The Lass From Nantucket, and other Smut

MY FATHER is a man of his generation and upbringing in a classic sense. That means that throughout my life, one of my clearest recollections of the cultural distance between us involves his attitude toward profanity.

My Dad doesn't use it. I can't reliably recall ever hearing him use 'those words.' Not in jest, not in anger, not in conversation. Not ever.

He would never cease to upbraid me when I'd let one slip. He judges entertainment based on how many bad words there are. He grudgingly admits that maybe gangsters would use those words, so he can watch The Sopranos. Somehow he got through Deadwood, though I don't see how. (I was not around to watch him watch it -- the soul can only take so much pain.)

It's when other people; people he doesn't expect to use that language, erupt with a curse here or there that my father really lets loose. If a young woman uses a curse word, he never fails to comment on it. All my life, he's encouraged me not to use the bad words. "They're common." He'd say. "It's the sign of an inferior mind."

When I was younger I'd try to argue the point. I'd try to explain that, in fact, there were plenty of quite superior minds who enjoyed a well placed "fuck" now and then. He'd hear none of it. I'd try to explain the inconsistency between his enjoyment of gruesome, bloody horror fests and his Calvinist attitude toward 'cussin. Doesn't matter. Wouldn't wash.

My little sister tells a hilarious story of watching The Exorcist on TV with my Dad, when she was about seven or eight. You can imagine it made an impression. But try to drop a compound word involving an unseemly action tied to one's parentage: no sale.

My father hasn't wavered from his contention that the really bad thing was to use bad words. And though the fight between us is over, damnit if I haven't spent time going through play scripts counting my 'fucks' and taking them out where I could.

Of course, we live in an adolescent culture that completely agrees with my Dad. The United States can't abide sex but pornifies all violence. Janet Jackson's nipple and a dropped F-Bomb on an awards program or a PBS documentary draws the ire of cultural warriors and the FCC. It's a lot less cute coming from the power structure than my Dad. But what are you going to do?

Well, if you check out Jody Rosen's delightful article in the NYTimes today, you'll see that it's ever been thus. Yes, it seems that in those waning days of the Victorian era, when the Edison phonograph was new and shiny, one of the things that people immediately jumped and used it for was....smut, and bad, bad words.

IN 1997 Bruce Young, a collector of memorabilia from the early phonograph era, placed a newly acquired 100-year-old wax cylinder record on his Edison Standard Model D player and heard a surprising sound: a young man saying filthy words. It was a 2 minute 25 second poetic recitation, suggestively titled “The Virtues of Raw Oysters,” written in the voice of a sexually voracious woman. “I never had it but twice in my life/Make me, just for tonight, your dear little wife,” went one of the few lines suitable for newspaper quotation on a recording laced with curse words and hair-raising sexual slang.

“My wife and I just stared at each other in disbelief,” Mr. Young said, recalling that first listening session. “We were just amazed that that kind of language — what you think of as very naughty late-20th-century schoolyard talk — would exist in the 1800s.” Mr. Young realized that he had stumbled on one of the earliest examples of audio indecency: a 19th-century record worthy of a parental advisory sticker.

Today it has one. “The Virtues of Raw Oysters” is one of 43 profane monologues, skits and other spoken-word curios on “Actionable Offenses: Indecent Phonograph Recordings from the 1890s,” the newest release from Archeophone, a small label devoted to early sound recordings.

The album provides a new vantage point on sound recording history and offers some contemporary lessons as well. The zeal with which phonograph pioneers took to indecent material is a reminder that, from the Victrola to the Internet, smut peddlers have always been among the earliest and savviest adapters of new technologies.

I don't find it the slightest bit surprising, of course. But it is instructive. We tend to think of the cultural wars as new and of our time. It's strangely comforting to know that over a hundred years ago, people went to jail for recording dirty words into a wax cylinder. And that, faced with a society where half the population was oppressed and couldn't vote, where labor conditions were scandalous, worker protection nil, child labor common and poverty unchecked -- there were still fuckwits who made it their life's work to stamp out dirty words.