You remember that guy in high school who used the ubiquitous sex bomb as an intensifier to the point that it lost its impact and became indistinguishable from the rest of his drivel? How about the girl who uttered it almost randomly and took great joy in using it as every one of the parts of speech? What of the mousy elderly Math teacher who, spreading chalkdust about the room as she wiped algebra from the blackboard, caught a snag in the classroom carpet with her 5$ Payless low heels and sprawled to the floor, shouting it briefly and irrevocably for all the students to hear and gape at, their horror solely drawn out by that most sacred of profanity? This is none of that.
Over a beat so split, divided, wrapped in itself, and otherwise fucked up, Levi Fuller evokes every American punk act from St. Paul to Minneapolis (with a healthy dose of Seattle’s own shambolic rock quartet named for a certain Russ Meyer film) in his righteous indignation over self-made problems, vanity, stupidity, hate, missed chances, irrelevance, racism, and the fear and hatred that are inseparable from xenophobic nationalism. As you might imagine from its title, the song is peppered with the multipurpose cognate so lovingly metamorphosed from the Germanic fock, focka, ficken, fokken, and fukka, but the magic of its every yawp, yelp, wail, and whoot is that Levi finds a way to sound incensed and unhinged, almost crooning it at one point, and yet . . . amused. Darkly, painfully, defiantly, but amused nonetheless. His secret? He knows that, for all of the cajoling, peddling, huckstering, shutting down, and threatening, such a damn fool endeavor as building a wall the length of an entire national border is just too ridiculous to ever actually succeed.
Right?