Kiss and Tell

AM I BOVVERED? 10 October 2008

A journey through populist innovation in English by Loaded journalist Jeff Maysh.

Before modern mass media, there was no such thing as the catchphrase. Popular language was circulated via word of mouth, ballads, and songs strummed on the lark. But today, our language is infected with a hundred catchphrases from radio, music, film, television and advertising. You’ve probably said five already today without realising: Perhaps “Do’h!” from The Simpsons, or even Joey’s Byzantine greeting in Friends, “How you doin’!”

In essence, the adoption of a catchphrase is ‘popular innovation’: the making mainstream of something once truly personal or even elitist. When Trey Parker and Matt Stone made a crudely produced animation between classes at the University of Colorado, they could never have guessed that the phrase, “Oh my God! They killed Kenny!” would become a globally recognised utterance. This phonetic phenomenon was ultimately what made South Park a massive success. There’s popularity, and there’s being textually embedded in pop culture.

Sometimes a catchphrase becomes such a behemoth of a slogan that it quite literally ‘goes viral’, affecting not only an entire population, but rebounding back around culture like a bombastic boomerang: Catherine Tate’s “Am I bovvered?” is the line used by her brusque teenaged character Lauren Cooper, which transcended the BBC sketch show and was even included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

“Am I bovvered?” was said by the OED to have ‘already come to be seen as the perfect expression of a generation of teenagers and their speaking style.’ Replacing 'whatever' as the signature phrase of teenagers, it “overtook Little Britain’s catchphrase 'yeah-but-no-but' as the embodiment of couldn't-care-less adolescence." So it came as no surprise that Prime Minister Tony Blair was happy to mutter the phrase for a Comic Relief Sketch - effortlessly tapping into the ‘youth’ using populist innovation.

Simpsons auteur Matt Groening summed up the power of the catchphrase in ‘Bart Gets Famous’ (Season 5, Episode 12), when Bart, ironically, invents a catchphrase. After destroying Krusty the Klown’s Channel 6 television studio live on air, he announces, “I didn’t do it!” and becomes an overnight celebrity. Later in the show, Bart eulogises that ‘you’re no one without a catchphrase’, prompting many other main characters to offer their catchphrases before finally, Lisa sulks, "If anyone wants me, I'll be in my room." In the yellow world of the Simpsons, without a catchphrase you don’t exist.

Successful catchphrases in our world are popular expressions that virtually function as lexical items. I.e. Sherlocks Holme’s, “Elementary, my dear Watson,” today stands alone for, ‘it’s bleeding obvious!’ Others become so deeply etched on our minds that they eventually swallow up the original meaning of the usage completely. I mean, can anyone today really say, ‘I’m loving it,’ without evoking the advertising of McDonalds, or even the infectious lyric of DJ Pied Piper, “We’re lovin’ it, lovin’ it, lovin’ it!” from his hit ‘Do You Really Like It’?

Which brings us to Kiss. Why is it that dance music produces so much endlessly quotable language, so many lyrics that become part of modern English? Why are we so familiar with the words of urban artists, but can’t remember anything from the indie scene? Faithless and “I can’t get no sleep,” unites a generation of ’24-hour party people clubbers’, while Soulja Boy bought the term ‘Superman, to the masses: A reference to a sex act known only to subscribers of the cult website urbandictionary.com.

Dance music, then, is also the perfect expression of a generation of teenagers and their speaking style. And this language, more than any other genre is creating a populist language, an intertextual lexicon for the masses. Just pray you never hear Tony Blair collaborating with Jay-Z.