(Credits: Far Out)
Fri 26 December 2025 17:11, UK
Swearing and profanity is an often underutilised art form within the music industry; despite the linguistic opportunities those few outrageous words provide, they do tend to mean that a song won’t be played on the radio (or, at least, not without heavy editing), or played in any public places pre-watershed. Still, there are a few artists out there who have leaned into the shock factor over the years.
It was back in the 1950s when rock and roll rebellion first hit the airwaves, but despite a few pockets of public outrage over rock and rollers employing words as unthinkable as ‘hell’ or ‘damn’ within their tracks, it wasn’t until the counterculture boom of the following decade that swearing became a little more common in rock music.
Rob Tyner of garage heroes The MC5, for instance, famously introduced the band’s stand-out single ‘Kick Out The Jams’ by bellowing “Kick out the jams, motherfucker,” even if that version was quickly censored and omitted from most versions of the album.
Those proto-punks weren’t the only ones at it, though. Hippie icons Jefferson Airplane, on the other side of the US, dropped an f-bomb on ‘We Can Be Together’, earning Grace Slick the accolade of being the first person to say ‘fuck’ on American television, which I’m sure equals her Grammy lifetime achievement award and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction when it comes to pride.
Following the cultural revolution of the hippie age, the conservative grasp on the music industry seemed to loosen somewhat, and profanity only became more and more common as the world moved into the 1970s and 1980s, particularly with the advent of punk rock. After all, punk’s weapon of choice – particularly during the early days – was shock, and there was no better way to shock and appal the establishment than by, quite literally, telling them to go fuck themselves.
It is no surprise, then, that the punk scene has produced some of the most sweary songs in musical history. Back in 1981, for instance, Anti-Nowhere League released their intentionally offensive anthem ‘So What?’ which, along with lyrics about bestiality, boasts seven uses of ‘fuck’, four ‘cunts’, and the odd ‘piss’ and ‘twat’ for good measure.
While that track, which was banned by the police under the Obscene Publications Act, certainly has some of the most shocking uses of profanity, there are a multitude of other tracks which beat it in the numbers game. Super Furry Animals’ ‘The Man Don’t Give A Fuck’ features five ‘fucks’ on the studio track, but the live version seems to feature as many as the band desire at any given gig.
Meanwhile, Rage Against The Machine clock in at an impressive 17 f-bombs on their defining anthem of resistance, ‘Killing In The Name’, and grunge legends Soundgarden have a whopping 20 ‘fucks’ and one ‘motherfucker’ on their 1997 single – a fitting tribute to the baseball legend the song gets its namesake from.
‘Ty Cobb’ is a pretty solid shout when it comes to the most swearing in one rock song, but it gets narrowly beaten by Lancaster DIY heroes The Lovely Eggs, and their fan-favourite anthem ‘Fuck It’, which expectedly sees vocalist Holly Ross utter ‘fuck’ a total of 24 times, putting it right up there in the profanity rankings.
If you were to dig deeper into the world of DIY punk, or extend your search into the world of hip-hop, you would likely find a whole host of other fuck-filled songs which might rival The Lovely Eggs, Soundgarden, or Rage Against The Machine, but on a grand scale, these tracks make up the biggest and most profanity-fueled tracks in the rock and roll world, and we salute them.
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