We used to sing this song at the top of our lungs at slumber parties when I was a kid. I literally hadn’t heard this in almost three decades. I remembered the drugs and the beer. I did not remember the whole incident at the end. Though I guess we certainly sang along with it, too. I keep thinking that I’m not going to actually publish this post because it says something ugly and strange to think of a basement full of young girls singing this song, me included.
But then, I wonder if the Christians who’ve become so much more outspoken against gay people have become so in part because a song like this isn’t funny anymore, isn’t forgettable. I mean, I know, when you hear it, you will be appalled. And you will remember the song, at least the general outline of it, because of its casual homophobia.
That was not the case when I was a kid. If there was a problem then with the song, it’s the joyous repetition of “motherfucker.”
And yet, this is another one of those songs that I almost wondered if I made up, because I heard it so much at one point in my life and then never again. But here it is. And when I was young–before the Beastie Boys, before Guns & Roses, before all the bad boys who would sing anthems that sounded to me like freedom, there was this song, and I, even at ten or twelve, was thrilled by its filth and its protest. It, too, maybe first, sounded like freedom.
And yet, here we are, so much later, relistening to “I did it like this, I did it like that, I did it with a wiffle ball bat” or “I used to love her, but I had to kill her” or even this and knowing, that promise of freedom never was for me, was never actually available to me. I was never the audience for these songs. But I listened and was shaped by them anyway.
Tiny Cat Pants 