Curse words are nothing new in pop music. What is new is who’s dropping the F-bombs: young female artists whose speech has historically been far more tightly policed than that of their freewheeling male counterparts.
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“I knew that ‘abc’ had the possibility of offending people,” says Gayle, who was born in Dallas and now lives in Nashville. “didn’t think it was offensive. But I know that a teenage girl being very comfortable in her emotions and in her anger and not being apologetic about it — that can be jarring to some people.”
“On the radio you can’t curse,” she says. “Spotify and TikTok and all these other platforms started bringing eyes to songs that didn’t necessarily have to follow the old rules.” But if streaming has facilitated the use of the F-word, with its punchy hard-consonant ending, why are artists and listeners increasingly drawn to it in the first place? According to Ong, the “vast majority” of Spotify users opt for an explicit version of a given song even when a clean version is available. “abc ,” an edited take on Gayle’s hit, has 6 million plays versus the original’s 473 million.
“But obviously,” Ryan adds, “the song wasn’t the first time I heard the word.” Ryan’s dad, Brandon, who’s 49 and works in product marketing at the Roland musical-instrument company, says he doesn’t fear his daughter’s exposure to rough language in a musical context: “It’s not like she’s gonna melt into a puddle.”