estimate, somewhere north of half a million; she said she saw one check, for $500, and never saw another.¹⁰ Pat Boone’s “Tutti Frutti” charted at No. 12 in February 1956, five places above Little Richard’s, whose original lyric had already been rewritten into nonsense syllables by a songwriter named Dorothy LaBostrie because the first draft could not be printed.¹¹ The most famous syllables in rock and roll are a redaction.

I could keep going — I have a table, it goes on for a while — but notice what the objection was. When stations refused Link Wray’s “Rumble” in 1958, it had no words. It was an instrumental that sounded like a threat, and Dick Clark introduced it on Bandstand without saying the title.¹² When the FBI looked into “Louie Louie” in 1964, the Bureau spent February to May on it and concluded the record was unintelligible at any speed.¹³ The censors never really cared about the lyrics. They cared about who was in the room and what was on the shelf. And the enforcement was not federal, whatever you’ve heard about the FCC banning “Work with Me, Annie” (the FCC had no such power; the real suppression was station managers, jukebox operators and, in Memphis in 1954, the police department pulling records by hand).¹⁴ It was shelf-level, route-level, cue-card-level. Which is why the strongest refusals of the period were structural too: Hank Ballard sold a million with almost no pop radio at all, proving a parallel market existed at scale, and Wynonie Harris, who had been doing the hip thing in juke joints for a decade, noted dryly in 1956 that Presley’s version of it was causing a scandal while his never had.¹⁵

Here is the sober version, so nobody mistakes the accumulation for a bit. Chuck Berry wrote white teenage life more precisely than any white songwriter of the decade, changed “colored boy” to “country boy” in “Johnny B. Goode” so it would get played,¹⁶ and was then prosecuted under a 1910 white-slavery statute and sent to federal prison from February 19, 1962, to October 18, 1963 — Terre Haute, then Leavenworth, then Springfield.¹⁷ Ruth Brown built Atlantic Records and got a debit statement. It took until 1988 for the label to pay her $20,000, forgive the debt it said she owed, and put $1.5 million into a foundation for the other artists it had accounted the same way.¹⁸ Decades.

Look at the chart and watch the purple stop. Bessie, Lead Belly, Muddy Waters spelling out M-A-N in 1955, Berry.¹⁹ The last entry in the file to aim at Jim Crow by name is Nina Simone, on March 21, 1964, in Carnegie Hall, to a mostly white room, naming Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi; the promo copies came back from Southern stations snapped in half.²⁰ After her, nobody in this lineage names the color line again, and I don’t think that’s because it was solved. It’s because it went into the plumbing. When Funkadelic — a Black band from Detroit playing at Hendrix volume — couldn’t get on the radio in 1970, the wall they hit was a format, not a statute.²¹ The target had been re-filed under “industry.”

The middle of the sixties is where most tellings of this story live, and it’s the section I trust least, because it’s where the addresses get vague. Hendrix at Woodstock is the anthem with the war put inside it — and he declined the reading, on Dick Cavett three weeks later: “I thought it was beautiful.”²² The protest meaning is the audience’s, which is the more useful fact. Creedence is sharper: “Fortunate Son” attacked draft deferments for senators’ sons from inside the Top 20 — No. 14 on its own listing, No. 3 once Billboard combined it with the other side, and I’m giving you both numbers so you don’t have to write me about it.²³ And there’s an early tremor of the thing this piece ends on: Dylan, 1965 and 1966, going electric on the folk left that had made him its spokesman. The booing at Newport is real; the cause is disputed; Pete Seeger’s axe is folklore.²⁴ But the target was his own constituency. Hold that thought. It comes back in 1991.

Now the home-field section, and the purest specimen in the whole file. The MC5 were the only band that showed up to play the Yippies’ Festival of Life in Lincoln Park during the Democratic convention in Chicago on August 25, 1968; about five thousand people heard them for half an hour, and then the week went the way the week went.²⁵ Wayne Kramer’s account of the band’s real enemy wasn’t the Daley machine, though. It was California. “The California bands were terrible,” he told Terry Gross decades later. “They could barely play.”²⁶ Kick Out the Jams came out on Elektra in February 1969 with the title phrase intact, and J.L. Hudson’s — the department store on Woodward Avenue, once the tallest department-store building in the world, the place that sold Detroit its school clothes and its Christmas and its records²⁷ — refused to stock it.

What the band did next is the reason I’m writing this. They ran a full-page ad in the Fifth Estate, Detroit’s underground paper, that read, in its entirety, KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKER! and kick in the door if the store won’t sell you the album on Elektra. FUCK HUDSON’S! — with Elektra’s logo on it, placed without Elektra’s approval.²⁸ Hudson’s pulled every Elektra title from its shelves. Elektra dropped the MC5 on April 16, 1969.²⁹ Not a censor. Not a cop. A retailer defending shelf space, and a label defending its account with the retailer. The most radical band in America was ended by a department store’s record department, which is either the funniest thing in this file or the least funny, depending on how much of the plumbing you’ve seen.

The downtown Hudson’s closed in 1983 and came down in 1998, so I can’t give you the store. The most Detroit room I’ve ever stood in is the Detroit Athletic Club, at a wedding: two friends got married there and we partied in the halls and spent the night. That was pretty epically Detroit.

Here is the fact I’m going to drop into the middle of this and not decorate. In January 1971, with the Stooges’ first run collapsing up the road in Ann Arbor, the Detroit Police Department approved a decoy unit called STRESS — Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets — and over the next two and a half years its officers killed twenty-two people, nearly all of them Black, most of them in decoy operations.³⁰ Coleman Young was elected in 1973 on a promise to shut it down and did so the month he took office.³¹ That is the city the Detroit rows on this chart happened in. Iggy Pop daring a biker gang on the radio to do its worst in February 1974, the bottles you can hear breaking on the guitar strings on Metallic K.O.³² — that’s the room turning on the band, in a city where the room was already dangerous. And it’s the first entry in the file where an act’s defiance was aimed at nothing but its own audience. Hold that thought too.

For the first sixty years of the chart, the machinery had the decency not to explain itself. That ended on September 19, 1985, when the Parents Music Resource Center got a Senate hearing and the pulpit got a subcommittee.³³ The interesting thing about the eighties is not that the censors returned; it’s that the refusals got more specific in response, and the machinery started answering by name. The head of MCA’s distribution arm refused to ship Black Flag’s Damaged in 1981 — “As a parent with two children, I found it an anti-parent record” — and the band stickered his quote over the MCA logo and sold it that way.³⁴ Police raided Jello Biafra’s house over the poster inside Frankenchrist in April 1986; the trial ended in a hung jury, and the case nearly bankrupted his label.³⁵ When chain stores refused the sleeve of Jane’s Addiction’s Ritual de lo Habitual in 1990, the band reissued it as plain text carrying the full First Amendment, and it went double platinum.³⁶ Every one of those is a fight with a distributor, a retailer or a prosecutor. Not one is a fight with a bishop.

And here is the paragraph I owe the reader who knows the period. On specificity alone, the sharpest addresses of these years belong to hip-hop, which is outside the frame of this piece — I built the file on rock and the blues, and I’ll leave the other lineage to people who can trace it with a straighter face than mine. But the counterexample sits exactly where my thesis predicts it. On August 1, 1989, the FBI’s public-affairs chief wrote to N.W.A’s label about a song whose title I’m only going to type once — “Fuck tha Police” — saying it “encourages violence against and disrespect for the law enforcement officer.” A letter of opinion, not an investigation, and worth being precise about.³⁷ That August, at Joe Louis Arena, Detroit police stopped the show when the song started and detained the group at its hotel afterward; nobody was charged. One officer, to a reporter: “We just wanted to show the kids that you can’t say ‘fuck the police’ in Detroit.”³⁸ Then Charlton Heston read the lyric of “Cop Killer” aloud at Time Warner’s annual meeting on July 16, 1992, and Ice-T withdrew the song twelve days later — killed not by the government, which failed, but by a shareholders’ meeting.³⁹ N.W.A named a police department, and a federal agency answered in writing. Cobain named a disposition. On aim, they win. I’ll get to why I still think the peak is where I say it is.

Because at the same time, quietly, a different kind of refusal was being built, and it’s the one that lasted. Greg Ginn started SST in 1978 because nobody would put out Black Flag.⁴⁰ Jello Biafra and East Bay Ray started Alternative Tentacles in 1979 to press “California Über Alles.”⁴¹ Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson started Dischord in December 1980 with pooled money from a band that had already broken up, and it is still artist-owned and still contract-free.⁴² Fugazi held ticket prices at about five dollars, sold no merchandise, made no videos, and put an album on the Billboard 200 in 1993 anyway;⁴³ asked why there were no T-shirts, MacKaye said, “We’re a band. We make music, not T-shirts,” which is the most Washington sentence ever uttered and I mean that as praise.⁴⁴ When Hüsker Dü signed to Warner Bros. in 1985 — one of the first bands off the hardcore circuit to take major-label money — that was the sellout that made Nirvana structurally possible, and everyone involved knew it.⁴⁵

Set that against the fight that didn’t hold. Pearl Jam named the cleanest structural target in the whole file: Ticketmaster’s service-fee monopoly. Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament testified to a House subcommittee on June 30, 1994, the band cancelled its summer tour rather than use the system,⁴⁶ and the Justice Department closed its investigation on July 5, 1995, without doing anything.⁴⁷ (Ticketmaster is Pearl Jam’s fight, not Nirvana’s. This is the single most common error in essays like this one, and I have now saved you from it.) Attacking distribution from inside it lost. Building your own channel survived. That’s the least romantic sentence in this piece, and I checked it against every row.

And you have to sit with the two most damaging documents of the period, from the same magazine, the same month: The Baffler No. 5, December 1993. Steve Albini, three months after recording In Utero, laid out the arithmetic of a band that sells 250,000 records and ends up with each member netting about $4,031.25 — “about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11.”⁴⁸ Thomas Frank, in the same issue: “There are few spectacles corporate America enjoys more than a good counterculture, complete with hairdos of defiance.”⁴⁹ His point wasn’t that grunge sold out. It’s that “alternative” was a marketing category before it was a movement: Billboard’s Modern Rock chart launched in September 1988, the Alternative Grammy was first handed out in 1991, and the bin existed before the band.⁵⁰ I’m conceding all of it. Purity was never the claim. Nobody in this file was clean.

Nevermind shipped 46,251 copies on September 24, 1991, sold about six thousand of them the first week, and entered the Billboard 200 at No. 144.⁵¹ On the chart dated January 11, 1992, it replaced Michael Jackson’s Dangerous at No. 1.⁵² That’s the coronation everyone knows. The honest version is better. On May 25, 1991, four months before the record came out, Billboard had switched its album chart to SoundScan — actual point-of-sale data instead of what store managers told a surveyor they thought was selling.⁵³ The instrument that measured pop had just been rebuilt, and the first thing it saw clearly was Nirvana. They didn’t beat Michael Jackson so much as arrive the year the scoreboard started telling the truth. Best timing in the history of the lineage. Partly luck, and I’d rather say so than pretend it was destiny.

A few more facts, because they change the shape of the thing. The song that did it was named by the founder of Riot Grrrl: Kathleen Hanna wrote “Kurt smells like Teen Spirit” in Sharpie on his wall, a joke about Tobi Vail’s deodorant, and he didn’t learn it was a brand for months.⁵⁴ Cobain told Michael Azerrad, in the band’s own authorized biography, that he was embarrassed by the production: “It’s closer to a Mötley Crüe record than it is a punk rock record.”⁵⁵ He also said he’d been trying to rip off the Pixies, which is the most useful thing any peak of any lineage has ever admitted.⁵⁶ And when In Utero came out in September 1993 and Wal-Mart and Kmart declined to carry it over the back-cover collage and a song called “Rape Me,” the band did not go to war. Six months later an edited edition appeared with the collage altered and the song retitled, on the sleeve and nowhere else, “Waif Me.” Cobain’s defense was a class argument: “One of the main reasons I signed to a major label was so people would be able to buy our records at Kmart. In some towns, that’s the only place kids can buy records.”⁵⁷ There it is again. The pulpit got the sermon. Kmart got the negotiation.

I was in second grade when Nirvana was everywhere, 1992 or ’93, and I first heard them because a babysitter put them on for my brother and me. My brother had genuine questions — who these people were, why they sounded like that — and she answered them in one sentence: “They’re just saying ‘fuck you,’ but they’re saying it in a really cool way.” I remember feeling cool for the first time in my life. I also remember watching my brother decide not to react to the swearing, and deciding the same thing. That is the whole thesis, delivered to a second-grader, and it is the origin of this entire piece.

So why do I still think it’s the peak? Because of where it was pointed. Look at the chart from left to right and watch the colors drift: the purple of the color line and the teal of the censors give way to blue, the state and the war, and then, after 1981, to green — the industry — and red. Red is the room itself: an act’s own audience, scene, peers or label. Of the twenty-four acts in the file whose fame began before 1964, one aimed at the room (Dylan, and he waited until 1965 to do it). Of the eleven whose fame began in 1985 or later, five aimed at the room and three at the industry paying them. Eight of eleven, indoors. This is the thing the data says that I didn’t expect it to say when I started: the defiance didn’t go soft. It ran out of external enemies that could hurt you and turned around to face the ones that could buy you.

Watch the sequence. Minor Threat, 1981, inverted the terms — sobriety as the transgression — and aimed at punk’s own drug default; then won the all-ages fight that built the infrastructure everything downstream ran on.⁵⁸ The Butthole Surfers aimed at nothing but the audience’s composure. Sonic Youth took a Geffen imprint’s advance and used it to make a song about a sexual-harassment complaint at Geffen: “Don’t touch my breast, I’m just working at my desk.”⁵⁹ Fugazi refused its own merch table. Soundgarden’s “Jesus Christ Pose” mocked the persecuted-messiah act Chris Cornell saw in his own peers, and MTV pulled the video.⁶⁰ Bikini Kill rearranged the floor of their own shows — girls to the front — and, in Kathleen Hanna’s words, “a lot of men were really mad and hated us.”⁶¹ That’s not a band against the sheriff. That’s a band against the pit at its own gig.

I once stood in a crowd covered in mud: the Black Crowes and Oasis at Pine Knob, June 2001, pouring rain midway through the show, and all of us sliding down the walkways. It was epic. I bring it up because mud is also what a crowd threw at Calamity Jane.

On October 30, 1992, in a soccer stadium Cobain remembered as sixty thousand people, Nirvana brought an all-woman band from Portland called Calamity Jane to open. The crowd threw coins, mud and rocks at them for the length of their set and chanted until they left the stage. “Eventually the girls stormed off crying,” Cobain said later. “It was terrible, one of the worst things I’ve ever seen, such a mass of sexism all at once.”⁶² So Nirvana needled the audience for the rest of the night: songs nobody had heard, B-sides, and the opening bars of the hit played twice, as a tease, and pulled back.⁶³ The most popular rock band on earth stood in front of a full stadium and made a point at the expense of the people who had paid to be there. Six weeks later, Cobain printed the thesis inside a compilation you could buy at Kmart: “If any of you in any way hate homosexuals, people of different color, or women, please do this one favor for us — leave us the fuck alone! Don’t come to our shows and don’t buy our records.”⁶⁴ Shipped by a Geffen imprint. By the biggest band in the world. To its own paying customers.

That is the peak. Not the loudest refusal in the file and not the earliest — N.W.A had better aim at the state and Pearl Jam had a better target in the market. But it is the only entry where the refusal and the maximum distribution happened inside the same twelve months, and the only one where a band at the top of the chart turned around and told the room to get out. Everyone before them had somewhere better to point. By 1992 there was nothing left outside the building that could hurt Nirvana. So they pointed at the building.

I promised the second movement would be light, and it is, but you should know the pattern is old. In 1324 or 1325, at Avignon, Pope John XXII issued a decretal against the new polyphony: singers “intoxicate the ears, and give no healing,” smothering the chant “with swarms of notes.” Penalty, eight days’ suspension.⁶⁵ A complaint about speed and volume, seven hundred years before amplifiers, from the pulpit — and notice the pulpit was the one doing the complaining, not the one being answered. The goliards had already been parodying the Mass from inside the clergy for a century.⁶⁶ In 1229 the Inquisition at Toulouse outlawed the singing of a troubadour’s attack on the papacy, which Guilhem Figueira had set to a Marian hymn tune so the crowd would already know it.⁶⁷ That trick has a name, contrafactum, and it is the most durable technique in the entire eight hundred years: John Gay built The Beggar’s Opera out of sixty-nine borrowed tunes in 1728 and got the Licensing Act for his trouble;⁶⁸ Joe Hill parodied Salvation Army hymns on the same corner the Salvation Army was singing them and gave us “pie in the sky”;⁶⁹ Woody Guthrie answered Irving Berlin song-for-song in 1940 under the working title “God Blessed America for Me.”⁷⁰ Rock inherited a method, not an attitude. Cobain, by his own account, was trying to rip off the Pixies.

(Unrelated opinion, while we’re in church: the organ is one of the most underutilized instruments in rock and roll. They use it. Not enough.)

And the inward turn isn’t modern either. The two beats in the second chart marked red are ars subtilior, around 1380 — music notated on circular staves for a handful of connoisseurs, the first clear Western case of difficulty as a position against one’s own audience⁷¹ — and Monteverdi in 1605, picking a fight with the counterpoint rulebook and the guild that enforced it, not with the church. (Artusi called his dissonances “castles in the air, chimeras founded upon sand,” which is a better insult than anything that ever ran in Creem.)⁷² The enemy has gone indoors before. It comes back out when there’s something outside worth cursing.

I don’t have a tidy ending, and the house rule is not to force one. The story doesn’t end in April 1994. Rock for Choice, which L7 started in a Hollywood club on October 25, 1991, with Nirvana and Hole on the bill, ran until 2001.⁷³ Pearl Jam lost. Bikini Kill withdrew from the mainstream press on purpose and kept going.⁷⁴ On February 8, 1996, the Telecommunications Act removed the national cap on radio ownership, and one company went from forty-three stations to more than twelve hundred in a few years — which is to say the machinery that had carried every refusal in this file, from jukebox route to Modern Rock chart, was gathered into a handful of hands right after the peak.⁷⁵ If the target had already moved indoors by then, the honest question isn’t who the next Nirvana is. It’s whether there’s anything left in the room worth telling to get lost.

Cage the Elephant has done it to me time and time again. I keep letting them. And I still think my babysitter had it right, in one sentence, three decades ago: they’re just saying “fuck you,” but they’re saying it in a really cool way.