N****r Fucker” by David Alan Coe

Released on one of David Allan Coe’s infamous ‘Underground’ albums, this song has gained notoriety for a reason…it’s actually kind of horrifying (note that this is the first song title I’ve ever had to censor in all the time I’ve been running this site). The weirdest thing is, judging from his actual life and the people he associated with, Coe doesn’t actually appear to be racist, or at least not racist enough to write something like this unironically. So the only conclusion I can come to is that this was an incredibly poorly-delivered attempt at satire. It was probably aimed at the more sincerely bigoted songs in this vein like the works of Johnny Rebel, but the end product is completely indistinguishable from one of those songs except perhaps in the graphic sex jokes sprinkled among the racial slurs. Now, it’s possible to make this kind of shock-value satire valid (Randy Newman’s “Rednecks”, which uses the same slur to make a serious point about racism and hypocrisy, comes to mind). But even leaving aside the racial component (assuming such a thing is possible), the song, like most of the content of Coe’s ‘Underground’ albums, is poorly-written, uninspired, and neither funny nor insightful, so anything that could conceivably justify the offensive content is clearly missing. Since I’m fairly certain this was ultimately just a horribly botched joke about real racists and not a sincere expression of racism itself, I’m willing to not hold it against Coe’s other, better works (especially given that the actual primary author of this song was not Coe, but the far more beloved Country songwriter and children’s author Shel Silverstein), but I get why people are still giving Coe crap about recording this today, and I hope he has the decency to be at least a little ashamed of it now.

Verdict: The second-worst song I have covered for this series, right next to “Your Kid Committed Suicide Because You Suck” by Anal Cunt.

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