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Rizzle Kicks & Linguistics

     Far be it from me to blog about language or music, but while trying to trawl through reading for an essay about a spectrogram, I came across a remix by Rizzle Kicks where they do something pretty interesting with their sample track. In this case, Lily Allen's The Fear is cut so that the phrase "I don't care about clever, I don't care about funny" loses its last syllable.
     The effect of the loss of the final '-nny', makes a non-word which the rappers employ in place of the word 'fuck'. By taking away this, they've essentially just taken away the release of the [n] stop, which we interpret as being a voiceless stop.

Rizzle Kicks - Fuck Loadsa Dubstep (Lily Allen Mix)

     Let me explain
     What is said and what we hear are two different things. Advertisers (notably that awful Irn Bru ad) have used this to their advantage, which, in a lot of cases, involves us filling in the blanks for ourselves.
In the case of Rizzle Kicks and the elusive 'fuck', the fact that stops (that's p, t, k, b, d, g to us English-speakers) are made up of a complete closure of the mouth and a complete stop in the airflow means that even if the mouth doesn't open again, we can assume it's one of these that's being made. We can also factor in the similarities between [k] and what's called a glottal stop- probably the sound you make in the middle of the word 'bottle' or 'butter' when you're speaking naturally. Both are articulated relatively far back in the mouth, and both produce a stop sound.
     Phonology aside, other things about the song lead us to infer an expletive where, in fact, there is nothing. 'fu-' is not a word in the English language, but when it comes after the string 'When I drink I get drunk as...' we simply assume the phrase 'drunk as fuck' is what's meant. This is semantics coming out to play.
     So, what we hear and what is said are two different things. It makes me wonder how well this track would fare on chart radio shows and the like. That is, if Rizzle didn't spend an entire verse just saying 'fuck fuck fuck fuck' himself. The point is that, though the expletive is never actually sang by Lily Allen, perceptually it is still there.
     A 'censored' version of the Black Eyed Peas' Don't Funk With My Heart had to be made for more conservative audiences in North America for the exact same reason.

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